Portsmouth is a nice little maritime town in the south of England. About one and an half hours train journey from London Waterloo its a decent trip away so to make the most of your time there make sure you leave as early as you can. Portsmouth is also handy for getting over to the Isle of Wight should that take your fancy.

I’m sure there were lots of places to see in Portsmouth (museums, castles etc.) but we were going mainly for the outlet shopping at the very modern Gunwharf Quays and also the coast – you know, to see the water and the beaches.

There are two things that seem consistent with English seaside towns:
– funfares (rides and games) by the water and
– pebbled beaches.

I find there is great appeal in the pebbled beaches as I have, while not exactly a phobia, a paranoia about getting sand in uncomfortable places. But the pebbles mean that you can rock up to the beach and have a lay down without worrying too much about not being in your beach gear and without worrying at all about getting sand in those uncomfortable places.

We didn’t really have a plan of action so we ended up walking back from Portsmouth Harbour to the sea front at South Sea which is a good 15-20 minute walk. The sun came out to play so we spent a couple of hours baking in the relatively good weather, after having a go at the 2p machines and the giant grabby machine thingy (no luck though.) The green just off the water and then the beach itself was just so peaceful that we couldn’t be bothered doing much more. Should have put some sunscreen on though as I came away as red as a lobster. That’ll learn me – seems embarassing to be burned by English sun! 🙂

Soon it was nearing lunch time and with meals always being a priority we decided we’d better head over to Gunwharf Quay. Einstein was after some seafood but many places which touted themselves as seafood restaurants had surprisingly little seafood options on their menus. So, the second best alternative was a restaurant called Char Bar – which has the novel concept of cooking your food in front of you. I’ve seen this concept mainly in Japanese tepenyaki or Korean BBQ places so I was looking forward to chucking some ribs on the grill in front of us. We went with some starters of King Prawns which came with some delicious melted garlic butter (hardening arteries much but so worth it – yummy) and then a whole rack of ribs each.

My brother tells me that some of the best ribs he’s had is where they totally char one side (the bone side) leaving the other side moist and tender. We unintentionally did the same with our ribs – mainly because it was fascinating how big the fire was in front of us and you can see just how charcoal at least one of the racks got from the pic on the left. Although they were really delicious – eating these ribs were really hard work taking us nearly two hours to finish!

The last thing that I felt like doing after having such a gigantic meal and such a lazy morning was hitting all the shops. However it seemed such a shame to travel so far and not visit the purported 85 designer outlets at Gunwharf Quay. So, being the troopers that we were, off we went. We managed to cover the stores in a couple of hours (which to me is practically the limit of my shopping interest) but to my disappointment didn’t really walk away with much shopping at all. However all in all it was still a good day.