Tag Archives: holiday

As you may have seen from Lynda’s blog, she, I, Andy, Chef and Louise spent last week swanning around various Italian towns in the vicinity of Rimini.

The week in quotes:

• “How many courses shall I have?” – by Chef, at most meals. We ate out every lunchtime and most evenings. The pasta was mostly nice, the pizza was relatively disappointing. As Chef was designated driver the meals were cheaper than they might otherwise have been. I once again disproved the sweeping assertion that I never have dessert by opting for Tiramisu rather than niente dolci on a number of occasions.
• “You’re the navigator” – which actually meant, “you’re in the passenger seat”. Three in the back of our 4×4 was cosy so we rotated shotgun; Louise performed most of the actual navigational duties. By the end of the week we also had a roadmap, which was nice. Chef drove come un italiano once or twice. We were never lost, though occasionally we didn’t know where we were going. Italian road signs are, mostly, for entertainment purposes only.
• “Just get in as quickly as you can”. Our pool was unheated. The wrong approach is to take it a millimetre at a time, moaning all the way. I just got wet as quickly as possible, often noisily, but effectively. Once submerged it was fine. More than a few seconds out of the water, though, and re-entry was most invigorating.
• “More tat shops”. Sometimes I wish the tourist industry could be uninvented. Please exit church via bookshop. Mug with your name on it? These postcards already stamped for Europe! Would you like to buy a pistol or a samurai sword with your baby’s new bib? San Marino’s fancy bits are especially blameworthy.
• “Cock-a-doodle-doo”. All day long, all across the valley in which our villa lay. Cheerfully, croakily, quickly, slowly, interminably.
• “Do we need more wine?”. Yes, apparently.

I’ve created a Flickr group for all our photos (mine only at time of writing).

Yes, we’re back. And unless I’m very much mistaken, in an average of one piece each.

Things learned in Les Arcs this year:

• I can go for 36 hours without any sleep, and ski during the tired end of that time.
• Travelling between Lille and the Alps by train would be OK with (a) places to sleep and (b) you know, some sort of open buffet car of some kind serving actual food and drink for a seven hour journey.
• The useless goggles I bought in Les Arcs two years ago are actually not useless. In fact they’re better than my useless sunglasses.
• I am most likely to receive offers of contract work while half-way down a ski run. There’s insufficient data at present to determine whether the difficulty of the work offered is proportional to the difficulty of the piste.
• I need new walking boots, preferably with soles not made from teflon.
• I can get down a red hill covered in sheet ice while remaining upright, performing turns and avoiding other skiers.
• It is possible to have a tasty omelette in a piste-side restaurant.
• I can, within reason, write and send texts while skiing. The ‘within reason’ bit meaning ‘when hardly moving’ and ‘after a beer’. Karma ensures that I fall over my own feet soon afterwards.

As my fellow travellers are or will be Flickrites, I’ve created a Flickr group for all the photos. Just mine and Chris’s so far, as the others are lazy.

Last Friday I flew to Las Vegas for Steve’s stag weekend/bachelor party/delete as appropriate, returning yesterday.

It was hot in Cambridge the week before – mid-90s F, or low 30s C – so I was partly acclimatised to the heat, though stepping out of an air conditioned airport terminal into a temperature of 100+ is something else. “Wall of heat” is a good phrase. I found myself making Shuttleworthesque “oof” noises.

I stayed at the New York-New York Hotel and Casino on the strip: opposite the MGM Grand, and between the Excalibur and the Monte Carlo. Almost all stag-goers were staying there too. It’s the collection of pointy bits in the middle of the panorama above.

Friday night we ate at a Thai restaurant; eventually. The concierge at the hotel sent us to what he claimed was Thai, but was in fact a golf club restaurant not serving riff-raff like us. I think when we said “thai” the concierge heard “tie” and thought we wanted to dress up.

I bailed out at around midnight, 27 hours awake being quite sufficient thanks. The others partied on; Rob Ross got no sleep at all that night.

Saturday lunchtime took us to The Gun Shop, where boys played with noisy toys for half an hour or so. In the afternoon we wandered along the strip, stopping at Paris for drinks.

The main event was Saturday night. First a curry at the Gandhi, then into our stretch Hummer for the evening. Sadly its aircon was bust, words you don’t want to hear in this town at any time of the day or night (it never dropped below 95F).

The deal Curtis organised included VIP entry to Studio 54 at the MGM Grand, with a table and three bottles of booze. We got through that relatively quickly, choosing not to buy more at the slightly inflated prices they were charging ($15 bottles of Absolut vodka marked up to $250).

On Sunday, from the it-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time department came the idea of a round of golf. In a desert. In July. In a heatwave. At noon. (I don’t play but went along too.)

