Get your sneezing head on, coz off we go again!

Three weeks and three days since we came home and we are off on our travels again.

You will be pleased to know that my dental check up went well.  Janice had been telling everyone that the only reason we came home was for me to have my dental check up.  Well, just for the record, Janice actually came back for a hair cut!  Actually we got a lot of cleaning and gardening done, not to mention servicing cars etc.  Also, the Hymer fridge needed a repair as well because it wouldn't work on the gas system and it is essential that I keep the beer and white wine chilled on our trip.

We can't believe the weather over the last three weeks.  It has been so much better than our summer holiday.  It looks like we might still get some more good weather into October.....great for retired people like us!

So, we are setting off today in sunshine for round two of our adventure in search of 'whats what'!  Since Janice has retired she needs to recite the day and date just so she can keep track of the day's and remember to keep Fridays special.  Anyway, 'what is your plan?' I hear you say.......well, for a change we do have a bit of a plan but it could be flexible.

The big plan is to stay away till Feb 2016, definitely in France and possibly into Spain.  The next few weeks involve:-

a) staying near St Albans for 5 or 6 nights (Janice's children both live there, so it's a great chance to meet up and celebrate Janice's birthday with them).  We may get a chance to nip into London for a day whilst there.

b) crossing the channel and visiting long time friends Sian and Geralt who hail from Wales but live an hour from Paris, near a place called Vernon!  Im not sure if I can stand the gloating over the Wales victory over England in the Rugby World Cup but we will have to be brave.

c) travel across to the Vendee and stay with my big brother David and his wife Wendy.  We haven't seen them for a while so it will be great to catch up on teasing Wendy to make up for lost time.

Are you fed up of these lettered bullet points yet? Only one more...

d) move on to the Limousine area to visit ex-cop Tim Payne who has a nice big house and a sizeable piece of woodland and lake.  We visited him a couple of years ago and it was glorious weather and absolute peace and quiet.  I don't suppose we will get the same weather in late October but here's hoping.  I'm sure we will get the peace though.

For us that is quite a lot of planning but after that we will probably travel south and see where we end up.  

Back to today.  We have arrived at a small Caravan Club Certified Location about 7 miles from Buckingham, which surprisingly is in Buckinghamshire.  We did our normal thing and found a nearby Aldi to stock up on basic food supplies but also got a couple of bargain winter cycling jackets for £17 each (you can pay £60+ for these kind of jackets in a cycle accessory shop).

The site is in a nice flat field with plenty of space.  It is very rural but we have paid for a couple of nights so we can explore on our bikes tomorrow. 

Nice new jacket with flat cap, it's the new look for autumn.  Janice has caught me scrumping a nice big juicy apple.

 Not many photos yet but will include more in future blogs.  We have been sneezing already. Janice is ahead 3-1 today.  That's all for now, so in Strictly style....Keeeeep Blogging!

Back home.

On Saturday we had our last stop over when we visited Gary and Joyce at Pelsall.  

We worked out that it was about fifteen years ago that the Vernon family arrived at the Looe Caravan site in Cornwall and I said (jokingly), 'I don't like the look of the neighbours' and we have been in touch ever since.

By the way Gary is lead guitarist in a Free/Bad Company tribute band called 'Merchants of Cool', look them up on YouTube.

We had a great day walking in Walsall Arboretum and a lovely meal back at their house.  Thanks for the hospitality.

The Sunday was possibly the nicest sunny day we had all holiday....just our luck when we were travelling home.  We arrived back by the lunchtime and got stuck into our domestic chores.  Lovely to see John again and Belła.  As Janice jokingly put it, we only came home for my dentist appointment but actually I have plenty of gardening to do (yuck!).

Janice picked up the last two days of sneezing and the competition finished 17 - 15 in my favour!  I'm not sure which bodily function will be the competition for next time but whatever it is I think I could be the favourite!

We have had a great first leg of our travels and thoroughly enjoyed seeing all the places.  My highlight is the cycling day on Orkney but many others days are contenders.  Janice has been a lovely 'companion', she will laugh when she reads this!

We are looking forward to our next journey to the continent probably starting at the end of September and crossing the channel in early October.  We will keep blogging, if you can stand any more!

Homeward bound.

We are on our way home and will get back on Sunday.  Doesn't time fly when you are enjoying yourself, it only seems like last week when we set off.

