Exploring the 11

So this weekend we decided to do some exploring to help me get an idea of the new city in which I live. We decided that given I had a sparkly new bus pass that it would be worth using the bus routes to get a better idea.

The explore started with a visit to a possible new church – which I think will have a post all to itself.

After leaving the service we headed along the main road in the area which I live, and managed to get ourselves attached to a drunken homeless man with a sob story for 20 minutes on the street corner!  Once we managed to extricate ourselves from him we headed over to the ‘world renowned’ bus route 11 (Outer Circle) – according to a sign half way round it’s the longest bus route in Europe.

NC had been to a talk about the route at Greenbelt, but she wasn’t all that impressed and said that the route was far better than the speaker made out.

We hopped on the bus and headed south, down the east side of the outer ring. I clutched my a-z in an attempt to work out where we were. We motored through suburbia, passed a chinese restarant called “Buffet Island”, then over the canal and through a number of industrial estates, big (rundown) shopping areas and housing estates.  Birmingham in it’s appearance is so very different to that of Sheffield, although both were industrial towns they seem to have a very different ‘industrial’ feel.

Anyway, NC realised that were were probably able to jump off the 11 to go and eat at our favourite veggie Indian restaurant, so we did and enjoyed an absolute feast.

We wandered back to the 11 route to discover we’d just missed the bus, so we walked the not too far distance to Sarehole Mill which is on the edge of a country park and (more importantly) part of the J.R.R. Tolkien trail – it is thought that he based The Shire in the Lord of the Rings books on the area. So we nosed around the museum and I declared I would have liked to have been a Miller or a Miller’s wife – mainly because the Millpond was so lovely and there was a vegetable patch on the edge of it (actually, I’m not sure that has anything to do with being a miller really!)

We then got back to the bus stop, this time we were on time but the bus was not (apparently a rather common occurance on this bus route). So we waited and I got unnerved by the noise of the rotating advert board on the side of the bus stop, so was quite delighted when the bus finally arrived.

Now we had the good intention of going to the Mosley Folk Festival which was happening but the 11 doesn’t go through Mosley and so I decided that we’d just stick to the bus route this time (which is very unlike me – but we didn’t have tickets and I was getting tired having eaten that much curry!). So we continued around the 11 route, along the bottom of Birmingham, passing through Bournville (where the Cadbury factory is) and then heading North up the West side of the outer ring, passing through Selly Oak (Birmingham University) and the big hospitals. We got off the bus for a drink in Harbourne, which is about half way up the western part of the 11. We decided that given the time we wouldn’t finish the full circle and headed straight into the centre and then home – but we will complete the 11 and hopefully the Tolkien Trail too.