THE LAKE DISTRICT

This is England's largest national park and is full of stunning mountain landscapes and lakes dotted everywhere. We decided to make a long weekend of it, and took the 4 1/2 hr train journey north of London to Keswick where we based ourselves. The next few days were spent hiking and cycling the local tracks around Keswick and Derwentwater.

Friday afternoon we orientated ourselves with the town. We headed off with a hand drawn map and took a hike to Castlerigg Stone Circles. Think Stonehenge, but with smaller stones. We only took one wrong turn but thankfully the people behind us realised we weren't really geared for a mountain trek and quickly pointed us in the right direction. The local sheep seemed to enjoy the area as well.

On Saturday we took on the challenge of a mountain hike. Although with this mountain named 'Catbells' it wasn't quite as tame as we thought and we did an extra peak. That'll teach us to follow the crowd!

Seems nice from this angle.

Getting steeper from this angle.

The first of many breaks on the way up.

Are we there yet?

Near the top of the mountain we spotted this lonely tree.

Proof that we made it to the top of Catbells, with Derwentwater in the background.

The view from the top. Spectacular scenery.
For our Sunday adventure, we took a less ardous approach, and stuck to mostly level ground. This couple were also out for their Sunday morning stroll. Awwwwww....

We also found this calf on our trip. Must have been very young, as it was struggling to stand up.

Speaking of young animals, we also saw this duck in one of the streams, although Mum was trying to shield all of the offspring.

As we had really good weather for our trip (a balmy 20 degrees), Claire decided it was time to dust off the shorts in an attempt to get a tan.

Our lunch picnic spot whilst waiting for the ferry to take us for the trip home.

In an endeavour to get the perfect lighting conditions for a photo of the water, we were faced with the dilemma of Sunrise vs. Sunset. In hindsight it wasn't too difficult a decision, as Sunrise is about 4:30am, and Sunset is about 10pm. Its nice to be able to go out for dinner, and still have daylight.

For our final days activities, we hired some bikes, and cycled our way along a disused railway line, which has been converted into a cycle path. This is part of the 'c2c' cycle way which goes from the east coast to the west coast of England. Fortunately our bikes had many gears to help us up the hills. We also had a few photo stops along the way.

Claire the budding photographer on this occassion.

Steve taking back the camera.... One of the locals thought my camera was something from CSI, as he held down the trigger and took about 10 photos at once.

One of the many bridges on the disused railway line, over the River Great. Very picturesque.

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.

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....

PARIS

This trip was meant to be for Steve to run the Paris marathon, but a lack of training and a niggling knee injury changed our plans. Nonetheless we decided to go to Paris anyway. Seeing as we had done the tourist thing here a few years ago we decided to take it easy and just walk around and see what we came across.

One thing which we didn't notice last time is that there is a hire system for bikes where you use your credit card to unlock the bike and you can use it for free for 30min before being charged a few euro per hour. You can drop you bike off any station. This was one of the larger ones. Very orderly..

Behind the Notre Dame Cathedral there is usually a flower market, but on Sunday it becomes a pet market, primarily for birds but also hamsters, mice and rabbits. Bit too cold for the these guys.....

A jazz band entertaining the crowd on one of the many bridges across the River Seine.
Found ourselves back outside the Louvre Museum although we decided not to go in this time.

One of a series of sculptures at Place de la Concorde. The bird is real....

Even though Steve didn't run the marathon, we did go and check out the race (after watching most of it on TV at the hotel). We think these people were at the 25km mark around 3hr after the race started. It would have been a very long day for them. We are not sure what the charity was, but there were a number of people running in lacy underwear. The marathon brings out strange ideas amongst fundraisers.

Since it was Claire's birthday we dolled ourselves up and headed to the Moulin Rouge. It was an entertaining night, although our dress standards varied quite a lot to the crowd going to the goth punk concert next door!
All in all, a nice relaxing weekend in Paris..... until it came to returning to London.

The plan was to catch the early train out of Paris on Monday morning and be back in London ready for work at 9am. Given our hotel was opposite the terminal in Paris we arrived a little earlier to get some breaky and scoot through Security/Immigration onto the train. Sadly, the security line was too long to get breaky and the train was even held for 15 minutes so that everyone could board. To make matters worse the 2 1/4 hour trip lasted 9 hours. Instead of arriving in London at 8:30am we arrived quite a bit later and made it to work for 3:45pm, only 7hrs late! Reasons given included

a) faulty electrics in the Channel tunnel (where we waited underground for 3 hours, only to reverse a few miles back into France and try again),

b) defective train ahead of us in the tunnel,

c) our train had a technical problem, and

d) baggage scare closing the terminal at London St Pancras International.

Maybe going to Heathrow Terminal 5 would have been a quicker option?? At least they would have given us a blanket and food!

Certainly a trip to be remembered, and we now have a free return Eurostar ticket to use as well. Anyone want to buy it from us????