Weekend of Sin: Great Yarmouth

I have spent a lot of time in Norfolk over the years, with many family holidays having taken place on the Norfolk Broads and this past weekend my sister and I decided to take a little road trip out to Great Yarmouth for a weekend break. As a seaside town there’s not a huge range of entertainment in Great Yarmouth, mostly entertainment comes in the form of the shoreline amusements and the cinema, so that is what we decided to do!

We stayed at the three star, Star Hotel which is proud of its maritime heritage – the herring fishery generated the wealth that enabled past generations to thrive in the area. The Star Hotel has a rather elegant facade of black and white with a lovely metal framework around the entrance. The Hotel building has a lot of history, with some of the parts of it going back as far as the 17th century.

Having arrived on the Friday evening we settled into our room which was simple and practical, a twin room with en suite bathroom, before heading down to the Merchant Pub which is part of the Hotel building. We tucked into pasta before turning in for the night.

After our breakfast at the hotel which was included in our room price, Saturday was our main exploration of the beach day, we spent all day down at the beach enjoying the amusements (and wasting lots of money trying to win key-rings, toys and other trinkets) before enjoying lunch, hanging out on the beach and at the end of the evening we went to the Hollywood Cinema to see Guardians of the Galaxy before returning to the Hotel via dinner at a little local restaurant.

Sunday was forecast to be a bad weather day with a lot of rain and wind – but we were lucky that the morning, despite being windy and a bit dull was not too wet. We returned to the beach and did a little more shopping and enjoyed the cast few amusement arcades along the front before making our way back to our hotel and collecting our car. We planned to visit Wroxham Barns (a leisure and shopping village with boutiques, craft studios, a kids’ farm, funfair and restaurant) in the afternoon – one of the locations we had visited on a number of times on family holidays – and enjoyed an afternoon of shopping in the foodie and crafty shops before enjoying a last Norfolk indulgence – a cream tea!

Unfortunately the weather broke whilst we were at the Barns and my sister and I ended up soaked through before we could dart back to our car and ready ourselves for the journey home to London which took us around 3 hours. I really enjoyed our little weekend of sin in Great Yarmouth and hope to return again in the not too distant future!