The Dimbola museum is worth a look. Besides the Margaret Cameron photography there’s a good section about the IOW festival Hendrix played at just before he died.
It also appears that there’s an exhibition by the pioneering aerial photographer Alfred Buckham on at the moment.
The tea room there was really good too as I recall.
At the Needles there are some awful UPVC huts pretending to be attractions which personally I’d avoid. But the views & the rocket test sites are pretty cool. I think they were trying out the engines there before moving the launches out to Oz.
There was a nudist beach back in the 80’s near Blackgang Chine …not sure if it’s still there as houses were falling onto the beach due to erosion…
I went to the I O W 5 years on the trot late 70’s early 80’s …I spotted Chalkie White (from Daily Mirror spot me man) but too shy to approach him two minutes later someone did and won £50 if I remember rightly …he may still be wandering around the island😀 had a flat cap on …
Used to get free holidays at the savoy holiday camp in freshwater,proper hi de hi place. Remember we were driving to the camp from Yarmouth and went past loads of ply that was up for the festival,must of been 69 or 70
I wish I’d said nowt…
Despite the best efforts of storm Allie we decided to have a clamber - neither the 60mph wind, driving rain or waterfall running down or route put us off.
So I did the 1st pitch - 40m or so. - and my partner (who I’d never climbed with before) stepped up, screamed and slumped on the rope.
Turned out his hip replacement had dislocated. And I had no mobile signal - he was 10m below me so I gently lowered him until his good foot got stuck in a crack. So I abseiled down to him and started trying to free him…
Just at that moment 6 blokes appeared - I shouted to ask if they had phone signal which they did…
It turned out these guys were aspirant mountin guides and their trainer, which was nice. So they climbed up , set up some more ropes and between us we got him down, put him on some rucsacs, covered him with a bivvy bag and gave him some cocodamol.
Mountain Rescue then turned up (10 of them!), gave him more painkillers and we all watched the helicopter turn up and fly off again due to the wind…
3 hours later we’d manhandled the stretcher down to the road, discovered after a further hour there was another 2 hours to wait for an Ambwlans so he went to hospital in the back of a rescue Land Rover.
All I can say is those guides, students and Rescue boys and girls were the fookin business…
