Most of October passed in the haze of days that were nothing special, filled with tasks not really worth recording. The trees finally accepted it was Autumn, and the leaves began to change colour.
This magnificent tree is in our front garden. The beautiful golden colour didn't last, of course - the branches are bare now and the beautiful leaves are a nasty khaki coloured mulch which needs to be swept up!
Towards the end of October, we set off for Manchester as it was half-term and we had the prospect of seeing our grandchildren. Unfortunately, the weather wasn't great as it rained quite a bit during the week, and both children took it in turns to be unwell during our visit.
Our grandson had been unwell before we arrived, and then his sister caught it, so she became quite miserable. As our grandson was starting to feel better, we took him for some days out. Our first visit was to Heaton Park Tramway Museum, which I had previously had no idea even existed, though it opened in 1980. It's a heritage tramway running old trams as a visitor attraction in Heaton Park. Of course it is calculated to appeal to old codgers like us rather than our grandson, but we thought he might like it, and he certainly did. This is the tram we rode in, built in 1901 for the Hull Corporation
On a freezing cold day, it wasn't at all warm inside the open tram, but our grandson was delighted to watch the ticket collector punching the old paper tickets and quite fascinated by the method of getting the tram to go in the opposite direction by disconnecting the rod from the overhead power lines, changing the angle of it and re-connecting, and having the driver go to the controls at the other end. He even asked, very politely, if he could please drive the tram! The ticket collector explained very kindly that only a few real experts were allowed to drive it, but said if he came on another occasion he would be able to operate the model tramway in the Museum, which was not on display that day. So we promised him another visit, and bought him a model tram in the shop. He obviously enjoyed his visit, as he asked to keep his ticket.
He asked to go to another museum, so we opted for the Manchester Museum as he wanted to see a dinosaur. He was quite excited by this, so he put on a dinosaur costume himself.
So we were able to take a small dinosaur to see a big dinosaur
I think he was a bit taken aback by the size of it. I'm afraid the photo is slightly out of focus, like a lot of those taken in poor light indoors.
After that, he was unwell again and it poured with rain, so that was more or less the end of the expeditions I'm afraid. Towards the end of the week he felt well enough to go to the playground near the house, hoping to find somebody to play with. Unfortunately, it was such a cold day that there was nobody there. After a while, a little girl arrived, but not somebody he knew, and sitting on the next swing to her and hoping to make friends unfortunately didn't seem to work.
Things got a bit better as Halloween approached - a friend came to visit and cupcakes were made and eaten. Then we made a gingerbread house.
It was a bit of a shame that it was done before my son got home, as Paul 'helped' with it and felt he didn't do too good a job on the purple spider web on the roof. We had tried the same thing with our younger grandson the previous week, and our eldest son made brilliant spider webs, which quite put Paul's efforts to shame. Anyway, our grandson wasn't really interested in the artistic merits or otherwise of the house, he just wanted to eat it!
There were, of course, various visits from people in scary costumes, so our grandson felt he had to dress up too.
I felt that was a rather horrid costume, but it seemed to make him happy!
We stayed the weekend after Halloween so Paul could help with a bit more DIY, and came home again on Monday November 2nd.
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