Europe 2023, August 16

Had an early two hour bus ride at 7:45am to go to Sheffield and the bus stop was over the other side of the city about a 15 minute walk away. Due to the time constraints I only had time for a 5 kilometre run and breakfast, although I started having some left foot plantar pain yesterday afternoon so maybe it was good to have a break.

Took a different running route along the east canals, some really narrow tunnels and low ceiling where you couldn't even stand upright. It would have been a challenge if someone else was going the other way, particularly on a bicycle.

It was bad timing to be going to Sheffield the same day and time as the Women's World Cup semi final between Australia and England that started at 11am local time. Surprisingly there didn't seem to be any public screenings of the England matches at all, even in London. Instead everyone must go to their local pub.

I hoped the bus wouldn't be late as I had a 10am to 1pm booking for the National Video Games Museum, and managed to arrive about 15 minutes before it was due to open. The NVM was a big studio space with lots of arcade and console machines to play, arranged in different categories. There was also an assortment of glass cabinets accompanied with a bit of information, a mixture of some rare stuff and some very common Nintendo consoles.

I looked at all the exhibits first then played a round of TMNT arcade, beat the game in under 30 minutes - it was originally designed to chew up money with so many extra credits needed. I played Sunset Riders arcade next, which was also very quick to finish.

Next had a go with Track And Field which is basically button mashing to move your character in each of the athletics event. I couldn't get the timing right on the hammer throw level, it was annoying having to start all over each time you lost at an event so I gave up.

Had a quick go of a few others including the original Donkey Kong, Metal Slug, Lode Runner, and Super Mario USA (Mario 2). I left at around 1pm just as they were finishing the morning session and got Wendy's for lunch, their vegetable bean burger was quite good. It would be good if they started opening some stores in Melbourne soon.

Spent the afternoon walking around the compact city centre:

• City Hall building
• Moor market - a smaller version of South Melbourne market
• Winter Garden - a glasshouse in a building foyer

I was going to walk down to Kelham Island museum at the end of the day but it was further than it seemed and my foot was still sore, so turned around before going too far in that direction.

Before leaving I remembered to look for a magnet and found a small artists gift shop in the city that had some for sale. Then it was back over to the bus station a little early for the return trip.

The bus company I booked with was a bit of a mess as they had many buses going from Sheffield to Birmingham with the same route number, even though they originated from different cities, the only difference between them was the departure time. The previous bus had been due at 2:55 but was well over an hour late, while the website was reporting my 3:45 bus coming from a different location was only a few minutes delayed.

Instead the bus company got creative and switched the services as they arrived at Sheffield to please the people who had been waiting an hour. This was obvious because the bus tracker website was telling me my bus had already arrived and left Sheffield after the first pickup, while the earlier bus was still nearly 30 minutes away.

Luckily there was no issue with seat availability due to the switch around, and we caught up a bit of time on the road and only came back about 20 minutes late in the end, but it was a long day on travel. Even a day on the bus and with a short run I still managed to hit 20,000 steps.