Not everyone lasted the course; it was just too exhausting. The only shade was from the hats we wore and our golf carts, and the odd tree. We could have done with a day’s survival training beforehand. Luckily there were water stops every three holes, and someone gave us cold towels after the ninth, soon repurposed as Lawrence of Arabia headgear, dunked regularly in our golf cart iceboxes. I’ve never drunk so much water in my life; it was absorbed as fast as it went down the gullet.

Mad dogs, Englishmen and Scots.

By Monday at breakfast only Steve, his brother Craig and I were still at the hotel. We wandered along the strip again, stopped for refreshments at Planet Hollywood in Caesar’s Palace (I refuse to omit the apostrophe, whatever the hotel does), then returned to the hotel to grab a cab to the airport.

A few hours later I was settling in on the plane when a dark-suited American man came up to me. “May I see your ticket stub, sir?” he asked, but not in a “you’re in my seat” way: he was an official of some kind. I assumed he meant my boarding ticket and reached to my back pocket; he stiffened slightly as I did so, or was it my imagination? Anyway, I retrieved it and handed it over. “Oh, sorry sir, you’re seat 35C. I was looking for 34C. Sorry to bother you.” He went back a row, to find the seat was empty. Some problem with the processing of boarding cards, I think. I had visions of being hauled off the plane for possession of subversive thoughts.

Bonus: two empty spaces next to me, so I could lie flat, albeit slightly foetal, and sleep/doze a bit on the flight.

Back at Gatwick, it was about 85F. I felt cool.

Photos

Just back from a long weekend on a canal boat near Worcester with Lynda, Louise, Chris, Melanie, Andy and Mikey.

Two and a bit days, 2mph, about two dozen locks. Several bottles of wine and beer. Not too much bouncing between banks, no sinkings, no swimmers.

On Friday afternoon we swarmed by car from the four corners to Dunhampstead and boarded our boat. The little man told us the do’s and don’ts, we bagsied beds, and set off in the direction of Worcester (if you go too far the other way, towards Birmingham, you have to negotiate 36 consecutive locks, which would be a bit tedious; you can’t abort half-way).

One hour of river successfully negotiated we moored outside a pub for a drink, some food and the night – it was the last pub until Worcester, about four hours away (probably twenty minutes by taxi). As it was our first mooring we were busy making a small meal of it when an “old hand” from the boat alongside came to “help” and the meal turned into a feast: the front end in position, the back end investigating the vegetation on the opposite bank. Ah well, we got there in the end.

After breakfast next morning we sped on to Worcester, deftly negotiating the locks in our way without sending any tidal waves down the canal. An old lady muttered something about how “they don’t teach people how to do locks properly these days”, which may or may not have been directed at us, but was undeserved if it was. We kept going until we ran out of canal (it joins up with the Severn), turned round, found a fresh water tap, filled up, moored, and went for some lunch. It was about 3:30.

We wandered around Worcester, not finding that much of interest. Generic shops, ooh look another branch of Waterstones. We didn’t do the cathedral.

Back to the boat, then out again a few hours later for dinner. Most of the interesting places were fully booked so we slummed it at Cafe Rouge. At this time I noted that the room still swayed even when you weren’t on the boat. As is semi-traditional, they got Andy’s order wrong. Not sure how an order for beef bourguignon could turn into chicken something-or-other, but there you go.

Sunday morning saw us searching for breakfast before 9am. Ooh look, closed generic shops. Caffe Nero seemed to be the only option. We mostly avoided the eye of a man who wanted to tell his life story to anyone who would listen; another sucker wasn’t so lucky. A panini, then back onboard.

The ladies left us in charge while they did ladies’ things in town: I imagine these included window shopping and chocolate. We menfolk hit the wine, and decided to snack rather than join the ladies for lunch. Upon their return we cast off and headed out of Worcester. Our aim: to be in the pub by the boat yard for 7pm and the World Cup final.

Louise watched the men’s final at Wimbledon on a scratchy patchy screen as we hefted lock keys and swigged beers. Mikey did most of the driving, though Chris enjoyed piloting the boat into locks at a thirty degree angle on more than one occasion. I exaggerate, but only slightly.

We reached the pub twenty minutes after kick-off and ate a pleasant meal with the locals while France and Italy slugged it out. What on earth was Zidane thinking?

Then to boat, to bed. Up in plenty of time on Monday morning to return our vessel by 9am. And then disperse home…

My photos.
Lynda’s photos. Expect some from Chris and Melanie and Andy soon.

A few days late, but I’ve been busy. Or lazy. One of the above. Or both.

Here are my Bath photos.

If you want words, see Andy’s or Lynda’s blog.

