Friday, July 9, 2010

finally

I finally bit the bullet and booked a holiday. all in an effort to celebrate Josh's 30th birthday.  his birthday is the 14th, but we won't be leaving until the 22nd because of his work schedule.  and I'm flying him off to Menorca Island, Spain!   found a cheap place to stay for 3 nights (the cheapest i could find, which is actually dirt cheap, thankfully.  came in under the budget i had set for this.  and yet we're still ON the beach, in a decent, clean place.  in a quiet spot of the island). 

I think josh and I remember our Spanish pretty well.  i think i'll grab a book at the library, though.  just to help us brush up.

August, our 'big' trip for that month will be to spend several days in East England, which incorporates attending the wedding of one of my customers!!!  I'm so excited about this.  A Bishop will be officiating alongside the bride's father (a priest).  Fortunately, they purchased my favorite crown set...and the crowns arrived to them safely.  good to go!  Now to find a dress...

September, we'd like to look into going to Greece.  I'm working on my Greek via Rosetta Stone.

October....depending on how we're doing budget-wise, my DREAM place to visit is Morocco.  I got Josh to agree that we could go to Marrakesh if I can get the other trips in under a certain budget.  Really need to work on my Arabic.  All I know are cuss words, church/religious phrases...and random foods, animals, and objects.  Trying to decide if I should go all out and get Rosetta Stone for that too...hmmm.....

November...HOME!

but right now...waiting on a plumber to show up to fix the silly washer..again.  waiting for my dad to get back to my house, so that we can ship out everything from this past week.  Hope everyone enjoyed their 4th of July Holiday, and thanks for being patient with our shipping holiday!

Monday, July 5, 2010

almost a half century.

 This past Saturday, we went for a long bike ride.  We utilized the National Cycleway Network, following route 68



We left Derby and headed toward Ashbourne.  Our ultimate plan was to pick up the Tissington trail in Ashbourne, and go to the end of the T.T. and then just double back. making for like a 63 mile ride, or something like that.

However, once we got to the Tissington Trail head, I crashed and burned. (Lots of dogs, people, little kids.  yeah, i totally lost control and slid right into a little girl.  she was fine.)  I bent the heck out of the rear derailleur hanger, and was really, really, embarrassed.  Tons of people just stopped and stared.  no one offered to help me up. 


I limped off to the side, Josh managed to get my bike going again.  and seeing just masses of crowns pouring out of the trail, we opted to just turn around and go home.  We realize that if we had kept on going, that crowns would have thinned out.  but um, we weren't really in the mood.  so we had a quick snack and doubled back home.  All in all, it made for a 40-something mile ride. (and that almost 5 hour  trip-tick includes out snack and sight-seeing stops, we're slow, but not that slow)


It was a hilly ride.  still getting used to all these darn hills...here's the profile. (elevation is determined by barometric pressure on our gps unit, so as you can see, the pressure changed during the ride..so the halves aren't exactly symmetric.)



So we were shy a few miles from doing a full 1/2 century ride.  that's ok.  we'll get there.

And of course we saw a few neat things along the way...
one of the cattle corridors we had to cross through on the route.  The route took us on some gravely trails, some paved trails, and some sleepy 1-lane farm roads (with lots of blind turns and cars that, then they're present, whip around those corners like you wouldn't believe.




interesting

there are more kinds, styles, flavors of yogurt out there than i ever imagined possible.

today's flavor: Champagne Rhubarb. 

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Stonehenge Saturday, beach Sunday

We decided to start taking advantage of josh's allotted days off...and noticing a string of gorgeous days out here, we took off to the South of England for a long weekend.

We left Saturday morning, and keeping with our tradition, we were able to stop for our typical "Start of a car trip McDonald's Breakfast".  (The McD's out here don't have biscuits (as biscuits mean cookies out here), so egg McMuffins are served on "English" muffins.  They don' have McGriddles...It's a bagel instead.  So damn healthy!)

We started off driving slightly South East toward the city of Leicester (sounds like Lester).  Near that city is the Kirby Muxloe Castle .  While there, we signed up for an English Hertigae Membership, as it allows us free entry to all of their properties, and discounted entry to National Trust sites. (English Heritage seems to own most of the Ruins, whereas the National Trust seems to manage most of the still intact castles).