As usual, I didn’t intend to leave it two months between blog posts, but life got in the way again.
The main reason for my absence is that we actually went on a proper holiday for the first time since our two-year-old was born. We accompanied my parents for 10 days in France, including a visit to Mont St-Michel, pictured above. This was at the back end of June, and I still have over 100 photos to sort. As well as Mont St-Michel, we visited the chateaux at Chenonceau and Chambord, Zooparc Beauval and the Jardin de la Source near Orleans.
This week I’ve been at home with our two-year-old whilst the childminder is on holiday. We’ve been to The Deep in Hull, Stockeld Park and a repeat visit to Ponderosa (which has improved significantly since our last visit). Right now, they’re asleep, so I have a rare chance to write a quick blog post.
After a long break, we’re finally moving forward with the house renovations again. I did some tiling for the first time in the downstairs toilet, which is now (mostly) painted and just needs flooring before it’s essentially finished. The next big project is our two-year-old’s room, which we’re hoping to get finished by the time they turn three in December.
On the technology front, I’ve replaced my iPhone (in addition to the new iPad in May). I had been planning to wait until the autumn, but the battery in my old iPhone showed signs that it was about to fail. I’ve upgraded to a Product(RED) iPhone 8, which is lovely and fast when compared to my iPhone 5S.
I’m hoping that I’ll have time to write at more length about what I’ve been up to; I have around 30 bullet points in my ‘blog post ideas’ note in Evernote.
After alighting from the ferry we got onto one of several coaches for the half hour journey from Zeebrugge to Bruges. It’s actually not that far as the crow flies but we were slowed down by roadworks and the coach drop-off point being to the south of Bruges city centre – Zeebrugge is on the coast to the north, so we had to go around the Bruges western bypass.
We were duly dropped off at a small island off the southern tip of the city centre – this is presumably the main coach drop off point for all visiting coaches as there were plenty of ‘Welcome to Bruges’ signs in four languages and a rather grand modern red bridge taking you over one of Bruges’ many canals. This leads into the Minnewaterpark, a nice public park that we should have walked through, it being the quickest route into the centre. Instead we got confused by a sign aimed at cyclists and took a longer and less interesting route.
We aimed for The Markt first of all, which is one of Bruges’ two large public squares. It sits in the shadow of the Belfort, a belltower with over 40 bells that you can climb up for views of the city (we didn’t). From here you can pay €39 for a tour of the city by horse and cart (the price is set by the city council) or visit one of the many overpriced brasseries around the edge. Seriously, these places are expensive; we ended up having lunch here as we struggled to find anywhere cheaper in the limited time that we had, and I paid €22.50 for Moules Frites (mussels and chips). At almost £18 that would buy me a decent three course meal back home. Fortunately we did find some cheaper places away from the main tourist areas later on and so our afternoon tea wasn’t quite so eye-wateringly expensive.
Bruges has a number of museums and had we stayed overnight we would have had the opportunity to visit more than one. As it was, we settled on Sint-Janshospitaal, an 11th-century hospital that treated patients well into the 20th century. It’s a big building, but there’s not a lot inside – some paintings and a few old fashioned medical tools for outdated practices like trepanning. Next to Sint-Janshospitaal is the Apothek, which is the pharmacy dispensary that served the hospital. Its opening hours are more restricted than the main hospital museum but you get entry for both in the ticket price.
Afterwards we had a general wander around the city. Belgium is well-known for its chocolate and its beer, and, as you might expect, Bruges has a chocolate museum and a beer museum. We didn’t visit either – the chocolate museum had some very mixed reviews on Foursquare and Christine doesn’t like beer, and I still feel guilty for dragging her around the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin. We did, however, visit a number of chocolate and beer shops. We bought quite a bit of the former but ended up not buying any of the latter. Many of the chocolatiers produce their chocolate on the premises and you can sometimes see it being made.
