I must get some more pics of the girls with Minnie as well.. but she’s pretty skittish of the kids (and adults too really).

Continue reading to see about the trip to St Andrews…. (photos from the day are in Canada – 2010 – Group 3.

We’ve had a lot of rain here in NB, it’s the only thing that’s made the trip a bit tedious really.  It would have been nice to have some nicer weather and get out and about more.  There’s so much to see in NB but it really does want nicer weather, especially with kids.  On Monday (June 7) we took a chance on the weather holding at cloudy and a touch of drizzle to head down to St Andrews for some seafood.  The day turned out perfectly.  It was cool and windy when we got there but the sun was mostly out and the rain completely stopped.  It was great for walking around the town, not so good when you stopped to look though haha

We decided to eat at the Harbour Front Restaurant on Water Street, just about 150m from the Pier.  We went here because of the big platter for 2 they had on offer.  Well, really it was just a platter for just one Yuki, but I managed to distract her just enough to get a few bits from it

Some photos of the seafood feast

The first basket is what I ate, the second is what Yuki ate .. the last photo is of the lucky ones that survived the feast

It was a great day out and everyone had fun.  I made Yuki drive back home as she needs practice driving in Canada, she’s going to help with the non-stop drive back to Ontario on Wed night.  I’m getting way to old to do it myself now hahah

I sat in the middle row of seats and enjoyed the ride and surfed using the pocket access point and USB rocket pictured above, it was bloody slow haha

Lisa was playing on her DSi (Thanks to Nana Carol)  the entire trip down and back to St Andrews, killed the battery completely on the trip.. she’s junky already.  Emma, well it was just all too much for her, she had to crash for the entire trip home.

It’s Tuesday now and I’m blogging this from the Chapters – Indigo Bookstore in the Regent St Shopping Mall, sip’n a Starbucks coffee.  The girls are all out getting their hair cut and ready for the Wedding on Monday of my Dad and Carol.  There will be plenty of photos posted from that

Well, just got a text, the girls are done and heading for home.  I’ll go and meet them and get yuki for a bit more shopping.  We need to get a few more things and get back and start getting stuff packed up for tomorrows departure.

On May 1st I managed to get a few hours to get out alone and go walking.  I’d planned a 3.5mi walk but it turned out to be a 5.5 mile walk.  What a great place to go walking.  There were two separate wooded area’s.  Once was Archers Wood

About this wood

Parts of Archer’s Wood are believed to be remnants of the original British wildwood, a ditch and bank in the northern section is a scheduled ancient monument and, true to its name the wood was a sanctuary for highwaymen. Even today you look to the north and imagine a 14th century Cistercian monastic grange that once stood there. Flat and easy to access, the site is dominated by oak, ash and field maple and served by a figure-of-eight network of rides so it’s great for gentle walks. Be sure to stroll along the main ride to spot the rare and beautiful wild service tree – and look out for foxes, woodpeckers and nuthatches.

The other was Aversley Wood, both just outside of Sawtry, Cambridgeshire.

About this wood

A woodland gem in England’s least-wooded county, expansive, impressive Aversley Wood is well worth the steep trek (sometimes boggy in winter) required to reach it. Believed to date back to the Ice Age, it is one of Cambridgeshire’s largest ancient woodland sites and a full tour is not for the faint-hearted – but very rewarding, with impressive fenland views.

You can see the full route of the walk with notes along the way by going to www.stepwhere.com.  I’ve been using this site for storing and planning my recent walks.  You can see all my public walks by going to my user name, M1XZG.  The process I’ve been doing with the site is planning the walk online and loading the track onto my GPS, then, when I’m out walking I record the actual track I walk and upload that to www.stepwhere.com. 

To see some photos from the walk of the woods you can CLICK HERE for my www.flickr.com gallery.  Here are a couple of the photos.

If you get out walking why not share your routes?   Also, why not check out www.walkingforum.co.uk – it’s a fantastic site for all manner of walking discussions.

A detailed account of the walk …

I started by parking in the small lot that services a large open park and allotment area off St Judith’s Lane.  Walking out of the car park I turned right and followed the road to a “T” junction, 1.6 km (1 mi)  This is where you can enter Archers Wood.  Just inside the wood is a map, I had a quick study of the map and planned my route sort of through the wood.  I figured I’d walk the outside route around the wood.  The paths were mostly dry and in very good condition.  There was one detour put in place due to some flooding of the path but that was it for any sort of problems.  The wood is mostly on an incline and that was at the lowest end of the wood.  The rest of the wood was very dry with only a few muddy spots from the recent rains.  Through out the wood there are very nice benches placed in excellent locations providing nice views through cuttings or paths in the wood.  I didn’t find any wildlife except birds while walking through this wood, however there was plenty of evidence of small game by the number of rabbit runs.  If it weren’t for the din of A1(M) very close by this would be a perfect place to come and reflect on life and enjoy the quiet.

