September 4 - 5

We went from the Travelodge to Beverley where we visited Beverley Minster, then we moved on to Market Washington. In York we walked along the wall to the minster; after York we went on to the amazing ruins of Fountains Abbey. In Durham we walked along the river and visited the extraordinary cathedral; in the Durham Waitrose we found bottles of Rutherglen Estates' Durif - it was delicious.

Stayed at Washington Travelodge.

5 Sep

First stop was Hexham Abbey and market, then it was on to Housesteads and Hadrian’s Wall. Unfortunately the weather was pretty dismal: wet, but not too cold, thankfully. The rest of the day was spent visiting Jedburgh, Dryburgh and Melrose Abbeys.

Stayed at Melrose YHA.

September 2 - 3

The flight left on time, Tat in window seat and me in the middle. Over Ukraine we experienced forty minutes of extreme turbulence – it must have been fairly serious as when it was over the cabin crew director specifically thanked the flight crew and the passengers responded with a spontaneous round of applause.

When we landed we jumped on the courtesy bus and went to pick up the car (a Ford Focus) and set off. Just because we could Tat decided to take a spin through central London to find Fysh’s place and then around St Paul’s. Then we hit the road for Cambridge: it was about 8am.

We took a quick tour along the backs and then it was on to Ely where we took some time to explore the fabulous cathedral.

Peterborough cathedral was next and here we also bought some provisions, before setting off for Lincoln. Here our luck ran out as we arrived just as the cathedral door was being locked for the day.

As I bit into my dinner of a ham and salad roll half a tooth fell off into my mouth. Fortunately it wasn’t sensitive so I didn’t bother getting anyone to look at it until I returned to Melbourne. Talk about lucky.

The hotel, the first of our £10/night Travelodge rooms, was very ordinary. Despite having booked a family room for two people, there was only one set of bed linen. Luckily it was warm enough for me to use the doona (oops, duvet) cover as a cover. BBC news on the telly in the morning told us that the next few days, when we would be moving north, would be wet. At least it was still warm.

Still here

The Gloriana concert on Sunday went well - let's hope the ABC liked it. This week has been pretty frantic with buying last minute things and madly washing clothes.

Today I had lunch at Mum's before going into work, which was a bit hectic as we were missing a few people. Not much to post at the moment, but hang around, I'm sure there'll be some interesting stuff before long.

Eight sleeps

More work and less concentration today.

Last night on the way home in the rain I dropped in at Mountain Designs in Smith Street (where I got the electrical adaptor plug thingy) and bought myself a rain jacket and a dinky folding umbrella.

Later nephew R (who is moving in first rather than S) took me out to Victoria Street for dinner. We had a good chat and I tried to remember all the things I needed to tell him about the house, cat, etc. He's off today to Nhill to plant lots of trees (a LandCare project, I think).

Not long now

Off to the clinic this morning to get some sleeping tablets for the flight; I want to make sure I'm alert for the first few days of the drive around Britain. Then up to Smith Street for breakfast. Afterwards I managed to find a European power-point adaptor at the shop opposite Katmandu and then had a brisk walk home to hang out the washing.

I came into town a bit early to see if I could find luggage and a waterproof jacket. I can't decide about the luggage and the jacket I liked wasn't available in my size. So I'm feeling a little thwarted.

Work tonight.

Hmmm

It seems I'm not the only person to be experiencing problems with Blogger. When I went in to register for help I was directed to check a few other areas before continuing. One of these was a discussion group where I posted a request for help - but looking through all the other posts there seemed to be a general problem appearing.

Blogger are in the process of moving to an upgraded version and it seems that this migration could be causing some of the problems.

We'll see...

In the meantime I'm going to persist with this site until the old one is reliably returned to service. Stay tuned.

I'm back

Because of something silly I did earlier today my previous blog at fcprain.blogspot.com has disappeared. Now this might only be temporary (I have emailed the Blogger help people about it) or it might not. So I thought I'd start up a new one at this address.

But of course the problem is now to inform everyone what the new address is.