Trains and Training in Sunny Staffs.

I'm not sure quite how it happened, but our holiday somehow became dominated by trains...

I may blog in more detail (or not, who knows?) but basically our holiday went something like:
Saturday - travelling in car, no trains involved.
Sunday - Great Hucklow Fell Race followed by a trip on the Churnet Valley Railway RailAleTrail
Monday - Went to visit Buxton and Poole's Cavern, lovely wee town with a nice park which had a miniature railway (on which we had a wee ride)
Tuesday - great fun at Alton Towers on all the big rides. Let's face it though, a rollercoaster is basically a variety of train (especially the Runaway Mine Train), as is the monorail that takes you to and from the car park.
Wednesday - visited Dovedale and went for a wee run. No trains involved.
Thursday - Alton Towers water park. Good but overcrowded and overpriced, I felt. Train count - nil.
Friday - Lovely visit to Rudyard Lake, complete with trip on a mini steam train. Followed by a jolly wee run down the Staffordshire Way.
Saturday - Back home, no trains.

OK, so maybe not that many trains, but it seemed like a lot to me. In any case, it was much fun and we had great weather, lots of decent food and far too much to drink. I'll maybe post some of the better pictures if I get round to it.

In other blob news, in order to try and attract a younger readership I've added Lachlan and Calum as authors of this blog so there might be some more regular posts. I plan to check everything they add before it gets published but don't want to censor them too much so no idea how it'll work out.

Center Parcs 2010

Well, it seems like a wee while ago now, but we had another holiday at Center Parcs Whinfell Forest, near Penrith.

As usual, it was good fun - the weather was somewhat changeable; generally warm but with a rain shower never far away. The boys had a lot of fun, with swimming, tree-trekking, canoeing, bowling, and messing around on pedalos. I also tried to teach them to play pool but even the short cue was too long for Calum and it didn't help that the table was too close to a wall.

Calum had a nice morning fishing with his grandad - not as successful as last time but they caught a couple of tiddlers anyway.

Vikki and I went out for a couple of runs - the first was supposed to be a trip round Skiddaw, Great Calva, and Blencathra but we turned back before the summit of Skiddaw as it was so cold, wet, and generally horrible. For our next expedition, we drove to Caldbeck and followed the Cumbria Way South for 9 miles into the valley between Great Calva, and Blencathra before coming back the same way - http://www.multimap.com/s/uYlNjOdc. All jolly good fun!

Thanks as ever to my lovely in-laws for a superb holiday and for their company and their babysitting skills.

Lots more pictures here:

2010-07 Center Parcs 2010

Biding in the East Riding

Thanks to those of you who took part in the latest round of Where's Magnus?. He was indeed at the Jorvik Viking Centre in York, where you can experience the sights, sounds, and smells of the ancient Viking city of Jorvik.

It was really good - both Lachlan and Calum also enjoyed the visit; Lachlan did a school project about Vikings last year so it was particularly interesting for him.

Our trip to York, which also took in a look at the Minster and the Shambles, was part of a visit to see Amy and the Daviator in their new house in Beverley. It's was great to see them, and chill a bit, and drink beer and wine, and generally just have a nice time. We also spent too much time playing Wii Fit, had a failed attempt at Geocaching (more about that another time perhaps), and took a trip to Hull, where we went to the Art Gallery and a rather good museum that had, among other things, a fine collection of Roman mosaics and a 4000 year old boat. We finished off our trip with a visit to the cinema to see Bolt which was funny and exciting and made everyone except me cry (and I was close at one point).

You can see the photos here:

2009-02-13 East Riding of Yorkshire

Where we were!

As the highly intelligent superhumans who read this blog managed to work out from the somewhat obscure clue in the previous post, we were in The Hague (or Den Haag or even 's-Gravenhage) for the weekend visiting our friends Faye and Wessel. The really observant among you might even have guessed that the weather wasn't great - it rained buckets on Friday when we arrived and on Sunday with some decent enough weather on Saturday.
We had a good time anyway - Faye and Wessel were great hosts, and all the locals were friendly, spoke great English and didn't seem to mind that we hadn't a clue about their language and found it very funny that they have words like "slagroom" and "SpuiMarkt". I really like it when people live up to their national stereotypes and although we didn't see any herbal cigarettes or a surfeit of smutty DVDs we did see a lot of people on bikes including women getting sidesaddle backies on bikes and a couple riding on seperate vehicles but with arms around each others shoulders. Ahhhh.
Faye took us to see the Panorama Mesdag which is an amazing 360 degree picture which really gives a feeling of being in a different time and place.
On Saturday, we visited Escher in Het Paleis which I really enjoyed (although there were no lego models), had some lunch at Rootz which I would recommend if you're in the area and took a trip on the Tram to Delft which was lovely and where Wessel gave us an insight into his student days there and we stopped for a drink here.
On Sunday we went to the Mauritshuis to see the collection there. On the way, we saw a heron which a passing local told us was called Harry from The Hague. When he realised we were from Scotland, he told us he had been on a cruise through the Caledonian Canal and then round the Northern coast of Scotland and had thought it was a fantastic country. We had to agree with him.
Big thanks to Faye and Wessel for their hospitality. It was great to see you guys.

Capital Stuff

So, as promised, some photographs from our day out in London...

2008-07-16 Trip to London

It was a long day and hot but it was generally good fun with a chance to see a lot of the buildings we had previously seen the lego versions of. We got the train in to Waterloo and did a quick bit of pedestrian sight-seeing, taking in the London Eye (although we decided not to actually go on it because it would be expensive and the boys would have been bored by about 72 degrees round), the Houses of Parliament, Whitehall, and Trafalgar Square. We got held up for a while by armed police at the end of Downing Street so that Gordon could get out for PMQs which was annoying but not as annoying as the fact that they were getting ready for some opera thing at Trafalgar so the boys didn't get to climb on the lions.

