*sigh*
I have had a nice week’s holiday, and now I’m back at work. I don’t want to be. Only 19 more days here at IBM. How did that happen?
We had a nice ride down to Devon on Friday afternoon, it was chucking it down for the first half hour or so, but as we came down towards Stone Henge the sun was out and there was a beautiful sky. When we got to Taunton, I took Hannah on a bit of a sightseeing trip round some of my old haunts. It was the start of something I noticed the whole week. I was going to all these places and seeing and appreciating them as if it was the first time. Devon is beautiful, and I miss it.
I won’t bother to do a complete rundown of the week, I don’t suppose anybody would read it anyway.
We went to the beach twice, north and south coasts. We joined the National Trust and went to three different properties, “Knightshayes (Knightshayes)”:http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/historicproperties/index.cfm?fuseaction=property&property_id=21 , “Killerton (Killerton)”:http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/historicproperties/index.cfm?fuseaction=property&property_id=20 and “Arlington Court (Arlington Court)”:http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/historicproperties/index.cfm?fuseaction=property&property_id=13
How middle-aged is that? Actually, I’ve been thinking about that and decided it’s not really. Why should you have to be middle-aged to enjoy the sun in a nice, peaceful garden and appreciate beautiful architecture? Especially when you can do that without a load of drunken idiots pratting around. We enjoyed ourselves, anyway. I nearly killed myself from cream tea poisoning too.
On the way back from the North Coast, we decided to go across Exmoor. Of course, the heavens opened and the wind picked up. Hannah was foolishly only wearing leather flop-flops on the bike. Driving at high speed in the rain with poor visibility on winding roads is not recommended. I nearly ended the life of a sheep which decided to bolt across the road in front of us. Fortunately I’d slowed down a lot and was trying to give it a wide berth by driving on the opposite side of the road. Dumb animal. By the time we got home, we were pretty cold, wet and miserable. Two of Hannah’s toes had gone black around the nail, which looked disturbingly like frostbite to me. Auto-amputation is was she was calling it. Fortunately they were OK. I’ll be checking she has sensible shoes or boots on in future.
We also went for an evening walk up on Culmstock Beacon, which was gorgeous. We have taken over 5 films worth of pics (oh, how I need a decent digital camera) with my nice old SLR camera, so expect the best of them in the gallery at some point.
We just generally had a nice, relaxed time. Barbecue, concert, beach, gardens, nice driving and sleeping. It was all good.
We came back on Thursday, to spend the weekend with Hannah’s folks in Reading. More, even nicer weather. We went to Sonning on Friday and it was perfect weather. Not a cloud in the sky, and we sunbathed, read and I swam in the river.
Now I’m back in the real world with a shock. It sucks.