At the end of August, we bears had a very special day out. We were going to meet some of our Twitter friends at a tweet-up organised by our friend Tour Guide Ted, but also see some other very special bears.
Hanley, Huddlesford, Endon, Waverley and I squeezed into the Bear Bag and were taken by Polar and Grizzly to our local railway station at Kidsgrove.
Hanley Bear always likes to look at the pictures drawn by local schoolchildren that decorate the station.
"The bears we are going to visit must like human cubs too," Hanley said, which was true, because they were helping to raise money for a children's hospital.
Our local train took us to Derby, where we changed onto a train to the city of Sheffield. None of us had ever been there before, but it was where Polar studied ancient and medieval history when she was a student, so our friend Old Bunny has been there.As soon as we left the station we saw our first Sheffield bear, who was very colourful and as big as a wild bear! We were so excited when Polar lifted up the Bear Bag so we could take a closer look.
We met another bear on our way to the canal basin, where Polar and Grizzly were going to have a cup of tea and we were having an Elevenses toasted teacake. It would be a very tough journey to visit by boat, as we would have to go across the Pennines and along the very big Yorkshire canals, so I don't know if Uppie will ever come here.Endon Bear loved the wildflower meadows beside the footpaths and cycleways. "I wonder if we can persuade Stoke City Council to do the same with some of the scruffy verges around our city centre?" he asked. "Or maybe we ought to sneak around and plant some ourselves?" We were still pondering whether we should do some secret bear gardening when we got home, when we spotted another of the Sheffield bears, watching us from the cobbled lane behind the canal warehouse!
Polar carried us up through the city centre, looking out for more of the special bears as we went along. Polar kept saying how different it seemed from when she used to live there, before the trams and when much less of the city centre was pedestrianised.We asked the Sheffield bears if their city had really changed so much since Polar was a student there, but they said they didn't know, as they had only arrived this year.
"It's a great city," Be Nice Bear told us. "We hope you'll come and visit again, even when there aren't bears to see, because there are lovely parks and some really cool museums, and you can get around on our supertrams!"By now, it was almost time to meet our bear chums at an old pub near Sheffield Hallam University (which wasn't where Polar went). By the time we arrived, there were already lots of our friends there.Along with Tour Guide Ted, Frank and Theo, we met Kenny Koala, Digby, Dooby Monty, Barney Beernard and DC Monkey and their friends. Here we all are!After some lunch, we were all going out to look for more Sheffield bears, although Hanley said he had some important research to do on Sheffield beers, with help from Theo.
There were sixty big bears and one hundred small ones across Sheffield, so we knew we wouldn't be able to find all of them, but we decided to search for as many as we could. I even found one that was dressed like me!
We found several on our way through the museum to the marvellous Winter Gardens, including two slightly smaller bears who hugged Huddlesford and I.
Endon really loved the Winter Gardens, because they were full of tropical plants as well as bears.
We met another bear called Theo here, who told us all about the plans to improve the Children's Hospital. We wondered what we could do to help. Theo suggested we could buy some bear-themed things from the shop to help raise funds, so we used our pocket money to buy some note cards for writing letters to Grizzly's grandcubs and Polar bought us a book all about the Sheffield Bears. There were several smaller bears hiding among the plants in the Winter Gardens. Endon had a good chat to them about the plants they were looking after.
One of them had a very wise message - only in darkness can you see the stars. That seemed very hopeful and a good way of encouraging us to think of good things in difficult times.
Then it was time to explore the city centre again, and to see some of the bears we had missed on our way to meet our friends. We looked out for the trams when we crossed the roads. Huddlesford said he would like to take a journey on one.We didn't get chance for a tram trip but we all had a ride on a fairground aeroplane in the Peace Gardens. Luckily, it didn't go too fast as we couldn't all fit in the cockpit.
There seemed to be dozens of colourful Sheffield Bears around the city centre. All of their decorations had been designed by different artists and you can see how varied they were.
Near the famous Crucible theatre we found a snooker-inspired bear signed by some players. Huddlesford had a good chat to him, while our friend Frank made friends with a rainbow bear nearby.
Endon made friends with some very small Sheffield Bears and we thought about asking Polar if one of them could come home with us, but there weren't very many of them and we thought they ought to go to live with little Sheffield human cubs if possible.
We found more bears near the cathedral and outside the City Hall in a big square, which Polar said used to be a busy road full of buses when she was a student, and looked very different then.
Finally, our human guardians said it was time for us all to go back to the pub to collect Grizzly and Tour Guide Ted's Assistant P. We all gathered for a group photograph beside the nearest bear to our base, then went to see how Hanley and Theo were getting on.
Theo and Hanley had been very busy with their beer-testing experiment. Theo had worked so hard he had passed out on the table, while Hanley said he was feeling quite dizzy after such a busy afternoon, and needed some coffee.Of course Hanley hadn't met most of the Sheffield Bears while he had been meeting the Sheffield beers and nor had Grizzly so, after we had given our friends hugs and wished them safe journeys back to their homes, we took Hanley and Grizzly to see the Winter Gardens and to meet a few of the bears nearby.Grizzly just had time to meet Snooker Bear before it was time to set off back to the station, passing a couple more bears on the way.
"How many bears did we see altogether?" asked little Waverley.
The rest of us tried to work it out, but we ran out of paws to count them on!
We had a long journey home, because there wasn't a good connection at Derby and then our train back to Kidsgrove was delayed, so we were all sound asleep in our bag by the time we got home.
We had really enjoyed meeting the Bears of Sheffield and more of our dear Twitter pals, and seeing an exciting big city we had never visited before. I hope we will go back to Sheffield again one day!
Grizzly had a jacket potato, but I gave him a hard stare as I wanted us to have oatcakes!
It probably didn't do any fighting, because it was built so late. It has belonged to the museum since 1972 and has just had a lot of repairs and restoration work done to it, which is why it looks so shiny.
