Holy Moly I am Slack!!! June 11 - June 21

Well last week was by all accounts very quiet.

On Sunday the 11 we with met up with Luke and Belinda in a pub to celebrate Luke's birthday. And went to Nando's after that for dinner.

My work was soooooo quiet, I was soooooo bored

I didn't play netball on Tues 15 because the mixed had a bye and i took the opportunity not to play women's to rest my shin splints. I am not supposed to play netball for three weeks to let them recover - ha! We'll see :)

Otherwise it was pretty quiet until Friday night. Of course we filled in the gaps watching the world cup. On Friday Luke and Belinda came around for a sleep over - We went to the Redback for some dancing, before getting a relatively early night. We were going camping in the morning.

The next day we got an early start to Eastbourne, our destination was a little campsite on Pevensey Bay just east of Eastbourne. We left early and arrived in the village of Pevensey in time to have brunch at probably the only cafe in the village. It was packed and did not disappoint. After that we found the campsite and set up our tents. Andy had taken the good tents to Germany (he is there wathcing the world cup) so we were stuck with the slightly less good ones... :) They were waterproof so what more could you want.

The main reason that we chose this as our destination was to checky out Beachy Head, some beautiful white chalk cliffs, it did not disappoint. We found the path and walked along the cliffside up to a couple of the veiwing points. It was a glorious day, (we all got a little pink) but the veiws were well worth it. Some very steep bits though, almost made us wish we had driven to the top parking spot :)

The afternoon was spent recuperating on the pebbly beach at Eastbourne, the boys thought breifly about going swimming, and credit to Luke for actually getting in, but the water was very cold, Duncan didn't get past his ankles. That is a lot more than i can say - i didn't get off the towel :). I do have to mention how much I like pebble beaches, no sand blowing around and no sand in your unmentionables, and the pebbles are actually quite comfortable to lie on.

We headed back to Pevensey bay and got fish and chips, which we took down to the beach to eat. It was unanimous that this was the best and freshest fish we had all had since coming to the UK, however the Poms do seem to insist on having their chips soggy.

We had a few goodnight drinks around the campfire (campfire = two candles bought at the local supermarket), before Belinda and I retired. Dunc and Luke stayed up for another couple of hours burning stuff.... apparently you can get quite a good flame out of a dorrito chip......

It wasn't the best nights sleep that we had had, not because it was hot or uncomfortable but because the two little girls in tent next to us would not shut up, especially around 4:30-5 in the morning......

The next morning we went back to the same cafe for the same breakfast and again it did not disappoint. We hit a local car boot sale, and stocked up on reading material before taking in the ruins of Pevensey castle.

Feeling all pretty tired by this point we headed back to London stopping only at a PYO strawberry patch. We filled a couple of baskets and headed home - we had our priorities straight, and had to get back before the football started.

Work this last week so far has been much busier thank goodness, it was getting so frustrating only having 3 patients on the ward each day to split between two therapists and a student. My contract is coming to an end so as well as working i have been job hunting.

Our big news is of course on Monday Gordon and Mark arrived. Yay!!! It was so good to see them. We met them at the airport and they are staying with us at the moment while sorting out places to live and work etc.

Thanks to my mum for sending some clothes, some chicken salt and some much missed Strawberry fredos...mmmmm.... they were so delicious. Keep them coming :)
Thanks to Dunc's mum for sending chrissy presents, i promise i won't look at them til then :)

Well I must go and rescue the poor pigeon in the garden who is being stalked by Stitch. Hope everyone is well
lots of love
Gemma (&Duncan)

PS we have the photos of our camping trip up

Friday 2nd June - Sunday 11th June

The end of our first week back from Italy (Friday 2 June) was marked by a bbq at Luke and Belinda's. Chicken, capsicums and tomoatoes on the vine barbequed, complimented by some very very cheap south african wine :). We headed down to a local pub for some dancing before wearily walking home and falling into bed (we had a sleepover at L&B)

Sunday we had lunch at a Pub called the Eagle in Farringdon for Sara Gawneds birthday, it was a beautiful afternoon, and the food was delicious, or so we thought. The next morning, i was not feeling very well, and my friendly dietician informed me it takes 6hours- 3 days for the onset of food poisoning, so maybe the steak wasn't so good :)

Needless to say, I had Monday, Tuesday and half of Wednesday off, and Duncan also had Tuesday off being poorly. Well it is one way to lose weight, and it sure beats swallowing a tape worm.

