It’s been a couple of weeks since I last posted but I have a very good reason – Mum is visiting and last weekend we spent three nights in Liverpool. (Okay that’s two reasons.)

On Saturday afternoon we set off from London’s Euston Station and arrived a mite delayed after a signal failure coming into Crewe meant a further 75 minutes was added to our journey (although a retrospective bonus is that it’s also likely to yield a 50% refund on what we paid for our tickets – yippee!). By the time we walked to our hotel and checked in, we decided that dinner and an early night was the best preparation for the busy Sunday ahead of us.

Having navigated the change to British Summer Time successfully , we turned up on time at the Anchor Courtyard at Albert Dock ready to immerse ourselves in some The Beatles history on a Magical Mystery Tour…

The bus was hard to miss,  waiting at Albert Dock for our tour to begin.

The tour was two hours of fascinating anecdotes as the brightly coloured bus wound its way through the suburbs of Liverpool – past childhood homes, playing Fab Four classics and pausing for a few photo opportunities.

The first stop was Penny Lane, which is actually named for slave trader James Penny but more importantly was the location of the people from John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s youth that were made famous by their song of the same name – the friendly barber, the mac-less banker and the nurse selling poppies from a tray – all clustered around the bustling roundabout. We stopped at the ‘less famous’ end for our photo opp…

We stopped at the ‘less famous’ end of Penny Lane for our photos. On the right is our tour guide Jay Johnson, younger brother of Frankie Goes To Hollywood front man Holly Johnson.

Since we are speaking of famous song locations, we also dashed off the bus pre-downpour at Strawberry Field. Lennon’s nostalgic lyrics refer to his teenage years when this site was a hostel for young girls (a lot of whom were unmarried mothers) and he would sit in the branches of a nearby tree to check them out.

Strawberry Fields Forever and a photo opportunity for Mum

Our other two photo-opp stops were the birthplace of George Harrison at 12 Arnold Grove (below left) and the family home of the McCartney clan, now a National Trust property, in Forthlin Road (below right).

But we also paused at many other places including at the end of Madryn Street in Dingle – the birthplace of Ringo Starr – and outside The Empress, the pub around the corner which featured on the front cover of Ringo’s first solo album, A Sentimental Journey. There was also a pause outside Mendips, where John Lennon lived with his Aunt Mimi from the age of five until he left in 1963, and a slow pass-by the St Peter’s church hall in Princes Street where John and Paul first met in 1957.

And throughout it all Jay kept regaling us with all sorts of stories and interesting facts and before we knew it, we were getting off the bus for the last time back in the centre of Liverpool and just down the road from the Beatles-inspired Hard Day’s Night hotel…

There’s a statue of each of the Fab Four along the front of the hotel and a shop which sells lots of memorabilia. But wait – could that be a fab fifth reflected in the sign?

After a well-earned coffee and a spot of lunch, we took a short spell from Beatle-mania to honour another part of Liverpool’s musical heritage by taking a ferry ride across the River Mersey…

The song Ferry Cross the Mersey was made famous in 1965 by local band Gerry and the Pacemakers. Our crossing was…well let’s call it ‘brisk’- one minute bright and blue-skied then the next, drizzly and damply-grey – but definitely one of the things to ‘tick off’ during a visit here.

It was then back to the Fab Four and a visit to The Beatles Story where we spent another couple of hours poring over more stories and memorabilia…

The Beatles Story down at Albert Dock is well worth a visit. Leave yourself plenty of time, particularly if you want to listen to the audio tour and read all of the plaques and snippets along the way. And if you can, pre-book tickets to save waiting in line!

After our music-themed day, what better to cap it all off than with a visit to the Cavern Club, where John, Paul, George and Ringo played more than 290 times before they hit the big time. We saw Made in Liverpool, a fab Beatles tribute act…

…before heading back to the hotel.

And that, my dear Gidday-ers, was just Day 1 of our Liverpool pilgrimage. Stay tuned for more of our Merseyside exploits – the  non-musical kind -soon…