Items of note from La Plagne:

• Tortoise beats hares. On our arrival Chris and Chef bagsied a twin room, Barrie and Mike having already bagsied the other twin. I was left with, sigh, a double room with en suite, for myself. It’s a tough life.
• Er, so where would Andy Heckford have slept? My double bed turned out to be two singles pushed together – but with no space to separate them. That would’ve been a fun week. (There was a pull-out bed in the living area, but that was occupied by Mike’s mate Mark.)
• Slipping on ice and sliding head first down a red run on your belly can actually be enjoyable. But after fifteen seconds you’re happy to twist round and skid to a stop.
• Red runs called Kamikaze and Hara-kiri aren’t quite as bad as they sound. The top of Kamikaze was, however, icy fun (Chris took the most direct route down, on his back; I nearly followed).
• Aime La Plagne, where we stayed, is a weird resort. No actual streets or stuff – just a monstrously ugly building containing both accommodation and a commercial area, including the usual trinket shops, restaurants, ski rental establishments and dogs. We stayed in a nearby hotel, Les Hauts Bois, and trekked to the ugliness daily for food. None of the restaurants had their own toilet – you had to use a public loo somewhere else in the commercial area.
• The entrance to one of the pedestrian lifts smelled of something druggy – constantly.
• I see no reason to return to grown-up skis. Snowblades are fine, and they seem to annoy Barrie.
• Mike’s friend Mark has interesting theories about Christianity. I fear I am unable to post them here in full due to excessive swivel-eyedness. I say only that if his ideas were true, the traditional bearded portrayals would need a good dose of immac.
• We made full use of our lift passes – we even went on the Vanoise Express over to Les Arcs, where we stayed last year, and did a few runs plus lunch there.
• Some of the runs had bare patches – we occasionally skied on little more than icy grass. We had one snowy day, but it stopped before nightfall and had more or less been scraped off the hills by skiers and boarders before the piste bashers could have a go.
• The Chalet Verdun Sud restaurant is nice until it gets busy. Then you never receive your main course until you swallow all your Britishness and complain. Chef did receive a main course, but it wasn’t his. As he didn’t know this, and neither did the waiter, he ate it anyway. We left no tip.
• Injuries sustained: minimal. Bruises, twists, etc. I think we all caught each other’s colds.
• Ryanair are rubbish. At 1pm yesterday, sitting in the Grenoble departure lounge for our 1:15 flight, we were told the plane had diverted to Lyon for unspecified reasons. Half an hour later, we were told they might be hopping across to us or they might be sending a new plane. At 3pm, we were told a new plane would be arriving at 4:30 for a 5pm flight. At 4:30, we were told our flight had been cancelled, and to please pick up our luggage and get stuffed. We milled around for a bit, considered trains and automobiles, then Chris rang Melanie and got her on the case. Very quickly we’d booked three tickets from Lyon to Stansted on Easyjet’s 9:45pm flight that night, sorted out (hopefully) a refund from Ryanair, and bundled ourselves into a taxi for a journey up the motorway to Lyon. We then had a few more hours to kill, filled by the traditional dawdling of concourses, eating of baguettes, and inspection of hand baggage by bored gauloise-infused officials. Amazingly I was home by midnight.

My photos. No sign of Chris’s photos yet.

That’s Rome done then.
My photos, Chris and Melanie’s photos.

Not shown in the photos:

• The moment when Chris had his wallet nicked, and then later returned by the thief as Chris didn’t have any money in it.
• The many and varied ways in which a Rome restaurant can forget to deliver part of your order, typically vegetables.
• The contents of the Galleria Borghese, including a room full of Caravaggios.
• The stuff that’ll have to wait for the video, including, but not limited to, a drunken few hours on the Spanish Steps.

Andy wrote notes about where we went when, so expect those to appear on his blog with his photos RSN.

Twenty years it’s taken me! Twenty years! But finally I win a trophy at the annual Camber Sands boules competition. Third place, but I’ll settle for that.

Pictographic evidence is in the usual place.

Got back this morning from a long weekend with the gang at CenterParcs in Elveden Forest, which sounds a much more pleasant holiday destination than “Thetford”.

I have discovered a number of things:

• I quite like archery. But not enough to take it up as a hobby.
• My back is more resilient than I thought it was. Over the weekend I have gone down “rapids” (glorified water slides) and taken part in other sundry chlorinated water-based activities; I have also bowled, arched, badmintoned, table tennised, “adventure” (crazy) golfed and snookered, with no apparent problems.
• I can, in fact, beat Chef at something sporting – table tennis.
• CenterParcs restaurants need prodding to take your order, seem unable to serve chilled white wine, and apparently have a single communal wine cellar. I think this is linked to the restaurants by a vast underground tunnel mechanism dug by ex-Vietcong militia.
• Ducks, like vampires, cannot come into your house unless given permission.

My photos are up already, and so are Lynda’s photos (she’s also blogged it). I’m sure that Chris and Melanie’s photos will be along any minute, and Andy’s photos soon. Chef takes lots of photos but we never see them. I think he just deletes them when he gets home.