A note on language in Bruges. Belgium’s official languages are French, Flemish (a dialect of Dutch), and German. Bruges is in Flanders, the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium, and so most signs are just in Flemish – unlike in Brussels, the capital, where signs are generally in both Flemish and French. So whilst Flemish is the primary language used, English is a close second. The guidebook we bought even suggested that you are better speaking English than attempting French, and we encountered a couple of situations where Flemish bar staff didn’t speak French (but their English was almost perfect). Whilst it feels odd using English in a country where it isn’t a first language, it was a bit of a relief that I didn’t need to use my rather rusty French vocabulary.
Another thing that we didn’t expect in Bruges was the lack of pigeons. They’re the scourge of most cities, but we didn’t see any in Bruges. There were crows, ducks, swans and a few collared doves, but no pigeons. Whether this is deliberate or not, I don’t know.
All in all we had a lovely time. Bruges is a really nice place – it is to Brussels what York or Chester is to London, in that it’s much smaller and more manageable, but still full of history and interesting attractions. It was Christine’s first visit and my second, but my first time was over 20 years’ ago when I was only eight years old and so I don’t remember much about it. If I were to go back I’d like to stay there a bit longer and do the bits that we didn’t have time to see this time, possibly as a wider visit to other parts of Belgium as well. Despite what Nigel Farage says, Belgium is far from being a ‘non-country’.
Tomorrow, Christine and I are off to Edinburgh for four nights. It’ll be my first trip for a couple of years – I was there for a (unsuccessful) job interview in January 2009 – but Christine’s first time, apart from changing trains at Waverley station.
Whilst we both need a break (February has been especially hard for me at work), we’ve also got quite a bit of annual leave that we have to take before the end of the month and so are using the extra time off work to go somewhere a little further afield.
Growing up in York meant that Edinburgh was only 2 1/2 hours by train, so I had a number of day trips whilst growing up. Getting there from Sowerby Bridge and Bradford requires a bit more time and effort since you have to change at York, hence why I haven’t been much lately. It’s a shame as I really like Edinburgh.
Foursquare Thursday will happen as usual tomorrow, through the magic of scheduled posting, as it’s already been written. I have mental drafts for more Foursquare posts for the next few weeks too. See you next week.
I’m back from the Isle of Man and both Christine and I had a wonderful time – it’s a lovely island and well worth a visit. I’m slowly uploading photos of the trip to Flickr – I took over 300 so it’s taken a while to sort them all…
If I get chance I’ll write more about the trip; unfortunately I’m rather busy catching up from being off work for a week. No rest for the wicked.
It’s July, which means that we’re now more than half way through 2010. Still feels like April for some reason, despite the very summery weather we’ve had lately.
I haven’t had chance to blog much so this is a summarised version of things that I would have devoted posts to had I had the time.
Films:
About a year ago I wrote about films which I own but haven’t watched. I finally watched Robots last night and it was actually better than I had expected. The computer animation is wonderfully detailed and it’s a lot of fun. I’m starting to wish I’d watched it sooner.
On a related note, I have copies of Eragon, Ghostbusters II and the first Twilight film which I own but haven’t seen. All in good time, I suppose.
I saw the trailer for The Last Airbender a couple of months ago and it looked good, but the reviews of it suggest it’s totally rubbish, so I’ll give it a miss.
Your Freedom:
I was intending to write something about the government’s Your Freedom site, which asks the public for ideas about laws that need changing or repealing. It’s a good idea but badly executed, and Chris Applegate sums it up much better than I can, so read his blog post.
But, for the record, I’d like to see the Digital Economy Act repealed.
The Internets:
Some time in late April our ADSL modem at home started acting up, and ever since it’s been happily dropping packets left, right and centre. It’s a Netgear DG834GT, which isn’t a bad model but it’s several years old and has been rather over-used. The wireless has gone as well, so I’m using my spare Netgear WGR614 as an access point. Anyhow, we’re finally getting a new modem from Sky and so I’ll actually be able to do things like play World of Warcraft without lagging and download files without them timing out.
Holiday:
Things will be quiet around here again as Christine and I are off to the Isle of Man for a week, starting tomorrow. We don’t have a solid itinerary but are planning a trip to see the Laxey Wheel and a train ride up Snae Fell.
