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Travel — No Comments
14
Feb 18

London – L.A. – Palm Springs

14 February 123 miles (total: 123 miles)

Early morning travel from LB to Gatwick with too much spare time, but one cannot rely on the trains in this country to run on time (or at all); missing Lily intensely. Flight was long but ok actually, sat by the window, watched stuff on tv, read a bit, and there we were, descending over a massive urban sprawl of sunny LA. Flew through the customs no probs, and Iestyn was already waiting for me at arrivals. LA was all fresh and sunny but we had no intentions to see more of it (well, Iest already did in the previous days, and I did years before), so just took the rental car (with some disorganisation hiccups eating into our time) and were on our way out. Nice car though, KIA Sportage, Iestyn’s first automatic, learned to love it pretty fast.
Drove through some unsavoury LA hoods to 60 East to Palm Springs. I was holding up pretty well, considering the long flight and 8hrs time difference but towards the end of the drive I was already dozing off. Palm Springs was off season, so was very quiet (more like Calm Springs, amirite?) even on Valentine’s night. The evening was balmy, we checked into our nice hotel and went out for a mexican dinner with live music (not mexican). Fast asleep before Family Guy’s Valentine’s day episode was over (well, before the first scene was over, really).

Culture — No Comments
16
Sep 16

Junius live!

Went to see Junius live @ the Bush Hall in London!

Junius in all his glory

Junius struggles with Iest’s name

Birds / Pics — No Comments
13
Mar 16

Hampstead Heath

Sunny Sunday, spring is almost here, so we made our way to Hampstead Heath to give some air to my mini drone. Plus also to find the parakeets and possibly other birds.
We were not so lucky on the drone front, it still pretty much does what it wants and then it ran out of batteries.
BUT we were super lucky on the birds! We saw:
– parakeets (all green, check!)
– geese (of some kind, not check, we don’t know what they are)
– and a KESTREL, and not only that but we saw him catch a mouse and munch on it in the sun in the tree (check check check!) Love my monocular.

Parakeet

Geese

Kestrel

Travel — No Comments
23
Jul 15

Reykjavik – London

Sad to be leaving but looking forward to our bed! A little bit of stress as the plane was out of the headphones we wanted to buy to watch Fortitude, but we managed to get the kids’ packs which had some shitty ones in them too. Also a colouring book and stickers – bingo! London grey and not so warm, missing Reykjavik already, they have sun all the time.

Loc(k)sin, Einstok, and Iest.

Pics / Travel — No Comments
03
Jul 15

London – Reykjavik

Glorious heat wave in London but we decided to forgo our only chance at British summer this year and packed for Iceland. Since we got our tickets in January we didn’t have much choice anyway. On Friday, I snuck out of work a bit early, picked up my gigantic backpack and braved my way to Heathrow, on the tube in the rush hour and in the heat. Iest went straight from work and we met up at the terminal. We weighed our bags and were happy our limit was 23kgs as both of them were over twenty. We had them nicely (and expensively!) wrapped, checked in, and went through security – which, for one, I totally failed this time, having forgotten my mobile in the side pocket of my cargos, which earned me a spot in the full body scanner.

Finally through, we still had plenty of time so we had a bit of dinner, while waiting for our gate to be announced. Unfortunately, instead a delay of the flight was announced, and we were a bit worried about our timing for the rest of the night.

Eventually we were taking off about an hour late. Our great window position, so carefully selected at online check-in, turned out to be over the wing, which was a rookie mistake, cruelly held against me by Iest for the duration of the flight. On top of that, we didn’t take our headphones for the trip, so we could not watch the entertainment, which included Fortitude! I was gutted. I went to sleep instead but Iest woke me up for some stupid question, and I couldn’t sleep afterwards and was super tired and cranky.

We arrived at Keflavik airport shortly before midnight, went quickly through passport control (even though the guy was not particularly friendly), grabbed our bags without waiting and out we were.
Despite the late hour it was not dark and it felt very strange, may be like a belated dusk. It was also very fresh and smelled like spring. We got on the bus connection to Reykjavik, which takes a bit less than an hour, and enjoyed our first views of Iceland.

The bus dropped us off at the campsite where we checked in and also bought fuel. Despite everything working our pretty much seamlessly since the airport, by the time we were ready to sleep, it was half past two. The sun was shining and birds were screaming their little lungs out but we had no problems falling asleep.

Icelandair

Food / Life / Pics — No Comments
26
Dec 14

Our London Christmas

Christmas started early for us this year. Gina came up with an epic timetable (it was called Action Plan – Gina), and different tasks for us to complete. My first task of the festive holiday, was to locate us a real, nice Xmas tree – and by the last weekend of November, I’d located one – fairly close by in Brick Lane, with a nice wee company called ‘Pines and Needles’. We were both super pleased with our wee 3 foot Nordman Fir Tree!

Our real hard work came on the first weekend of December. Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas without Gina’s famous Czech Christmas Cookies – so, this weekend marked the first weekend of many, where Gina pulled up her sleeves and worked hard making the different doughs for us to bake. We now have many, great different cookie shapes (including a Welsh dragon-shaped one, which I got at work from my Secret Santa – he really IS watching!), so we got extremely busy.

Man shaped cookie

Christmas tree cookies

Gina in the Cookie Factory

Chocolate dipped cookies

Jam filled cookies

Iest learning ‘piping’

Cookie factory

One of Gina’s project for the festive season, as my beard is pretty epic if I don’t say so myself (yes he does, all the time!) – was to create a ‘Christmas Beard’ – so one evening Gina went wild, and decorated my beard nicely. (Was not really a project, just a spur of the moment inspiration; wasn’t even on the Action Plan!)

Christmas Beard

Gina’s beautiful birthday also falls in the Christmas Season (there’s so much wrong with this statement! If anything, it’s the christmas which falls in my birthday time; but in reality, it’s actually both my birthday and the christmas that fall in the Winter Solstice days, the real reason for the season!) so we celebrated nicely. I made her some blueberry pancakes for breakfast – and we headed out for the day to town. (Yeah, like that breakfast was epic – the blueberry pancakes were delish, the tiny candles so cute, the rose petals so romantic, and The Economist: World in 2015 so me!)

Birthday breakfast!

And, what was left was the actual Christmas Day! Every year, it’s a tough one for Gina, as she usually has her Christmas presents on the 24th evening (by Baby Jesus), but here in the UK, we get them on the 25th in the morning (by a guy from a CocaCola commercial). So she did extremely well not to open any – although, she had a great time eyeing the presents that were nicely placed under the tree.

Our Nordman Fir Xmas tree

Christmas Morning!

Christmas Morning! Ho Ho Ho!

After opening our beautiful, beautiful gifts, I went to the kitchen, and started to work on our Christmas dinner – which took around 4 – 5 hours of cooking. This year we went for Veg Christmas Pies, with a plethora of seasoned baked veg, and for desert, a Cranberry meringue roulade – which was oh-so-good (I helped on that one). Very nice.

Christmas Table

Christmas Food!

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