Tour of disappointing seaside towns, part 3

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There's been no proper holiday this year because of OPERATION KITCHEN but the boy and I had a couple of nights in Blackpool last week. I'd not been there since the mid 90s (when I left early in disgust), but I visited it as a child and loved it, so thought I'd give monkeyboy a chance to experience it. Surely it couldn't be as bad as Tenby or Yarmouth, could it?
Actually... no, it was pretty good. The 1930s trams remain, the pleasure beach is still very good (which you now pay a single fee to enter, like other theme parks), the sea defenses are being imaginatively rebuilt and feature large pieces of modern art, and the weather was great.

Unfortunately most of the bad bits remain; the nasty seafront hotels (ranging from sleazy to cheesy), rows of squalid chip shops, scruffy nightclubs, gaudy arcades (sometimes claiming to be 'casinos'), and souvenir tat shops. All place great emphasis on how cheap they are - clearly their patrons don't care much for quality. It's particularly bad around the tower, we avoided the area altogether.

Unless they take a bulldozer to all of this, I don't think Blackpool can possibly recover any of it's credibility as a family holiday destination, despite the great efforts being made by the council.
In other news... dog had his first trip to the beach at the weekend.

The Mazda has been cleaned and polished, and returned to the road... briefly. After noticing the dipstick dislodged from it's tube and high oil consumption when using a heavy right foot, I suspected all was not right with the oil breather and blocked off the connection to the inlet manifold. That fixed it, and provided noticeably more power - I suspect much of the boost had been going past that valve and pressurising the crankcase.

This was REALLY GOOD, and I was having a fine tussle with a M3 on a quiet B-road... until it went BANG. The air filter had been blown off the turbo (presumably because I still don't have a dump valve), which had taken out the hose from the electronic boost controller, which in turn led to excessive boost pressure which resulted in a blown off intercooler tube, which knocked out the IAT sensor. But it still ran! Not very well of course, but enough to get me home.

I've got a nasty ebay chavtastic dump valve on it's way now, so there will be much pSHHHHHHHt hilarity once I've found a way of bodging it on. A better-fitting air filter and (hopefully tougher) silicone vacuum hose for the EBC is coming too. It's supposed to be going to Swansea on Saturday to get the roof fixed, will it be ready in time?

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