Friday 9 June - Congratulations to Guy and Linda on the very quick birth of a healthy little girl. Name to be confirmed.

Saturday 10 June - The sun has finally come out. With a vengeance infact. Yes London is in the midst of a heatwave, and that means 1 or 2 days over 29 degrees ;). The weekend was glorious and even bordered on being hot, so after England's first game in the world cup, we walked down to Gunnersbury Park and had a bbq.

Kerry had just come back from NZ, so Luke and Bel and the flatties (minus Andy who is in Germany for the Aussie games, and Bron who was at work cooked up a feast.


Most of the supermarkets sell these tiny little single use bbq, which are perfect for taking to the park. Obviously due to fire restrictions at home it is just not an option.

There were all sorts of fun and games. Inlcuding one called B-U-T-T. This involved all of the boys standing in a circle throwing/kicking the ball to each other. If you dropped it or did a really bad throw, you got a B, if you did it again a U etc until the word 'BUTT' The first person that gets the word has to bend over in front of a tree and have the ball kicked at them. Boys!!

Here is a picture of Duncan partaking in some kicking, at least it is only kicking and not receiving :) Oh and if you miss the tree you have to go and line up with the other guy - Boys!!

Last Gallery

Morning all,

The last gallery of Italy from the Amalfi Coast, ingeneously named Italy Part 4, has now been uploaded and also 2 movies. One is outside St Peter's Basilica in St Peter's Square, and the other is from pedal boat looking back at the coast of Amalfi. So preeeettty. Enjoy!

kthanxbye.

Galleries

Just quickly, we have put up 3 of the 4 Italy galleries and Gem has a long post below for you to read. Hope all is well! D.

Tuesday 30 May - Sunday 4th June

It was a very quiet week for me at work. The hospital for some reason was just really really quiet. All the wards had empty beds.

We had a couple of good games at netball, won our mixed game very convincingly, the girls had a loss but it was close. My shin splints held up ok.

On Friday we went to Luke and Belinda’s for a sleep over. Had bbq chicken, with bbq capsicum and vine tomatoes, before hitting the pub for some dancing. It was a very fun night.

We had a big fried breakfast in the morning.

Sunday was lunch for Sara G’s birthday at a pub in Farringdon.

I am sorry that it has taken so long to get these done. I have done two of the four galleries from Italy, hopefully it won’t be long before the others will be done and up. Below are some stories from Italy, hopefully they won’t be bore you too much J

Love to you all.

Our week in Italy 20-29 May (Sorry it is really long)

Italy

The reason that you haven’t heard from us for so long is we have been gallivanting around the world. Yes we have been on another holiday, this time to Italy.

Saturday 20th
We began our holiday with some not-so-patient waiting for our camp mattresses which were supposed to be delivered during the week and did not come. When they still did not come by lunch we began to panic and borrowed some from friends. We finally got our bags packed and hit Heathrow. Even before we had left the airport I had spent some money…. Ooopsy – but what can I say it was a beautiful skirt.

The plane ended up being delayed so we had a little bit of a wait, fortunately they made up most of the time in the air. When we arrived in Italy we were very surprised at the complete lack of security in Customs. Duncan walked straight through, being on an EU passport they didn’t even take it from him. As for me, they stamped my passport, but they did not even look at the photo page!!