Although I’ve been back in Britain since Monday, I haven’t yet said publicly that I’m back, so… I’m back.
There you go.
France was fantastic – we had really good weather for most of the holiday and went to lots of cool places. I’ll write in more detail soon although I’ve managed to return from holiday during a very busy time at work so it’ll probably be at least the weekend before I upload anything. I also have around 300 photos to sort through and upload to Flickr.
I’ve been away from this blog for some time – 2 weeks almost – which is mostly due to being busy at work and having very little free time at home. I’ve been playing World of Warcraft a bit more than usual lately, but now have a second level 70 character as a result.
Been testing out Firefox 3 RC1 and Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1. Firefox 3 is looking really good now, especially on Macs where the improved performance and native theme make it even more of a joy to use. Thunderbird is obviously an early alpha build but it too is much faster, as it inherits many of the optimisations that were undertaken for Firefox. Unfortunately, it’s not yet very stable, but it is at least usable.
Now that I have more than a smidgen of free space on my MacBook, I installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron in Parallels. Unfortunately, despite updating to the latest Parallels release, the Parallels Tools for Linux package doesn’t work with this release of Ubuntu so there’s no adaptive window sizes, cursor integration and clock synchronising. It’s a shame as apparently VMWare Fusion does support the latest Ubuntu release. I haven’t played around with Ubuntu much but it looks good, and including Firefox 3 is a bold but welcome move.
Speaking of Twitter, I would recommend the TwitterFox extension if you use Twitter and Firefox, as it’s quite a handy little extension which lets you read and interact with your Twitter friends. It doesn’t have masses of features, but it’s intuitive and it works with Firefox 3 already.
Google Reader’s ‘Trends’ feature has an unexpected use as a way of digging out feeds which haven’t updated in a long time. I found one that had gone dead in October 2005 that I was still subscribing to. I also found a few sites which had changed their feed URLs without redirects so I wasn’t receiving updates any more.
This, unfortunately, isn’t the return to regularly scheduled blogging, as on Saturday I’m going away for five nights in camping barn in the Lake District with some friends. It’s really in the back-end of nowhere – it doesn’t even have a connection to the electricity grid so all power comes from a hydro-electric generator, and it’s highly unlikely that there will be any mobile phone reception there either. So until I return on Thursday, you may not hear a peep from me, either on here or on Twitter.
This is the first of several posts about what I did on my holidays, initially covering the first four days, with photos. Future posts will have the rest of write-up.
Thursday 26th June
Reims
Reims (pronounced ‘remm’ but most English people say ‘reams’) was the first of our two overnight stops on the way down to the south coast. Having overestimated the delays on the roads (despite heavy traffic on the M11 and A14), we turned up at the motel at 4pm, giving us a whole 3 hours before dinner was served at the restaurant. Instead of vegetating in the hotel room, we went into the centre of the city, since it’s been a while since we last visited, apparently (I have no recollection of ever visiting it, but there you go).
Reims is regarded as being the capital of the Champagne region of France, home to that expensive fizzy alcoholic drink of the same name, so obviously there were a few champagne shops around. However the prices were about the same as we’d pay in England (and probably more than the Calais hypermarkets and wine warehouses would charge) so we passed on the opportunity to stock up. The city itself is nice, with many of the streets in the centre having been pedestrianised partially or entirely, so you don’t spend the whole time dodging traffic. The main square is quite pretty, and includes a fountain and a statue, along with shops and bars, most of which had tables out on the street as is customary in France (and increasingly over here too). It’s here that we stopped for a biere pression (beer from the tap) to recharge our batteries.
Reims is also home to a cathedral and various large department stores, which I had a brief dabble in, however I didn’t buy anything.
Friday 27th June
Touron and Tain l’Hermitage
Having left the motel in Reims, we headed down the motorways towards Valence, calling off at the amusingly named le Poulet de Bresse service area on the way – literally translated it means ‘the chicken of Bresse’ and this fact was reinforced by a large steel sculpture of a hen overlooking the picnic area. Bresse, by the way, referred to the nearby town of Bourg-en-Bresse.
