Green Tourism Feature : Trafalgar200

Well June has been and gone for another year, the IoW Festival hangover has passed and my friends have returned to their respective LA, Durban, Honduran & French retreats. Even I, the extreme optimist, was beginning to feel that the best (May & June) had passed for another year…and then…July began!

My mate calls me up and says let’s head over to Ryde for the Trafalgar200 celebrations, not overly enthusiastic I agree. So he picks me up and we take 10 minutes discussing our Nelson-esque plan of the best way to get in and out of Ryde on one of the busiest days of the year…so after a long debate we decide on the trade entrance to New Look through one of the car parks on the west-side of the Town, knowing that the car park would be full. We arrive and find plenty of room, park-up and are joined by another vehicle… there are three young ladies and I can make out the driver mouthing ‘cheeky b*****s’… I guessed they worked there?! And yes, we are!

So we head down through the Town, recalling memories of our adventures in Ryde during the early 1990s, when we would get a discounted ‘Rover’ bus pass for the summer holidays from school and spend our days traversing the Island and ‘hangin-out’ in random towns. Ryde back then was pretty rough (well as far as the Island goes) and was in that limbo point that I guess many similar areas were in, the Victorian era had finally come to an end and the town was having a identity crisis…which I guess its still sorta in? The Town is undergoing a £30 million face-lift, as a part of a large regeneration programme so I guess the identity will be addressed as part of that?

Anyhows, I digress…where were we…ah Trafalgar200, so we head off down to Appley beach at about 9pm to find a good spot to watch the festivities. After traipsing up and down the promenade working our way through the chaos we decided that the best view was gonna be out on the end of the sands…so off with the shoes and socks and out we went. The mile long walk felt quite liberating and conjured images of Dunkirk as thousands of people began to join us on our mission. We ended up in 5th & 6th, as the furthest people out…1-4 were just plain nutters! As we were stood out in the middle of the shipping lane the whole event began to unravel and the gravity of what we were witnessing began to hit us. The fireworks were a little bit of a disappointment…ok if you were in Portsmouth harbour but a couple of miles away in Ryde was simply to far to really get the full impact. That aside I turned to my friend (Russ) and said ‘hey we’re a mile off Ryde, stood in the middle of the sea with a couple of thousand people, surrounded by one of the largest assemblies of ships ever…and its dark! How cool is that!’…Russ nodded, slurped some beer, drew a lungful of his cigarette…and with a big cheesy grin replied ’sweet’…and with that we decided to try and navigate our way back to reality and the inevitable traffic jams that were to ensue…

So looking back the whole event seemed a little strange…the fireworks were poor (from Ryde), we couldn’t even see the re-enacted battle, the onshore entertainment was non-existent but at the same time it was a sorta really cool experience? The view from the shore was like a Lowry painting with thousands of stick-people buzzing around and the walk out across the sands was like a pilgrimage or some biblical act. I’m a little confused really…I had an amazing experience but from a totally different perspective to what I envisaged? I guess this just reinforces the point that enlightening experiences can be found in the most absurd situations, we just have to scratch away a little of the surface to discover the true qualities sometimes? I found disappointment in what I was expecting but enlightenment in the absurdity that ensued…as Russ so poetically put it…’sweet!’

Steve