North Coast of Norfolk day 2

romer, Norfolk, on the North Sea, Day 2

Today was a terrific day. After breakfast at the hotel (pretty okay, better coffee as they used a French press), we drove west along the coast to the Cley nature preserve, where we walked out into the salt marshes to look for birds. We went first to a series of small thatched huts (called hides here, we might call them blinds in the US) in the middle of marshes, and saw a good variety of water birds - lapwings, coots, many different ducks and geese, bitterns, curlews, and even a marsh harrier (a kind of hawk). Plus several others that I haven’t identified yet. We then walked out along the footpath along a dike out to the beach on the North Sea. The beach was a totally pebble beach - most of the pebbles were flint! See photo of a tourist on that beach. We continued along the beach to the east end of the nature preserve and back along another dike to the nature center. Someone (not me) was very, very hungry, so we had lunch at the small cafe there. It was pretty cool, as we ate our lunch at a counter overlooking the marsh. After that we went a bit further west to Wells-next-the-Sea, which is a much less depressed and depressing than Cromer. It’s pretty upscale actually, combining both a working harbour (pleasure craft and small fisherman) and shops that cater primarily to tourism - from ice cream parlours and fish & chips shops to arts & crafts and summer clothes shops. We may stay here again when we come back to Norfolk.

Now we’re back at our hotel for a brief stop, and soon we’ll go into Cromer for supper. I especially want to stop and look at the sign that Peter discovered this morning, about one of the towns that disappeared under the sea a few centuries ago.