This place was heaven compared to Dover. But even if we hadn’t been to the most boring place on Earth before, this place still would have been fantastic in the eyes of the Battlers.

As always, I do have a few criticisms about the place. Like for one, it was the gay capital of England. Lucky for us it was cold the whole time so unlike Mykonos, we didn’t see more than we paid for. Thankfully.
The second criticism is that upon view of Brighton’s ‘beach’ – large pebbles next to water doesn’t count as a beach – it was noticed that the town had breached copyright laws. If I put a photo of Venice Beach Pier in Cali next to a photo of Brighton’s Pier, it would be the hardest game of spot the difference you’d ever play. I reckon the designer of Venice Beach Pier would have a real shot of suing the copycats who designed Brighton Pier if they had a crack.

The Battlers stayed in St Christopers Hostel, right on the ‘beach’, next to the pier. In our room we met an English bloke called Luke who was working on the railways down here. Luke was a good bloke and had a tonne of conspiracies. One of which includes a conspiracy of the old cartoon ‘The Rugrats’. Was real interesting to read on the Internet how the whole cartoon is based through one of the girls’ side effects of drugs. Anyway, he also had a conspiracy about the old pier.
The old pier was burnt down several decades ago I believe. According to Luke, it was an insurance job, someone burning it down to claim a bit of insurance money. He said that usually in summer, there are many divers who submerge themselves to see all the old theme park rides and games that dropped through the burning pier onto the ocean floor. There’s still coins from the games and everything down there.

The Battlers walked around ‘The Lanes’, home to more than several vintage shops. Like the markets in Berlin, it was like walking through a tidy tip or garage sale. There were Gameboy’s, Supernintendo’s and Nintendo 64’s for sale. The fact these technologies were being sold as vintage made me realise that I’m starting to get old. I still use two out of three of those technologies.

The two blokes had a geez around the pier and the shopping mall. Also did a bit of planning of the next couple of weeks so we have a general idea of where we will be at certain dates.

We’ve made so many mistakes in the past sixteen and a half weeks we haven’t learnt from. One of these being that we never think ahead and book accommodation early for the weekend. This weekend was no exception. Stuck between ice and a cold place and realising that there was nowhere to stay in Bristol over the weekend, we booked an extra night in Brighton and then have to go to Bath for one night (planning to do that anyway) and then go to Bristol on the Sunday night.
I struggle to understand why we don’t think ahead that we’ll need to book accomm in the future for weekends because they’re always so packed. Perhaps it’s because we never know what day it is until we run into this problem.

An extra night meant changing rooms to an eight person dorm. No whakkaz. Didn’t bother us. At least not until we were heading to bed for an early night and a group of Englishers (new word; add it to the dictionary) were dressing up in costume to go out. Neither of us had a problem with them until they came home the early hours of the morning, turning on the light and speaking loudly, to change into ‘normal clothes’. After constantly telling them to shut up, they left to go back out. More noise was made an hour later when they returned and it became a joke. Almost yelling, light still on, our words started to become rather violent. This managed to shut them all up. Was pretty annoying. It sounds like it got to us but it didn’t really. Become accustomed to this type of thing. Going to be that much more special when we first plonk our heads on our own pillows in our own beds.

Brighton was good. Would like to come back here in summer. Enjoyed taking photos of the place as it was all really old school.

We’ll have to get used to the cold as it’s starting to get chilly. That’s going to be a completely different battle, especially when the snow sets in