Part of our rationale for coming to Birmingham was so that we could visit Janice's niece, Joanna, at Halesowen and also see Gary & Joyce, long time friends at Pelsall (I nearly said 'old' friends but they wouldn't forgive me).

We managed to get a little bit of sunshine before we left the site.

Friday was our day to visit Joanna and boyfriend Chris.  We found them without a problem and managed to park the van opposite.

We went out to a pub nearby called the 'Why Not Inn'.  It was my kind of place because they served proper portions.  I bottled out of the Mixed Grill Challenge and when I saw someone else get one I knew I had made the right decision.  It was massive.  If you could eat it you got a free pudding but I don't think anyone would manage a pudding after it!  We had a lovely meal.

For the first night in nearly six weeks we slept in a real bed in a real house......strange feeling.  For our breakfast we had our first porridge breakfast, it something we kept saying we should have but never actually did.  Needless to say our bed and breakfast accommodation has be of an excellent standard.

It's probably about time that I brought everyone up to date with the sneezing competition.  I don't want to sound like I am bragging but I am winning by 17 to 13.  It sounds fairly convincing but my mid holiday man flu gave me a clear advantage but Janice did come back strongly recently with three wins in the trot to keep her in the running.  However, I managed to secure the series win by winning by 1 - 0 yesterday, with only two days left.

We are at the Bullring (not Pamplona this time)!

It was a brave decision to visit Birmingham.  Neither of us had any recollection of really giving it a look from a tourist point of view.  I think I have visited a couple of times but it was more of a drive through.  We booked the Caravn Club site that is about 10 miles south of the centre and cycled in.

Well we saw more ethnical diversity in the first half hour of our cycle ride than we had in the whole of the holiday previously.  That was before we actually got to the city centre.

We were keen to see what Birmingham had to offer.  In the main it seemed to be scaffold and road works!  I am being a bit cruel but quite accurate.

The first landmark we saw was Edgbaston Cricket Club, I had been once before as a teenager to watch. Lancashire v Warwickshire when great players were in the Lancs team, Barry Wood, Frank Hayes, Jack Simmonds, Farouk Engineer, Clive and David Lloyd, Peter Lever, Colin Croft, Harry Pilling and Peter Lee.  That's not bad from memory!

No match today.

On to the centre and we navigated the road works to the shopping centre, which is actually quite impressive if you like that kind of thing.  

I'm the one in the yellow with steam coming out of my nostrils!

Eventually we found some nice buildings, the Town Hall and Council buildings which included this City Museum.  It was nice inside too.

Overall, we were rather unimpressed by the place and cycled back.  We thought that maybe we just don't have any affinity with the city in the same way as we do with Manchester. Sorry Birmingham.

Waspberry Whipple!

We had a full day in Cambridge and it has confirmed in our mind that it is a lovely town.  We enjoyed our cycle along the river into the town and we had a little plan of visiting a couple of museums and a college.

Kings College Chapel.

First of all we went to Fitzwilliam Museum.

This is the museum entrance.  It looked rather grand.  It is an art museum and had exhibits by many famous painters including Constable, Monet, Picasso, Canaletto, Turner, Rubens, Ruskin and many more.  Sadly, there was nothing by Caravaggio....my favourite University Challenge answer.  It was an excellent museum and to cap it all, it was free!

We had our picnic on a bench outside the museum.  We tried to get a tour of Queens College but it was closed for visitors due to a private event.  We did have a look around Gonville and Caius College.  It gave me memories of reading a book called Porthouse Blues.  Here is Janice in one of the courtyards.

  It was starting to rain so we dived into the Whipple Museum of Science History. 

I was only enticed in on the promise that I could have a Waspberry Whipple ice cream!  Needless to say I was disappointed!

Whilst we were in we could hear the drumming of the rain on the roof, so we stayed inside until it stopped.  The museum was especially useful in that it proved to us that we knew very little or nothing about most areas of science.

Here is Janice making a new friend!  Don't ask what she is doing with her right hand!  Probably just checking the anatomical correctness of the model??  If this was a caption competition my entry would be, "When I squeeze please cough".

The weather was good when we came out and we managed a little shopping and coffee and cake before our return cycle back to the van.

This leg of our journey is now coming to an end.  We have a couple of visits to do on our route back up north.  Both are in the vicinity of Birmingham.  So with that in mind we are going to give the city a chance to impress us.  

By the way, today is. Quite a momentous day.....as it is the first day of Janice's retirement as it is the day she would have gone back to work if she had not retired.  Hooray!  Sorry for those of you who are still working.  We do feel a little guilty for being able to do the things we aim to do....but only a little.

