I'll've Wight

We set off in a leisurely sort of a way this morning, entering Portsmouth Ferry Terminal into the GPS and following its instructions like good little people. But the Ferry Terminal was big and empty and scary, and had a lot of French written on the signs. It didn't seem quite right for a place that should have ferries across to the Isle of Wight every 20 minutes or so. And when we asked someone, sure enough, it turned out we were at the wrong place. So we unparked the car (for 3GBP) and tootled off a bit further up the road. But that was still confusing, because the only ferry we could see just went across the river and had a ticket machine, so there was nobody to ask. So we wandered around a bit more and tried to reinterpret the signs we saw to make sense with what we could see in front of us. And finally we figured it out and found where we were meant to be. And we'd missed a ferry departure by abut 5 minutes, and in fact they only left every 45 minutes. We finally got a Fastcat at

11.15.
But it was a gorgeous, fabulous day, and the water was as calm as a calm thing, and there were very few people around (even though it's actually still school holidays here). We had thought of hiring bicycles to go to the places we wanted to see, but when we examined the scale of the maps a bit more carefully, and realised that it would mean a bike ride of at least 20km, we reconsidered, and thought that maybe the buses would suit us better. On arrival, we had just missed the bus to one of our destinations, so we hopped on a bus to Newport, which has a Roman villa partially excavated and on show. It's just in a normal suburban street, and was uncovered in 1926 when someone wanted to build a new house. In fact, part of the villa's foundations are still underground on a neighbour's property, who hasn't allowed them to be excavated.
We had lunch in Newport while waiting for the bus to East Cowes, where Queen Victoria had her holiday home, Osborne House. It was lovely, mostly, with just a very few touches of over-the-top Victorian gaudiness. What I find amazing about sightseeing in this country is that (along with a million or so other people) I can say, "Queen Victoria/George IV/Charles Dickens/whoever has walked these halls/climbed these stairs/looked out these windows, and now SO AM I!!" Love it. Osborne House also had beautiful grounds and flower gardens. This is a great time of year to be visiting, but we were maybe a couple of weeks too late for the camellias, and a few days past the daffodils' best. We saw a pair of pheasants wooing in a meadow - how very English-country-house!
We were waiting for a bus afterwards when a taxi came past, so we took that back to Ryde for the ferry, and we arrived back in Portsmouth at a bit after 6. We had parked (by mistake) in a shopping centre's carpark, and we had seen this morning that it had quite a few eateries on the seafront, so we had a wander round until we found a nice place, looking out over the marina as the sun went down. It was a very pleasant evening.
Today was the hottest day of the year so far, apparently, up to 25 degrees. It really was glorious, not a cloud in the sky all day long. On the way home we saw a lot of people with sunburnt arms and faces and chests, although we weren't affected much, being sun-toughened already. I only packed one short-sleeved t-shirt for this trip, thinking I was going to be freezing most of the time. I have been proven wrong, and for once I'm very pleased about that.