Our plane arrived at around 9:45. Getting from the airport into Rome was seamless on the Leonardo Da Vinci express train, but from there things got a little bit interesting. We were arriving on a night when the train out to our accommodation was undergoing maintenance so we had to take 4 buses to get there. This is where our drama began. All the ticket machines seemed to be broken when it came to accepting change. And there were lots of dodgy looking characters that were ‘retrieving’ coins out of the coin slots when they got jammed and you walked away. When we did find a ticket machine, it only had 4 euros of change to give, so we had to buy six tickets, because it was a very honest machine and wouldn’t let you take just two if it could only give you 4 euros back.

So we caught the first bus (MA1) and got off at the first stop with minimal trouble. We had quite a long wait at the next stop, and we weren’t entirely sure that we were at the right stop but fortunately we met an Australian-German couple (Cath and Christian) who were supposed to be at the same stop and were going the same direction. Finally we made it to the next stop: Piazza Mancini, where we waited with them for over an hour for the next bus. By then we were starting to get a little tired and impatient. Finally the N24 came, by that time we had changed our accommodation plans as Cath and Christian recommended the place they were at, it was one bus ride closer and we didn’t have to look for it. We were going camping!

By the time we got to the campsite, checked in, set up our tents and crawled into our sleeping bags it was 3:30am. Yes it took us nearly 6 hours to get there, a trip that took us about an hour when we did in reverse later on in the week. Ahhh the memories.

Sunday 21st
The campsite was awesome and had the most amazing bathrooms. We purchased our three day travel pass from the office and headed into Rome. We caught the train from Due Ponti to Rome (Flaminio) which took about 15minutes.
Our morning began with a leisurely stroll along the Tiber down to Campo di Fiori, a piazza where they used to burn people, that is now a fresh produce and flower market. We didn’t see much fresh produce but the flowers were pretty. From there we walked to Piazza Navona, a spectacular square with three beautiful fountains, and musicians and artists busking and selling their work.

I feel like this little story is not doing any of these places justice as they have so much history behind them, but if I wrote everything I had learned we would be here all day.

From the piazza to the Pantheon. Like many churches the pantheon began it’s life as a Roman temple and was converted to a church much later when Christianity began to make its mark. The temple was once largely bronze which was stripped away to make an alter for St Peters Basilica

The large, impressive but slightly obnoxious Monumento Vittorio Emmanule. A monstrosity built in the 19th century made to look old, built to mark the unification of Italy. Dunc thought it was alright I wasn’t so taken with it.

Behind it was the famous museum Campidoglio, which unfortunately we ran out of time to visit, but we walked past and down to the Forum, the archeological ruin of ancient Rome. At the end of the forum was the Colusseum. It was very impressive to look at but very expensive to get in, so we contented ourselves with the view from outside.

It was a very hot day, so we took the opportunity to refill our water bottles and drink in the shade. From there we went walking to Fontana di Trevi, a spectacular fountain. We fought our way through the crowds to throw a coin into the fountain. Apparently this is essential to ensure one’s return to Rome.

We headed back to the train station through the amazing shopping district, stopping for pizza Rome style (thin base, really thin compared to what we know), before crashing out very early in our tent.

Monday 22nd
We met up with Cath and Christian in the morning and joined the queue…. It was long, very long, it took a couple of hours to get in.

The Vatican museum was…. (I am running out of adjectives)….dazzling, I heard it said that if you spent an 8 hour day in the museum, with a one hour lunch break, and spent one minute at every piece in the museum it would take 6 years to see everything. With that in mind it is easy to understand how we got a little bit lost. But it was very grand, and we left feeling much smarter. We did rent audio guides, but I think it would be nice to do a tour next time so someone could point out all the really important ones…..

The museum is a one way affair that winds its way through the many corridors and ends up in the Sistine chapel. My jury is still out on the Sistine Chapel, Michaelangelo’s work in there is undoubtedly unparalleled, but there were so many people it was hard to fully appreciate it.

That evening Cath and Christian cooked us pasta in their little campervan, so we enjoyed good company, good food and good wine until the wine ran out, the shop closed and we got in trouble for being too loud (ooopsy).