After that, we took the tube up to the Natural History Museum which is a great place to spend a few hours, especially as it's free. Lachlan was keen to see the Human Biology section for some reason - we lived in fear that the boys might start asking too many questions but the worst we got was Calum pointing to a picture and saying "you can see his willy. heehee".

Vikki decided we had time to have a look at the Tower and Tower bridge so we headed over there and visited the gift shop. It was cool to see Boris's new place of work and the HMS Belfast which features in the boys' Top Trumps. We also went to have a look at the Monument to the Great Fire which features in The System of the World which both Vikki and I have read recently. Unfortunately, my navigation (using the memory of a map viewed in the gift shop) let us down slightly and we almost missed it, and it had scaffolding round it anyway. Which all gave us just enough time to get back to Waterloo for the return train and much confusion over whether we were on the right train, and the right carriage on that train. It turned out we were and we got back without further adventure. Phew!

Stop messing about and get blogging young man.

Sorry about the lack of blob posts recently. This is partly because we've been fairly busy doing stuff (as will be explained if I just get on with it) rather than writing about it, and also because I've spent far too much time playing Battle for Wesnoth (yes, I know it's a bit sad) by myself and Mah Jong with Vikki.

Those of you who keep tabs on my Picasa Web page will have seen the photos from Christchurch and Bournemouth. Those who haven't can click on the pictures at the bottom to get there. We were in Christchurch for a week's holiday and it was very nice.

The boys got a couple of days at the beach (one after a short trip along the coast to Bournemouth) which was just as well since that's one of the main reasons for going.

Vikki and I managed a couple of runs. The second one hadn't been planned but we went to Moors Valley park (which was a really good day out for everyone) and we decided to follow the orienteering course there. On the way round, we realised that we weren't going to get to all the points and get back to meet the rest of the gang at the time we'd said. My plan was to miss out three of the points, but Vikki decided we could make it if we ran rather than walked the rest of the way. You can guess whose idea won the day.

We also had a trip up to London (will post some photos soon), went to a car boot sale and bought some books, games, and Dexter's Laboratory bobble headed figures (the last were Calum's), and Vikki and I went to see the Bournemouth Shakespeare Players outdoor production of Macbeth which was very good.

2008-07-12 Christchurch

2008-07-18 Bournemouth

Old Friends

On Friday evening, Vikki and I took Magnus and Vikki's dad's new friend Tim to Guildford where we met up with our friends Karen and Suchada, who both used to work with Vikki. Despite being a bit late (we'd forgotten just how horrible the M25 can be), we had a very nice meal and chin wag. Magnus spent most of the time looking at an attractive woman at the next table - thankfully her boyfriend didn't seem to mind too much.

 

 

Next day, we braved another trip on the M25 to meet up with Jim and Trish and their wee lad, Callum. They were good enough to give us lunch which was very nice, and to let us play with their Wii (it was about the only way to stop our kids complaining that they were bored) so that I could thrash Vikki at Super Mario Karts. Lachlan also built his new Lego car and we conducted some experiments to see how many household objects it could jump (see video below). It was great to catch up but we were only able to stay a couple of hours before we had to set off for Christchurch...

 

 

Look! It's ...Made of Lego.

Our holiday started with a horrible long drive to the well known holiday destination of Slough including a stop at possibly the worst Burger King in the world (and that takes some doing) at Stirling and an overnight stay at the Travelodge at Southwaite. Thankfully, the Copthorne had a swimming pool, decent grub, and comfortable rooms.

Slough is of course famous as the location for The Office but we were there because it's a short hop from Legoland, Windsor. We had two-day tickets which gave us enough time to get on all the rides we wanted to, especially as we missed the English school holidays so it was a bit quieter, and we went early and stayed right to closing time. My favourite ride was the Viking River Splash, Vikki's was the Jungle Coaster. The boys seemed to have a great time on everything, and both passed at the Lego Driving School. We managed to get soaked by a combination of rain and what the rides threw at us, but it didn't matter as we had a great time. We even had time to go to the shop where Lachlan got a new car and Calum got a cuddly Lego man who was named "Lego Ben" for about a day before he became "Digger Doug". I resisted the urge to blow £180 on a Mindstorms NXT kit but it was a close thing.

Anyway, here are some pictures, although you'd be best clicking on one and going to the Picasa site to see them bigger

Getting Back to Normal

(or at least what passes for normal round here)

Just a quickie to say we had a good time on our holidays, but are now back to the relative drudgery of normal life. Well, I am. The kids have another few weeks of freedom before school kicks in again. We took a bunch of photos and will be making an effort to share the best of them, along with some (hopefully) witty observations, with you, our dear readers, soon.

Another Holiday In The Highlands

Fear not - this blog has not been hit by a general malaise and neither have its authors been abducted by aliens. In fact, we've been away gathering new material for the blog or, in other words, having a holiday. For the last two years we've stayed in Scotland and been relatively lucky with the weather. Last week we were in Fort William (at this house which is here) and our luck ran out; it rained every day except two and was generally dreich for most of the time. We still had a lot of fun and took full advantage of the few spells of nice weather. I'll add more details and photos later but for now please enjoy the views from Dalaraban House:

The picture above is our view of Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Scotland. Most of the time, it was shrouded in (or completely obscured by) cloud so this was a rare glimpse of the summit.

This autostitch panorama shows the view looking over Loch Linnhe. The hill on the left is Meall an t-Slamain. The towns of Corpach and Caol occupy the centre and Cow Hill is the one on the far right with the communications mast.