After lunch, we pulled off the motorway (having sneakily avoided Lyon on a new motorway that had only been open 6 days), we arrived at Tain l’Hermitage and its sister twon Touron. These two towns are located either side of the river Rhône, one of the widest in Europe and one of only a few to end in a delta. Tain l’Hermitage is the smaller of the two, and is home to the Crozes Hermitage wine variety. Stocking up with 6 bottles of the stuff from the Cave Cooperative is the main reason for stopping here, but Touron is a nice town to spend a short amount of time in. There is a wooden footbridge linking the two towns, and Touron has a castle and a few older timber framed buildings. Again, we made use of the bar facilities, before heading south to Valence for our second overnight stop.
Saturday 28th June
Sète
We ended up at Sète after visiting probably the largest hypermarket I’ve ever seen in Avignon. We didn’t intend to go to Sète today but we got fed up of the slow-moving traffic on the motorway around Montpellier and pulled off onto the older coast road, which happens to pass through the town.
Sète can be best described as the French equivalent of Scarborough, a rather jolly British seaside town just up the road from my home town of York. Except Sète has nicer weather and a canal running through it, and it has water jousting.
Now, anyone who has seen films about Camelot, or has been to the British theme park with the same name (I haven’t), will know that jousting is usually two knights in armour on horseback with long poles and shields, and the aim is to ‘poke’ the other knight off his horse as the two approach each other. Now apply the same principle, but remove the armour, change the horse into a boat and slow the whole process down somewhat, and you have water jousting. And being a Saturday afternoon during the early part of the tourist season, the locals were out doing it. It’s quite fun to watch, particularly when one of the jousters falls off in a ridiculous way, or, as sometimes happens, they both lose. The activity is obviously part of the town’s heritage as there’s even a prominent statue up in the middle of the town heralding the sport.
While this occupied most of our time here, we did have a brief wander around the rest of the town, which is mostly home to posh holiday flats and seafood restaurants. And some very large seaward pleasure boats.
Cap d’Agde
And, finally, we had arrived. It took us some time to actually find the apartment block that we were booked into as, in the typical French tradition, the signs for it disappeared just as we started to get close. Well, okay, they didn’t disappear but were positioned such that you only saw them once you’d turned to go in the wrong direction. But, anyway, we arrived.
The ‘residence’, as it is known, was called Les Rivages de Rochelongue (Rochelongue being the ‘suburb’ of Cap d’Agde that we were staying in), and to be honest, we’d have been hard-pressed to find a better place. The photo I’ve included here is the actual view from our balcony, which is certainly a par with the view we got when we were in Barbados three years ago. As you can tell, the beach is within staggering distance and the pool is even closer. There’s also a good variety of shops, bars and restaurants literally next door in the Mail de Rochelongue, which is the main street in the area. It also has a most superb ice cream stall, with something like 90 different flavours on offer, including a very nice lavender flavour which I’d never seen anywhere before.
Sunday 29th June
Not wishing to exert ourselves too much after such a long drive down, we spent the morning exploring the town and the afternoon slouched out on the beach.
This will probably be my last entry before I go away on my holidays. Just about everything is packed up now (and in fact it all fits in the car remarkably well), so we’re all set for an early start tomorrow morning. We’re due to leave here at about 4:30am so that we can be in Folkestone for a 11am crossing through the Channel Tunnel. The AA reckons it’ll take us 4 hours and 23 minutes, but bearing in mind we’ll be travelling through rush hour, and will probably need to stop off for breakfast (usually at Bishop’s Stortford on the M11), we’re leaving some extra time. Admittedly we’ll hit rush hour while travelling on some rural stretches of the A1, but still, there’s the M25 and the Dartford Crossing to negotiate. Glad it’s not me that’s driving, but then I can’t drive, so that really is a good thing 🙂 .
Andy will hopefully pop in occasionally to review and publish any comments you guys leave. All that’s left to say is: see you in 2 weeks!