Exiting the wood by the same gate I entered by, I turned left and continued to follow St Judith’s Lane for just about 1 km (0.6 mi), just past a large farm on the right side of the road you’ll find the Public Path sign.  Follow the path for 1.7 km (1 mi) and that will bring you to one of the entrances to the Aversley Wood.   About 260m before the entrance is a park bench.  This is where I’d stopped to break out my stove and kettle and make a cup of tea and some lunch.  After about a 30min break or so I packed up and headed into the wood.  This was another spectacular wooded area.  The paths were well maintained and very wide with ample chances to sit on benches and reflect and enjoy the quiet.  Because of the geography of this wood there was pretty no noise from the outside world at all.  The only thing to be heard was the rustling of  leafs and the birds.  Again, I didn’t see any wildlife but it’s clear it exists from all of the small game runs.  I did see what I think might be badger tracks, I meant to take a snap of them to check it out but meh, forgot   After quite some time walking around the wood I finally left via the North Eastern most corner with a gentle ascent up a hill then down the other side right back to the park where I started off.  

The total distance was 8.9km (5.6mi).  The weather really couldn’t have been more perfect, it was sunny but a little cool so it made walking not too hot.  Sitting idle you could feel the cold after a while, but it was very nice. 

I’m looking forward to future walk and hope to plan for a number of them to be through wooded areas like these.

We’ve all suffered through Christmas and of course New Years, so Happy New Year eh?

Well, that brings us to today now.  I’ve converted back to Windows (it was a sad day yesterday).  I’d finally had enough of Ubuntu.  It was a series of issues that forced me back to Windows … apps that stopped working, funny things happening since upgrading from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10, that was a mistake for sure and generally speaking I just grew tired of missing functionality in Ubuntu when everyone you deal with uses Windows.  Oh well.  I’m not running Windows 7, 64-Bit, finally making full use of the hardware in my laptop.  The only “issue” I have right now is Win 7 doesn’t seem to support the ACPI power management stuff.. so, as a result when I pull the power and run on battery the only performance tuning that happens is the screen dims but the CPU’s run full out and thus drain the battery at an alarming rate.  I’m sure I’ll find the correct drivers for that issue at some point. 

Oh yeah, I bought a new car as well .. pics of the new motor here ..

There’s not really much else to report I suppose.  As usual, check out the photos on our flickr account for new photos and videos. Such as this one, Lisa playing her piano..

I hope I’ll have some more interesting things to blog about in the future.. just sort of lost the desire to blog.. hoping it comes back.

I’ve finally got the photos posted on Flickr now. The easiest way to see them all is by going to the Camping 2009 Collection.  You can see we had a great time

While we were away I was blogging using my Nokia N97 phone with the use of Wordmobi (WordPress Blogging Tool) and QuickOffice 6.  Entering text into Wordmobi is fine but there’s no spell check available in the tool.  So, the process I used was to write up the posting content in QuickOffice and saved as a Word Document.  Once it was complete and spell checked I’d copy the text and paste it into Wordmobi.  This then allowed me to post direct to the blog and add the tags and whatever I wanted.  All in all this process was very good and worked well for me.  I had my laptop with me including my datacard and power source but never once turned it on during the week we were away.  I was able to do everything I needed to using my phone.  Other apps I used were the Facebook App that came installed on the phone and my favorite Twitter App – Gravity.  I would have been online using Nimbuzz, but for some reason I just couldn’t get authenticated, but it worked fine from home, not sure what happened there.

I’ve received a lot of positive comments from people via various paths about my blog postings while away.  Thanks for the comments and thanks for reading them too!

I really must try to blog more often… perhaps with the new found process using my phone I will feel more like it.  Since moving from Windows to Linux full time on my laptop it’s not as convienent to use my one beloved Windows too, Windows Live Writer … truely a great application for blogging on WordPress sites.

Thank again for following our holiday and reading the site.

Thankfully, Yuki’s dad is here staying with us and he was looking after the kids.. Yuki and I managed to sleep in until nearly 9am, which was nice.  In fact, we managed to sleep in until nearly 10am Friday and Saturday.   I can’t even begin to recall sleeping in that late when vast amounts of alcohol was the direct cause of it.  So can’t really complain much.

Anyhow, the day started with breakfast as usual.. then we sent the kids up stairs with their lao ye (grandfather in Chinese, it’s more specific then that, but trust me, you don’t want me to open that can of worms here and now ).  Yuki and I took to hiding all the stuff for the kids.. candy, chocolate eggs, bunny’s, all sorts of rubbish haha.  Then it was time to unleash the kids..

