just finished our ride on the "Wheel of Liverpool" (a souvenir photo, 2013)

Thelma was very good at finding bargain travel offers. Among other things, she found cheap ticket offers on Virgin Trains to places in England, and we made little trips out of it. In 2013 she found excellent cheap tickets to Liverpool. We booked in to an equally excellent Travelodge very close to Tate Liverpool, and we had a few days' fun in the city. We visited the Cavern Club, went on a bus tour around the original homes of the Beatles boys (stopping at Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields, of course), we looked around the roundabout mentioned in the song "Penny Lane". The barber shop was still there. We visited the two iconic cathedrals, went on a boat trip on the Mersey, checked out the city museum on the riverbank, visited Tate Liverpool, where they had a Chagall exhibition on just then, and we discovered a fab Korean takeaway near our hotel. We also went on the Wheel of Liverpool (the big wheel). This photo was taken by the automatic camera at the exit of the Ferris wheel, and this time we went for it. We seemed to have left some curse on the place. One of the strange events reminding us of our Liverpool trip was that not much later we heard that one of the capsules/cabins of the Big Wheel fell down. We wondered if it had been the one we had been sitting in (it did wobble a lot). That October the wheel was hit by lightning. Also, soon after we got home, we heard on the news, that a duckboat had sunk in Albert Dock next to the Tate (we saw it at its moorings when we were there), and within a month or so a ferry on the Mersey sank (was it the one we had been on?). In Canning Dock, next to the Tate, we asked a beautiful old-worldly sailing ship's people what their conditions were on joining on a sailing trip to somewhere in Europe they were advertising. But they were going to depart too soon for us to arrange for it, sadly. All this was great fun only because of my sweet Thelma.