Woke up early again this morning and trotted down to the hotel lounge after breakfast to do some more weblog.

Made my way out to the Alamo car rental place at about 10am to pick up our car for the next 21 days of the holiday.

The nice lass at the counter explained that the Vectra that we were expecting was actually going to be a Peugeot 404 (sorry, bad Internet joke there). I wasn't impressed with the size of the car (considering the amount of luggage we're carrying) so I talked them into a cheap (£5 per day extra) upgrade to a Vauxhall Omega CD instead. Nice car!

After picking up Kaye from the Hotel, we drove out to the Designer Outlet again to buy Kaye a new backpack, as she had carried hers home last night on the back of her new luggage trolly, and destroyed one of the straps in the process by dragging it all the way home without realising it.

We then drove out to the National Trust's Quarry Bank Mill and Styal Estate near Styal. The Georgian working water-powered cotton mill still spins and weaves cotton to be sold in the shop. The Mill includes demonstrations of the development of the textile industry from hand spinning to noisy weaving factory.



We took the Apprentice House tour as well as a tour of the mill itself - all very interesting stuff. The Greg family were quite a progressive lot back then - no corporal punishment was allowed (the apprentices were all children from work houses) and they ran their own organic garden (fertlised by their own waste, ewww) as well - how green!



On the way back to the city we passed the Manchester Velodrome so being cycling nuts (yes, me included now) we decided to drive past and take a photo.



Some chaps were unloading bikes out of their Brittish Cycling Team vans so we said 'hello' and they told us that the drome was actually open, so we parked the car and grabbed the camera for some more shots of the insides!



They asked me to fill in a permission request form to take photographs inside which basically prohibits using any photos in a negative way - no fear of that here! Took a great shot of a bronze statue of Reg Harris O.B.E (1920-1992) - a world champion cyclist and managed to talk the drome manager into letting me take a 360 degree shot from the middle of the track (another Quicktime VR shot, also huge at 4.5Mb)!



Tired and hungry, we made our way back into Manchester and found Oxford Street, otherwise known as the Curry Mile because it is home to hundreds of Indian restaurants and other curry houses. We settled on the Shere Kahn, which turned out to be one of Manchester's best Indian restaurants! They even have their own beer!



Back to the hotel for the last night where we finally saw the lights turned on across the front of the building.



We're heading north tomorrow for the next phase of our holiday so stay tuned for the next thrilling installement of Our European Holiday coming to a blog near you :(this one!)!