First, here is a quick tour of the hiding places of all the candy

Here’s a video of the “hunt” under way .. I love Emma’s comment at one point “I’ve got so many…”

Here are a few pics…

You can see all the pics and videos taken today by CLICKING HERE.

Enjoy the pics and videos.  I hope to do more blogging in the future.. I’ve been pretty slack at getting out updates, but life has been full of upheavals that… well… frankly made blogging a chore. 

Besides, I’m booked to attend WordCamp UK in July.  It’s the second year for the event and the first year I’m going … it’s a weekend full of meeting other bloggers, some who do it for a living but most because they enjoy it (I assume anyhow).   With enjoy luck this event will encourage me to blog more, or even just give me loads of ideas to make my blogging better (which frankly wouldn’t take much, I know I suck at blogging).

This place was an incredible size!  The actual play area was easily 5 times bigger then Funky Fun House .. And so much more to do there.  You can see from clicking on the link for Activity World they have more pics and videos on their site which is why I decided to go there and check it out.

Here are some pics I took on the day, there are more in our Flickr Gallery ..

 click here to see them all.

Click the thumbnails to see the bigger images.

I’d really like a MSR Whisperlite but they aren’t cheap, however, they are very versatile.. best you read about them on the manufactures website (click the link back there).  At some point I’ll likely get one of these, but not right now. 

For now I’ll have a go with this Hexamine stove.    This the very same one I have picked up for £4.00

To night I decided to do some timing experiments to see how long it takes to boil water in both my crusader cup and a small aluminium kettle.  The Crusader cup took 6m20sec to bring 1L of water to a boil and the Hexamine cube held the boil for 3 minutes.  Might want it to boil longer if you were sterilizing water, but just pop another cube of Hexamine and it would be good for another 9 mins of burn time.  The kettle, which has a lid, only took 4m30sec and the same 9 min burn time on the cube so that means 4m30sec of the water being held at a boil.

A couple of pics and a couple of videos can be seen below.. click to enlarge or see the videos.

Well, now just have to try it out in anger one day in the field

You can see all the pics and the videos from the night by CLICKING HERE.

The kids both had a great day today.  Lisa had to wait until about 1130 or so to open her gifts because we wanted to have the webcam on so Nana Shirley, Nana Carol and Grandpa Bob in Canada could watch the opening of the gifts.  The web cast went ok but next year I really must try something better, a proper Vlog sort of thing.

Some pics of the main gift opening from this morning

At around 5pm our friends all came around with their kids (Yang with Oliver and Olivia, followed by Stuart (her partner), plus Sam and Liz with their kids Tabbie, Ted and the as yet unborn baby to be ).  Yang and Stuart gave both Lisa and Emma a “Red Pack” a typical Chinese gift, a red pack with £10 for each of them.  Liz and Sam brought over a pair of Groovy Girls dolls.  We put Emma’s away until her birthday though.

Here are some pics from the party in the afternoon

You can see all the photos including a short video by going directly to the Flickr Photo Gallery.

Thanks to everyone that sent gifts for the kids.  Lisa really enjoyed them all and I’m sure Emma will when she gets to open hers too!  Watch this space for Emma’s birthday party results

So, I decided to take her with me.  The question was where too.  I decided to take her to Wicken Fen again.  We’d gone there before (Wicken Fen…) with Lisa’s school.  That visit was good for the kids but we didn’t really get to see too much of the place.  Today when we went back we’d ended up walking about 1.25 to 1.5 miles around part of the area.  Lisa had a good time but sure was tired.  Surprisingly she didn’t fall asleep on the way back home.

There are some pics and a video from the day HERE – here are some samples.

Today is Father’s Day.  First, we went to Ladybirds Pre-School for the Father’s Day Fete.  There were loads of things for the kids to do there.  They had a small bouncy castle, face painting (you’ll see in the pics), draws and prizes and several Tombola‘s including a couple for adults where you can win booze.  I got a bottle of wine.  The kids won several little toys and a drink.

After the Fete, we headed to Cambridge to the Town and Country show on Parker’s Piece.  We didn’t even know this was on, one of our friends mentioned it to us. There aren’t a load of pics of the various things going on there.. we should have taken more pics of the event.

There are a bunch of pics of the kids playing on some of the rides.

Click for today’s photos – 2008-06-15 – Father’s Day  – Photos

The pics I took have been uploaded to Flickr – CLICK HERE, go and have a look. I’ve geocoded just about all of the ones I uploaded. If you don’t know what means, simply put each photo has been associated to a point on a map.

I’ve also put a some new videos of the kids being kids ..

video 1 – video 2 – video 3

You can easily get to our Flickr page by going to:

http://flickr.uk-experience.com 

Here’s a new video of Emma, and more can be found in The Kids Collection on Flickr.

I also shoved all the pics from Mull up on Flickr as well, they are here

Isle of Mull – 2008 album.