A Brighton Getaway

Brighton is one of my favourite places to go, in all of the UK.  In 2001 (about 4 months before meeting my hubby), I came to Brighton for a big holiday with my close school friend.  We booked into a backpackers for a week and spent a week discovering the city and the amazing open culture it has.  At the end of the week I couldn't face leaving quite yet, so I stayed on for an extra 3 days and experienced the Gay Pride festival, such an experience!

My old job took me to Brighton a couple of times too and I couldn't have been happier to go.  So when the chance cropped up to go again, this time taking the hubby and baby, I couldn't say no.  We stayed at the Brighton Travelodge (not the seafront one) opposite an enormous and beautiful park.

Our room was basic, but clean.  It had everything we needed: kettle, tea, coffee, cups and lots of space - we had a family room.  The staff were amazing, all were very friendly and bent over backwards to help us.  The breakfast was very basic in terms of vegetarian options for the cooked breakfast (scrambled eggs and baked beans) but the food they had was cooked well (the eggs were lovely!).

Our only qualm was that our room was on the first floor, right above reception at the front of the hotel, and since it was during a heatwave, we really needed the windows open - the hotel had a couple of stag and hen parties, so on the Friday night, every half hour from about 1am - 5am we were woken up by groups of drunk people out the front.  So, if you're there with a baby or children, I'd recommend asking to be at the back of the hotel :)

We drove down on a Thursday and had the full Friday there before heading home on Saturday morning, so we made the most out of Friday.  We decided to walk in from the hotel (a decision we both later regretted considering we hadn't had breakfast, Squidge was close to needing a feed, and it was boiling hot and not a short walk!).

Close to the hotel was this field full of beautiful wild flowers, it was so beautiful I took about a gazillion pictures!

 Right next to the field was this lovely cafe.  We were going to stop here for breakfast, but there was a big queue, the place was empty and service seemed very slow, so we moved on.

We passed this lovely viaduct too, thought it was a good photo opp :)

Just beyond that was an open market, we were planning on walking back and were going to stop here, but after walking all the way there, and spending hours walking around we were too knackered to walk back so we got the bus.

We also saw a real Banksy!!!!!

Such a beautiful building!

The little man was cwtched up in his pram and was happy there most of the time :)

We also stopped off at the Sea Life centre, Squidge absolutely loved it! He loved seeing all the fish, and all the colours.  He also took a nap on the pier :)

On the Saturday morning, we got up early (as we always do with Squidge) and had breakfast downstairs in the Travelodge, as I mentioned above, it was simple but lovely - the hubby loved his meaty breakfast :)  After that we packed up the car and checked out about 10 am.  About half hour away was a lovely National Trust place called Nymans (more on this over on my mummy blog soon). Squidge needed a feed at about 10:30 so we thought it would be well timed.

It was absolutely beautiful, one of the nicest National Trust places we've been to.

We had a lovely couple of days, although it did seem like travelling there and back took longer than we were actually there for (6 hours there, 7 hours back - for a 3.5 hour journey if we didn't have a baby!).  I'm hoping to bring Squidge back to Brighton when he's older, it's such a wonderful city, we both felt really safe there.  Our only issue was that we struggled to find The Lanes, well, we didn't - mind you, we didn't make a whole lot of effort to find them :P

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*The accommodation was provided free of charge, all opinions are my own