kate and graeme

Last weekend we travelled down to the south coast of England to Plymouth.  The main reason for going to Plymouth was that I had won some free tickets from Coca-Cola to a football match.  Coke sponsors everything in England and Scotland bar the Premier League, so when choosing tickets the best matches to see were either in the Scottish Premier League or the Championship.  We are doing the trip to Glasgow to watch Celtic, so thought picking a Championship match somewhere interesting where we hadn’t been before would be the best choice.  The result was Plymouth vs Coventry at Home Park in Plymouth.

The difference between going to Anfield and Home Park could not have been more different.  It felt like the difference between going to Homebush or Penrith Park.  The Plymouth match felt like attending a suburban NRL match.  We turned up, parked in the free car park, saw a few players in suits in the car park and got some cheap food from the food sellers outside the ground for lunch. There was a solid crowd (11,000ish), free car parking outside the ground and an easy going feel to the whole afternoon.  The match itself was fun, technically it wasn’t super but it was end to end and there was no lack of excitement.  It also helped that Plymouth won 1-0 and we had no one sit in front of us so we could stretch out a little (how did people ever fit in seats with so little leg room in front of them?!).  Overall it was a very enjoyable experience.

After the football finished (and we got out of the car park free for all) we checked in to our hotel and went looking for a place to have dinner.  We ended up in a inn style restaurant by the harbour side.  We had a bit of a drive around the City after dinner but anything that looked a small bit interesting was closed or wouldn’t have been worthwhile at night.  We were also tired and in need of a ‘crash’.  We ended up having an enjoyable time watching the 2nd half of England losing the World Cup final.

The next morning we started at a huge Sainsbury’s Supermarket to get some Croissants and juice for breakfast before driving a short way from Plymouth to a small town that had a Glass Works Factory with a Marble Museum.  The marble museum was terrific.  They showed you loads of different types of glass marbles, how they made them and a guy was there showing off how they did the glass-blowing on the factory floor.  The best bit was they had all of these machines which dropped marbles from the top and they followed a series of paths down to the bottom through all sorts of contraptions.  Anyway my description doesn’t do it justice, I’ll need to make sure some pictures of them are put up.

Following from the marble factory we made a stop off at Wells near Bath on the way home to see it’s well talked about Cathedral.  The amazing thing about Wells, is that it’s not a very big place, really only a small country town but it has a huge Cathedral that stands out over everything.  As we were there on a Sunday at the time they had a service we couldn’t see all the areas of the Cathedral because of an Evensong service but we saw enough and were very impressed.  After finishing at the church we had a bit of a walk around the area surrounding it with some ponds, gardens, Bishop’s castle and the oldest unchanged street in the Country.  This street, and all its identical houses was built in the 1400’s and is used by those in the Church still today. The impressive things is they are all in the same external state they were in when they originally built.  As it was getting dark, and we were tired when we finished up in Wells we made the trip down the M4 home from another good weekend away.

Well we got through it, we’ve moved in to our new place in West London and handed in the keys at our old place.  It was a bit of a struggle but that was mostly because we were both under the weather (I didn’t go to work on Friday and Monday).  Our new place currently doesn’t have any telephone connected (it’s meant to happen on Wednesday) and it will be a couple of weeks before we have broadband internet again. So with both of those things you probably won’t hear much from us in the next few weeks.

When the phone is working and we can at least dial-in to the net Kate will probably send an e-mail around with our new contact details.

Anyway I’ve got to get back to work (the only place I was able to do this, as its the only place we can access the net at the moment)

–Graeme

Tired, jet-lagged and totally sick of planes, we’re back in London after just over 2 weeks in Sydney.

Yeah, that’s all we have to say for now - just letting everyone know we got back safely, basically - will be back here when we have the brain function to write more than a couple of sentences.