Notes from Swindon – home of the Magic Roundabout
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OK, so I previously said that I didn’t think much about cycling while we were in Paris. But I did…a little.
Well, how could I not when there was the Velib bike-hire system to check out.
I confess, we didn’t use Velib 1, but that didn’t stop me being highly impressed with it.
This year my beautiful, amazing, wonderful wife and I celebrated 5 years of being married with a 4-night trip to Paris.
It was an amazing few days. I totally chilled out. Anyone who knows me knows that I think a lot and I didn’t think about much at all…not about church, not about work, not about technology, not (much) about cycling. I confess, I thought quite a bit about food, but that’s France for you, and we talked a bit about politics too.
I don’t normally travel well, but France is OK because I know the lingo pretty well, and in a city it’s easy to find food and drink and pretty much anything else that you need, at pretty much any time of day.
We went on the train to London and Eurostar to Paris…so much nicer than flying. We stayed in a Hotel on the southern edge of the Latin Quarter and found lots of reasonable-quality, cheap food on Rue Moufftard, which helped keep costs down a bit – in fact, I loved Rue Moufftard, it was the quintessential trendy French street.
The weather was perfect, and we walked our socks off exploring the city, and generally had a really relaxed and fun time.
Some more specific thoughts will follow, but generally, visiting Paris was good, going by train was good, staying in the Latin Quarter was good.
Oh, and being married for 5 years has also been very, very good!
Tags: anniversarys, Holidays, paris, spring
It’s been busy lately…again. But a different and nice kind of busy.
We spent a week in France with good friends, followed by a day at the Christian arts and music festival Greenbelt.
I don’t want to do my usual multi-part holiday post – it was too relaxed a holiday and there’s not so much to say – but a few experiences and thoughts are given here.
I am…yes, really, I am getting there.
Friday – our last day. We’d previously planned a hike up to over 800m up the mountain known as Tonelagee. Having abandoned this on Thursday we were up early with the aim of doing it on Friday.
So, we packed our rucksacks and jumped in the car, back towards Glendalough heading back to towards Sally Gap and parking at Glenmacnass Car Park.
Despite it being predictably unpredictable, We’ve been trying our best to closely watch the weather this week. Our aim has been to be outdoors as much as we can, and do some hill walking if possible. While we’ve certainly been to mountain height, we’ve still not really “climbed a mountain”, and so last night we planned a hike up Tonelagee (817m).
Lots of rain overnight meant that we weren’t keen to rise early…again! So we had another slow start and a nice bacon-and-eggs breakfast/elevenses. Yummy! There wasn’t much in the plan, and the weather was possibly unpredictable weather, but expected to clear, so we again went for something with an indoor element – at least to start with.
Two quick observations.
Radio: Radio here is really good. Both East Coast FM and RTE 2 have a really good mix of music. Though, oddly, its all English music.
Weather forecasts: We’ve got Freesat here, but it’s been really hard getting a decent forecast for the Republic of Ireland. There don’t seem to be any Irish channels on Freesat, so we’re resorting to interpreting the BBC’s big charts (with the presenter usually stood right in front of the bit of map we’re interested in) and short snippets on the aforementioned radio.
Oh well. It’s mostly sunny with showers, and I guess that will continue.
First a note on Irish signs. These aren’t lacking, but they are, we find, generally pretty rubbish. They are badly placed, usually too small, occasionally not actually related to the place/junction at which they’re located, and completely sporadic and unpredictable. One minute a main road is signed, the next, you’re at a junction with no idea which way to turn. This is not confined to the countryside: on our trip to Dublin last year we couldn’t find any signs for the main M1 motorway north to Belfast and spent 40 minutes driving through the suburbs.
Someone should really have a word.
We had a very nice long sleep – a feature that would be present in most of our days in Ireland. We had spotted in our room an electronic pest control device and had heard some odd noises from above – we wondered if there may be rats, but these failed to materialise in any tangible way during the course of the week…phew.
It was an early start on the first Saturday. Holidays shouldn’t start so early, but as my sister said, it meant that we didn’t just spend the whole day travelling, and we got there with some hours to relax and find our way around before bedtime.
