Festive goodness

Happy New Year to all!

Christmas was awesome in the Lake District. When we arrived it looked as if it had been snowing, but it was just that everything had iced over from a couple of heavy frosts - we were surprised at how slippery walking on gravel was! We absolutely loved the farming community atmosphere (just like home for both of us) and the large amount of personal space - ie not like London!!! And we loved being able to drive round in a car, and not having to rely on public transport and walking everywhere.

Looks like snow? Just heavy frost

Our flatmates parents place was built in the 1700's and has been modified a few times over the years, so it has a lot of character to it. We were treated to some fantastic 5 star accommodation and food! The Lake District reminded us of Wanaka without the snow on massive mountains. Like Wanaka they make use of slate stones for dividing farms and walls along the road, and every house built has to have slate roofing to comply to regulations, to keep everything looking the same. Christmas day saw us gorging ourselves on a lunch consisting of a starter of salmon and salad, followed by a 5.5Kg Turkey complimented with real homemade cranberry sauce, and roast veges followed by our pavlova for dessert (it turned out well - whew!).

Jam and Mel standing on a thawing frozen lake

Typical Lake District road with slate stone walls either side

5.5 kg Turkey

Christmas feed
Quaint buildings in the small village of Hawkshead

Wray Castle

Different looking British sheep...Baa!

I had to go back to work for a day before the weekend (Friday). This proved rather interesting returning by train (as was also the case travelling up to the lake district) as Virgin trains had engineering works on at the most inconvienient time of year, so there was a mad rush of all those that didn't have a seat allocated to them (us included - damn new players!) However we were extremely lucky to find two seats beside each other the whole way there and back (including a change of train on the way back), but there were heaps of people that had to stand for the whole trip (3 hours on the way there but four on the way back due to railway works), and there was heaps of luggage in the aisles of the train with everyone travelling somewhere for Christmas -crazy stuff! The joys of public transport!

For the weekend we finally went to the Natural History Museum, the coolest museum in the world! We checked out some inspirational wildlife photos - an exhibition called the Shell wildlife photographer of the year and only managed to get through half the museum before running out of stamina...so we left the rest for another day.

For New Years Eve we spent with some Kiwis mates, Monique, Christine and Chris. Our plan was to head in to see the fire works around the London eye, but when we got into London we couldn't go any further than Trafelgar square because of the massive crowd numbers. So we were forced to stay in the square for midnight. We managed to see Big Ben tick over, but the apparently spectacular fireworks were behind some buildings, so we had to watch them from a giant screen. The most excited the crowd at Trafelgar Square was when someone let off their own piddly small sky rocket that people could actually see! We were quite disappointed not to get a chorus of auld langs aye or even a count down from ten seconds to go.

Massive crowd numbers just in Trafelgar Square

Big Ben in the distant background

Our new years day ended up being a sleep in day then it was back to the grind today. Apparently the forecast is for snow tomorrow in London with max temperatures to soar to a super cooking 3 degrees. So should be nice to see some snow finally!....might only be exciting for a minute before freezing my arse off!

Laters,Bev and Jam