Tuesday 23rd

St Peter’s Basilica – I just don’t know where to start with this. It was a definite highlight for both of us. Again another enormous queue, but somehow we got lucky and joined a free English speaking tour with Douglas from Icon group – a NGO group of Art Historians. We were a bit worried that there was going to be a catch, but they use the tour as advertisement for other paid tours. The word basilica is “meeting place of the king,” many basilicas were Ancient Roman structures which were later adapted by the Church as churches.

You could spend hours in their marveling at the feats of Engineering, that make a place with the standing capacity of 95,000 people appear like a large cathedral, not something the size of two American football fields. Cherubs were over 6 feet in length, lettering over 10 feet, creating many optical illusions. The front of the basilica was torn down and put up 2-3 times in its 120year construction history, depending on who was in charge of the architecture. I could go on and on but I won’t bore you as this description of our Italy trip is going to be long enough….. feel free to call us for more detailed explanation.

After the basilica we walked along the river to Trastavere, a suburb of Rome a little out of the way, it is much quieter and less touristy and this means fabulously cheap meals mmm mmm. Possibly our best Italian meal 4 courses for 10 euro (most places in rome you could get a pizza and a drink for 10 euro). I had bruschetta, lasagna, veal, and a yummy yummy dessert that I didn’t get the name of so probably will never be able to have again L

We celebrated our last night in Rome at our little campsites pizzeria, having pizza which was really thin and crispy.

Wednesday 24

Zoom, zoom, zoom…

Remember that mammoth 5 hour expedition to the campsite, well getting back only took us 1hour and a half. Back at the airport we picked up our brand new freely upgraded Fiat Punto which until it met us had only done 8km.

Drove to Naples which only took us a couple of hours. Our intention was too spend the afternoon moseying around the National Archeological Museum, which is supposed to be one of the best of it’s kind in Europe. Unfortunately driving in Naples is like trying to cross a river of molten lava in a plastic boat…… Very hair raising and just waiting for the accident to happen. We found the museum but could not find any parking anywhere, Naples has the highest organised and petty crime rate around so we were reluctant to leave the car anywhere that wasn’t a secure parking place. Our opinion of Naples was not very good, it appears dirty and run down. So unfortunately we were forced to abandon our plans and high tailed it out of there. Cath and Christian had told us the only rule when driving in Italy is do not stop – ever!!! Not for stop signs or red lights, or anything – just keep swimming, just keep swimming…… We made it through Naples and back onto the Austostraad and headed to Ercolano, the modern suburb of Naples which was once Herculaneum, destroyed by molten mud after the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 79AD.

The ruins were unbelievable, it amazed me to see colours still on the wall from how they were painted, and the floors still maintained their mosaics.

After Herculaneum we drove to Pompeii and found another little campsite, and had pizza Napoli style, which by comparison to Rome is thick, but not thick like we had at home, possibly the best pizza we’ve had. They even provided us with entertainment over dinner, as they were trying to set up the projector to watch a football game.

Thursday 25

Walking distance from the campsite, Pompeii was also destroyed by the eruption, but not molten mud, pyroclastics. The ash and gas from the eruption. Pompeii was a much bigger city over 35 acres of excavation and around 20 of that available to the public. Again just astonishing a town that was seemingly stopped in time. During excavations they actually found loaves of bread!!

Duncan’s highlight was the gladiator arena, where as mine was the bodies that they found in the same position that they died in, with the expressions on their face. We grabbed some fruit and crackers and cheese from the local supermarket and ate in the car on the way to Sorrento.

Sorrento was a very beautiful peninsular town. We had a cliff-side campsite with views over the bay which was very pretty at night. We wandered down to the coast in the afternoon, I say coast and not beach because there wasn’t really any sand. The town was very pretty and we spent the afternoon just walking. We did see a function centre on the cliff being set up for a wedding reception – nice place for a wedding.

We had dinner right on the limited beach that was there, watching the sunset – ahh romantic. We also made an interesting observation: there were no seagulls, pigeons but no seagulls.

Being cliffside the ground was very very hard!! But surprisingly we slept well.

