Birthdays, Birmingham And Burgers

As some of you may know I celebrated a birthday last Wednesday. Another year older and hopefully wiser, although this is yet to be tested or proven.

I was unaware of how to feel at this birthday, it wasn’t really a ‘big one’ (I turned 24) yet I still had the feelings that I should notice some major change with my change of age.



I didn’t!

For my birthday the boy and I took a trip up north to the city of Birmingham. We planned to spend a few days in the city and had some trips booked.

We love Birmingham for many reasons, the shopping is amazing first of all, but the city itself is so compact and well designed. The mixture of old and new architecture fit in so well together and it would be impossible to starve as there must be thousands of restaurants in the city centre alone!

We arrived in Birmingham on my actual birthday (Wednesday), checked into the hotel and took a short stroll to the Bullring. We did a lot of window shopping and a bit of actual shopping before going back to the hotel and getting ready for the evening.

Something we were looking forward to during our stay in B’ham was eating at the Handmade Burger Company, a little restaurant we had found by accident during a previous trip and fell in love with. They make every burger to your specification right from the meat to the spices, the sauces and the salad (which is a massive bonus for me as I NEVER order anything straight from the menu!!)

We had booked a trip to Cadburys World on the Thursday so we woke up early, had some breakfast and headed for the station to start our journey. For anyone unaware what Cadburys World is it is sort of the real life chocolate factory! You get to see chocolate being made, packaged and even make some of your own chocolate.

A few stops later and we arrived at Bourneville station, on the short walk up to Cadburys we could smell the chocolate already. Walking around our pockets were filled as we were given chocolate bars around every corner.

Unfortunately the packaging plant wasn’t working when we were there but we were still able to walk around and see all the machines which made the boy happy. We also got to try our own bit of chocolate decorating (see my attempts down below – I don’t think the chocolate business is under any major threat!)

I could write for pages just about our trip at Cadburys World so perhaps another blog on this but for now I will move onto the night. And more shopping was in store, we had a few presents to pick up so we done that and I ‘needed’ to go into Forever 21 again.

We were still quite full of chocolate so we decided to go for dinner at Pizza Hut where we knew they could box up what we couldn’t eat for later back at the hotel. After dinner we took a stroll around the city as it was still light and there is so much we still hadn’t seen.

Sadly, the next day we were going home so we woke up early to pack our bags (which had doubled in just our two days!) and then checked out of the hotel. We decided to go to the Sea Life Centre as I had read it was the biggest in the UK and had a 360degree glass tunnel where you were literally walking through the sea.

The Sea Life Centre is located on a little canal that runs through the centre of Birmingham and it was so picturesque as we walked over the canal looking at the narrow boats parked along the sides.

Again I could write pages about the Sea Life Centre (maybe combine the two trips in an extra blog?) but I would highly recommend it for anyone and everyone. Not only is it a lot bigger than I expected, they have literally hundreds of species of sea life, a 4D cinema, feeding sessions and talks on different parts of the centre.

After a long and amazing trip it was finally time to get ready to say goodbye to Birmingham yet again, but before we left we needed to eat and that called for another trip to the Handmade Burger Co.

I still feel like there are corners of the midland city that I haven’t seen, I want to drink tea on a narrow boat along the canal and there is plenty of shopping left to do so the boy and I are already planning on when our next trip up north will be but as always you will be coming with me as well.

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Our much LOVED Handmade Burgers

The sign of shopping!

My chocolate decorating attempt

Face masks in the hotel

Roundabout on the canal