One day we’ll be organised and have regular updates, pictures going up every week and so forth. Until then please make do with infrequent news and new pictures every three months. We spoke to Steve and Chris on the weekend and they have set a date for their wedding, 22 March 2003. So, it looks like we’ll be in NZ from the 17th until the 28th of March, probably in the North island for the first week and the South for the second.
We were looking at hiring a car but given the cheap flights available on Air NZ we’ll probably fly places. We’ve already tentatively booked tickets to NZ so that’s basically set.
Recently we’ve seen a couple of fireworks displays, one at Leeds Castle which was a horrible time and another on the Thames which was quite nice. The Leeds Castle event was held on the 2nd of November and it rained all day, by the time it got dark we were all wet and fairly unhappy, there was no where to take cover from the wind and rain and we still had a couple of hours before the display. We took Jim and Gee with us as well, they’ll probably never talk to us again after that trip. We saw the fireworks through the rain and left, the fireworks weren’t even that impressive. We still like Leeds Castle as a place to visit, just a pity the weather had to spoil everything and they had no contingency for dealing with several thousand wet and bored people.
The other show was part of the Lord Majors Show and was held last Saturday night. It was much better. We made our way to the river after watching the All Blacks v England game at a Walkabout pub in central London. It was a good game, I think it bodes well for NZ rugby that they can come back so well. We missed the first 20 minutes as there was a large queue of people waiting to get in but once inside the atmosphere was great.
After the game we were off and walked down to try and find a spot where we could watch and also take some photos. Turned out that this is a popular event, we should have known as they closed the roads to cars for the whole day in much of the square mile to allow a parade and when we’d walked the streets earlier there had been lots of people around. Walking down Cheapside a couple of churches had there bells ringing out, it was strange walking the roads with no cars around to the sound of bells. We found a spot eventually looking out over the Thames. The fireworks were to be set off from a barge between Waterloo and Blackfriers bridges, turns out we were looking at the wrong barge. We hot tailed it to another point and set up to take photos again. These fireworks were loud and spectacular, probably the best traditional display we’ve seen. It also helped that they started just after 5pm so there was light left in the sky, it was a nice calm evening as well which just made it all the more pleasant
After the light show was finished we wandered up to Waterloo Bridge, Keryn wanted to get some night shots of London. There were too many people around however, so we packed it in and made our way home.
I’m looking forward to the Lord of the Rings box set edition of the Fellowship of the Rings turning up this week, if the weathers bad on Sunday I’ll probably just watch that all day. We have a message in the guest book from Geoff Taylor as well, made us feel special hearing that he (well, they) still remembers us. I’ve been putting together a website about his work for over six months now, I’ll have to try and get it finished this weekend as well and put it up somewhere.
Finally, we’re off to Brugges in Belgium for Christmas, just four days as I have to work the 27th. We’re staying at a B&B that looks quite fancy and will just be doing a little sight seeing and relaxing. It’ll be our first European trip on our own, it’ll have been over 18 months over this side of the world by then, about time we started properly exploring outside of Great Britain.