Five weeks away!

We have managed to survive for five weeks away and covered quite a bit of ground.  Fortunately we were not apprehended for wild camping at Aldeburgh and we travelled to a CL between Stowmarket and Bury St Edmunds.  The village was called Woolpit.  It was a quaint little place that had lots of old buildings and you could imagine it being a set for a period drama.  The name of the place was nothing to do with wool but involved a story about a wolf pit for catching a wolf but according to the story two 'green'children fell into the pit and they were unable to speak.  Strange story!

The next day (Monday) was almost a wash out.  We stayed put on the site and apart from managing to do some exercise we spent the day reading, doing crosswords, listening to the radio and also watching a DVD (Life on Mars, the drama series about a police officer who had an accident and woke up as a policeman in 1973).

Tuesday has been an improvement and we visited Bury St Edmunds.  It looks a super place with Abbey Ruins and a Cathedral.

Another legend of the area.

St Edmundsbury Catherdral.  It makes me think of Edmund Blackadder!

We moved on to a village outside Cambridge.  The site is next to a rather alternative pub called The Missing Sock!  It seems to have a Turkish menu and is rather ramshackle at the back.  There is a delapidated double decker bus next to our field.  Nevermind, the cycle path goes straight into Cambridge.

Later in the afternoon we went into Cambridge for a recce.  It was pleasant and sunny. We just got our bearings and got some ideas about what to do tomorrow.

View from Kings College Chapel towards the college itself.

Taking a punt on Janice!

We had a little walk along the River Cam.

I am a regular watcher of University Challenge so whilst we are here I feel that I need to revise my knowledge of Renaissance Italian Art and Classical Music.  My standard answers are Caravaggio and Mozart....it doesn't matter what the questions are, I give the same answers anyway!

On a less academic note Cambridge was in the news this week for a different reason.  Following the leak of personal information by an adultery website it transpires that Cambridge was the place with the highest number of people who had signed up for adultery!  I wondered why Janice was holding my hand so tightly!  It should be me who is keeping an eye on Janice because it also turned out that the vast majority of the people on the website are men!

Brittain's best place!

From our stay on a church car park near Southwold we moved on for another night of wild camping.  We wanted to have a look at a couple of towns further down the East Anglia coast, namely Saxmundham and Aldeburgh.  We parked up at Saxmundham but didn't spend much time there.  I feel that it must have more history and significance that I haven't taken the trouble to find out about.  So apologies to Saxmundians who may be undersold by my blog.  

We left the van there and cycled on to Aldeburgh which I had high expectations of.  It is the place that Sue's Uncle Stephen and Auntie Barbara go for a holiday every year.  They always get fantastic weather and I had the impression that it was a quaint and cultured place on a pebbly beach.  We weren't disappointed.  It had a real English seaside feel without the gaudy and commercial stuff that we see at places like Blackpool (I like Blackpool in a different way).

The Moot Hall at Aldeburgh.

Drinking beer seems to be becoming a tradition.  The weather was fab and we managed a bit of sun bathing.

We were keeping an eye out for a place to wild camp for the night and decided (naughtily) to stay on the large council car park at the southern edge of the town despite the notice that overnight parking and camping were banned.  We thought we could bring the van later in the evening and no-one would bother.

That afternoon we cycled back towards Saxmundham but by a different route that took us to the village of Snape.

I couldn't resist taking the photo because I thought it would appeal to my daughter, Rebekah, who is a great Harry Potter fan.

Nearby was a place called Snape Maltings.  It was previously a place where grain was malted and now it includes various gift shops, cafes, pub and a large concert hall.  It was the concept of composer, Benjamin Brittain, who was born at Lowestoft and lived at Snape and later at Aldeburgh.  The connection of Brittain with Aldeburgh and the area seems to be still very influential because the Aldeburgh annual art and music festival is the main event of the area.  On a more negative note it seemed that the only thing I couldn't buy at the Maltings was 'malt'!

Janice is interacting with a piece of modern art by Barbara Hepworth.  She recently had an exhibition in Kendal.  I thought she was Barbara Woodhouse......but that is a completely different piece of work!

In the evening we drove to the Aldeburgh car park and walked into town to sample some more Adnams Beer.  There seem to be only three pubs in the town, quite a low number for the size of the place.  Back to the van for an illegal sleep....it sounds rather clandestine.