Ramsgate; Monday, 25 May, 2015

With a sense of Groundhog Day I headed out of the hotel, grabbed breakfast in a café and was standing on Ramsgate station at exactly the same time as the previous day, boarding the same train, heading in the same direction.

However, this time I reminded myself not to disembark at Walmer and instead stay on round to Dover.

It’s a good 25 minute walk up to Dover Castle, with the final 15 minutes being nearly vertical, so I had hoped to be able to pick up a taxi at Dover Priory station to save all the effort, but on arrival there didn’t appear to be any cabs, and my distance memory of their being a taxi office by the station was either wrong, or had been redeveloped away. So instead 30 minutes later and slightly out of breath I found myself in the queue for tickets to Dover Castle.

The Castle is an English Heritage site so my membership card should have got me in for free, but as it was a Bank Holiday, and the 75th anniversary commemorations of Operation Dynamo, which had been co-ordinated from the tunnels under Dover Castle, there were special events on and consequently they were charging even members an access fee.

The castle was incredibly busy and there were queues to see many of the main sights, particularly to go down into the wartime tunnels. I eventually got onto a tour after standing in a queue for the best part of an hour, but it was worth it.

If I’d known how busy it was going to be I would probably have brought a picnic with me as trying to get food was also very difficult with most of the food outlets regularly running out and having to suspend services for periods whilst they cooked up more batches of food.

Eventually I managed to see most of the site and consume a particularly revolting chicken salad sandwich that had me reaching for the antacid tablets within a couple of hours.

Having seen pretty much all there was to see at the castle I walked back down into town and onto the station to catch the train back into Ramsgate, where I treated myself after the revolting lunch to a very nice dinner in the Pizza Express just round the corner from the hotel.