Friday 26th
We got a very early start to Positano, as we thought we would try and beat most of the traffic. The coastal road was windy and sometimes a little hair-raising being right on the cliff. Positano was uniquely situated and very photogenic. Unfortunately though, there was not a lot of urban planning and just one windy road in and one windy road out. The rest of the access was largely pedestrian and involved stairs, and a lot of them.
After we had taken a few pictures we decided that we would skip Positano and park in a nearby village Monteperturso. From there we walked upwards to Nocelle, a tiny little village with no vehicle access at all – just mules. It was a pretty walk and we climbed lots and lots of steps. More steps than we needed cause Duncan took us the wrong way. The views were wonderful. We were looking for a hole in a rock where Mary and the Devil had a altercation, but we couldn’t find the rock and there were not many people to ask. There were some very strange possessed cats though.

Once we climbed up there we realised that we had forgotten to get money out though so we had no cash for food – whoopsy J So our stay in Nocelle was short but sweet.

The next stop on our itinerary was another village on the coast called Amalfi – the town for which the coast was named. It was an adorable unashamedly tourist driven town, not as bad as Positano, and where we planned to spend the final days of our holiday. We found our camp site which was in a village nearby called San Lazzaro, granted it was about an hour away from Amalfi but it was “cheaper than chips”. It was family run place that looked like it was actually in the courtyard of an old gatehouse next to the village church.

We put up our tent and got back in our car and drove to Ravello, another beautiful mountain top village. Well known as the ‘play ground’ for many celebrities. It has beautiful wine, beautiful villas and beautiful art galleries, and is a little like a much older, Italian Margaret River - maybe minus the hippies J.

We had dinner that night at a tiny little family run Pizzeria, it was a hilarious evening. Th restaurant was completely empty except for us, and when we looked out the back we could see the whole family having their dinner. The papa would come and take our orders in between their courses. The cost of the meals was minimal so we thought we would have a couple of courses. The little man spoke no English. I said for Primi I would like Lasagne, but he said “lasagna? No!” I changed my course and then flicked to the pizza page (bearing in mind this is a pizzeria) and went to order a pizza and he said “pizza? No!” That completely through me, I now had no idea of what I wanted for dinner and could not for the life of me remember how to ask for more time. We were both very confused until suddenly “uno momento” came to mind! Once we had decided on our primi and secondi we tried to order a glass of white wine and red wine, we ended up with a bottle of red!!

A lovely dinner and a bottle of red under our belts we went back to our tent, where we had the worst night’s sleep ever! The church bells rang every 15 minutes for the whole night!!!!

Saturday 27

We caught the bus down to Amalfi and our first stop was the beach where we hired a sun bed each and spent the morning getting rid of our London white, we took a paddle boat out and went for a swim, read our books did sudoku, it was divine.

Around midday when everyone else was at lunch we took a boat out to visit Grotta Dello Smerelda: The Emerald Grotto. A see cave into which a tunnel led under the water allowing light and turning the water a shimmering emerald colour. Because we were being smarties and going at lunch time there was just us and another couple.

While we were waiting and after we came back from our little boat ride we spent some time watching what looked like an adaptation of water polo and la cross played in kyaks. It was quite violent which made for a good spectator sport.

In the afternoon we wandered the alleys souvenir shopping, before heading back to San Lazzaro for dinner. The meal wasn’t the greatest and I think we must have been dead tired because the church bells did not keep us up this night.

Sunday 28th May

Every home must have its end, ours ended on Sunday. I drove most of the way back to Rome (da da da da). We were early and stress free to the airport, even after getting lost in the airport car park.

Monday 29th May

Even though we were technically no longer on holiday, the 29 was a bank holiday. Our plans were to go with Luke and Belinda to the Cheese Rolling Festival, but the weather had been so terrible while we were away and was not forecast to be any better that the official website was telling people not to come as the parking fields were completely boggy.

Instead we went to see X-Men 3, which was entertaining. After we went to a Persian Restaurant for dinner, which was quite delectable