The Number 233 Route

Thursday 6 October 2011

It was a bit hard to be happy this morning.  Not only had the lovely weather mutated into cool and windy, but the account which controls the blog has been corrupted.  No I am not in Madrid, and if I were, and had been mugged, I would not have contacted anyone by email.  Grr.  Expletives. And the password has been frozen so we can’t add to our blog.  More expletives. (Perceptive readers - noticing that they are reading a new post -  will see that the problem has been solved, with the help of Google's help machine, which was scary but worked just as they promised it would) Now, on with the bus.

We – Mary, Linda and I - met at Eltham Station, with its fragrant facilities, and were onto our single decker by 10.15, heading to a little known corner of Swanley.  We recognised the chalet style toilets, nestling incongruously by the church but firmly closed, as we headed down Eltham High Street.

Large numbers of passengers came on board here, and indeed the bus was pretty full for almost all its journey.  As we passed Holy Trinity Church, Linda mentioned that she and Roger had been unable to get in to see the Gallipoli memorial window.  Perhaps when it is all refurbished for the centenary in 2015 it will be more accessible.

Once before I was reprimanded by a reader of this blog for commenting upon unnecessary apostrophes, but I couldn’t resist these, as they confirm that misconception about needing an ‘e’ before the ‘s’ to feel comfortable without the apostrophe. 

We ran through areas of pleasant houses interspersed with parades of shops, past New Eltham Station and past the Charcoal Burner Pub.  I have, as so often, been unable to discover if there were many charcoal burning works around here.

A hail and ride section took us past more attractive semis, with well maintained front gardens

(we thought it was particularly the configuration of the porch supports that worked well) and into Sidcup.  

Again, lots of people got on and off our bus, as we passed a shop with a clear change of use and a hairdresser’s with a name to add to our collection;  a number of shops were closed, sadly, including the Sidcup Pound Shop.

We hadn’t particularly noticed going up any hills, but we clearly had, as Sidcup Hill took us down steeply and towards Kent, over the River Cray, along which we could clearly walk one day.

  

The River is a tributary of the Darent and eventually the Thames, and gives its name to various villagey suburbs in the area.

 Suddenly it all felt pretty rural, with fields, horses and a large plant nursery, as we swept round the Crittal roundabout and paralleled  the big A 20 for a while. A guide dog came on board, with its owner and a friend, clearly well known to some of the other passengers.

Many of the passengers got off near the large Asda in Swanley, but we pressed on, through some residential roads, arriving at the end of our journey at about 11.05.  There was nothing much to see there, except some people getting ready to paint lines on the road, so we took the same bus back towards Foots Cray and our next route.