Tuesday, May 27, 2008

CORNWALL

The second Bank holiday long weekend in May inspired us to get out of London and head for the beach. A five hour train journey got us to Newquay in Cornwall, in Sth East England. Some promising weather over the past few weekends gave us hope of working on our sun tan, and enjoying the surf. We stayed next to Fistral Beach, which is meant to be the best surfing beach in England.

View from outside our hotel.


The next photo is of a typical English couple. Only in England would you park your campervan next to the beach, get out your deck chair, and face away from the beach (just to soak up some rays).

Surfers enjoying the sunshine, waiting for the waves.

Claire decided that we needed to have some surfing lessons. In hindsight waiting until we got back to Australia may have been a better option. The weather turned out not quite as nice for when we decided to go surfing. 10degrees, 40 mile per hr winds, and raining.....

We got one fantastic sunset overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, and we decided to try for a self portrait. Resting the camera on a rock, we tried our luck with the 2 second time delay. Not quite quick enough on this occasion...

Nearly made it :)
OK. Maybe Steve should stick to being behind the camera.


Next part of the trip, was a day out at the Eden Project. From the photos below, it may look like a series of giant golf balls, but it is more like something 100 times larger than your local garden centre. One of the 'bio-domes' is a rainforest greenhouse with plants from all parts of the tropical world. The other is the 'meditteranean bio-dome' is a mixture of everything else.
Typical Malaysian house in the rainforest.






This exhibition, which was meant to depict 'Dionysus' Greek God of the vines, can only be described as very strange, and quite disturbing.

Monday, May 05, 2008

COTSWALDS & OXFORD

With the prospects of good weather for the early May Bank Holiday Long Weekend, we hired a car and set out to see the Olde English Villages of the Cotswalds. On our way home we dropped into Oxford to see what the students were up to.


Typical English village street in Cirencester

Claire enjoying the countryside views
A couple of stag's put on a good display, although I think they were just fooling around
We saw lots of sheep and lambs
Lots of nice scenery to photograph
If only I had the bigger zoom lens...


Oxford
Well, Oxford is a university city, and apparently the exam period was very close. This young chap seemed to be in a hurry to start revising given his armful of textbooks.
The Christ Church College dinner room. A little more formal than our time at Cromwell College in Brisbane. I don't think the lanterns would have lasted long at our formal dinners.
A quote to live by....