If you’ve followed me on social media around New Year time, you will know I am a self-confessed New Years Scrooge. My boyfriends Dad, however, lives in Scotland (where they are big on the whole New Year/Hogmanay thing!) and invited us to stay with him over New Year, so I decided I should work up the courage to celebrate it this year. Unfortunately, the Scotland plans had to be cancelled last minute. But, rather than let our holiday days off work go to waste, my boyfriend and I booked a last minute Premier Inn in Newcastle for four days of food and shopping – perfect!

We ended up being pretty excited. My face clearly shows it more than my boyfriends though… 😉

We visited the MetroCentre every day that we were away, whether it be for food, drink, games or shopping. If you haven’t been before, I really recommend you pay a visit some time. It’s one of my favourite places to go. I love that it’s so much more than a shopping centre; you can go first thing to grab yourself a yummy breakfast, get a tonne of shopping done, stop off for a break to play games and have a cheeky little gamble, indulge in more shopping, grab a meal at one of the many restaurants, and finish off the day with a trip to the cinema followed by a hot drink in the Odeon Costa before heading home. It boasts a massive 340 shops plus, and can be a fun, varied day out, all under the same roof. With us visiting so shortly after Christmas, all of the decorations were still up, and they were fab!

I must say, I well and truly indulged my inner (and slightly outer!) fatty whilst I was there, and enjoyed Nandos, Burger King, Chiquitos and more whilst I was there, and the service was great. I even got to treat myself to some cheeky cocktails and the occasional huge hot chocolate whilst we were there.

On New Years day, with most of the shops being closed, we started off the day by visiting the Angel of the North. I’m a little bit of a geek when it comes to sightseeing, and I really enjoyed it, though the wind nearly knocked me off my feet – seriously! Naturally, I took about 391,947 photos, and then picked out my favourites. 

Before heading home, we spent our last bits of time in the Namco Funscape amusements in the MetroCentre. We’d spent a grand total of about a million hours in there over our four day trip, and won the ticket jackpot three times. Yes. Three times. It was actually rather embarrassing having to stand at the machines for about 15 minutes whilst the tickets piled around our feet. We both enjoyed feeling like children until we noticed that the actual children were ecstatic with winning 20 tickets whilst we walked around with 10,000 in my handbag. Awkward. After exchanging our tickets for prizes – including my huge unicorn below – we headed home with empty pockets, bloated bellies and bagful of goodies we didn’t need but really wanted. 🙂

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