Today we had a trip to Cambridge to hunt for giraffes. Standing Tall is this year's Break Charity Wild in Art sculpture trail.
This was the invite from Joyce.
"Tuesday March 26th Giraffes in Cambridge . The train from Ipswich, Diss and Bury St Edmunds arrives at Cambridge train station at 10.41amso I will be waiting for you, I have mapped out a 7-8 mile route that should enable us to see 25 giraffes . It just leaves 6 which are on the outskirts of the city that we won’t go searching for. We won’t have a morning coffee stop but we will head over to The Iris Café at Newnham College for lunch. A bowl of their delicious soup is less than £2 (from memory). Of course you can eat your packed lunch there if you wish. Other food items are available. It should be an interesting day out. Hoping to get back to train station by 14.47pm for onwards travel. All pavement walking. "
This was our route today
Here are just a few of my photos.
We assembled at Cambridge railway station with several of us arriving on the train from Ipswich.
Our first giraffe "Born to Stand Out" wasn't far.
Jungle giraffe outside the botanic gardens had some lovely animal portraits.
No he's not a giraffe, but walking up Hills Rd we passed the infamous statue of Prince Phillip, soon to be removed (see
here).
At The Gonville Hotel we came across one of my favourites, Strawberries and Cream.
Dan spotted some mini-giraffes in the hotel lobby. We weren't explicitly seeking them out but we came across quite a few of them.
We liked ELR's mathematical knowledge of e and pi.
In the Grafton Centre we found In my DNA
Another of my favourites was Jiggles and Iggles in New Square Park.
Through the city centre now we enjoyed Grandifolia Camelopardalis by All Saints Passage with its portraits of famous Cambridge city alumni.
...within sight of the great gate of my old college, we found Theory of Everything.
We headed to the Garden House Hotel, now aka the Cambridge Graduates Hotel. We went through the hotel to get to the garden. Anyone for cocktails here?
We admired the punty decoration in the lobby.
Punts opposite Silver Street bridge.
Our lunch stop was at Newnham College's Iris café
on our way to the
University Library. The current building was opened in 1934. From as early as the middle of the fourteenth century, the University of Cambridge owned and kept in chests in its treasury a small collection of books. However, it was in the second decade of the fifteenth century that the first University Library found its home on the newly built Old Schools site. It's a bit bigger now and as one of the UK and Ireland’s six Legal Deposit Libraries, Cambridge University Library has been entitled to request every publication in both the UK and Ireland since 1710. In addition to its physical collections, the UL allows access to tens of millions of electronic articles, books, journals, scores and other e-resources.
Back across Garret Hostel bridge where we got a view of Clare bridge now without its scaffolding....
...and back to the marketplace to find another favourite, Find a New Perspective.
We enjoyed browsing the title on the bookshelves.
I loved the little machine at the bottom. Metropogiraffolis answers the question of how to find an
actor who can perform the wide variety of acting talents required for your ambitious storyline when you need to film next week and casting isn't going so well. Their only option? To create a character themselves. How hard can it be to give life to a robotic giraffe? My favourite.
We found some more nini-Gs
But we were in a bit of a hurry now to catch our train, finishing with Savannah's Golden Guardian...
...and Swifts -Visitors to Cambridge on Parkers Piece.
It was 14:19 and well over a mile back to the station, but we made it for our 14:47 train. Thank-you Joyce for leading us round and to everyone else for the additional company.
You can see more details of our 6.5 mile route here on MapMyWalk (or download a GPX file here) and find more of my photos including all of the giraffes we saw here on Flickr.
Other related walks you can find on my walk include:
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