The second wedding of Mr and Mrs Nix

One wedding is enough for some people, but Jo and Bill decided to have two - one in New Zealand and one in England. We were lucky enough to be able to make it to the second one in the village of Audley where they live.

The venue, along with a couple of local wedding crashers

A path of gravestones!

The weather was absolutely beautiful that day, and has been part of a spell of quite nice weather we've enjoyed over the last couple of weeks. Unfortunately conditions on the motorway weren't as good in the vicinity of Audley and we arrived at the wedding after the bride! Oops. Luckily we weren't the only ones.

The happy couple (Jo still managing to smile for the cameras, what a trooper :-)

I can't take any responsibility for the blurriness of this photo - at this point I disappeared for an hour and was later found at the bar drinking with one of Bill's mates.

The farmhouse B&B we stayed at had all sorts of animals, including a comical pack of dogs.

Ooh, lammy lamkins! (Imagine Sylvia's voice at this point)

It's a glitch in the Matrix. It means they've changed something.

Visitors

Hello again.

In the week up to and including Easter we had some friends come and stay with us. The first ones were gypsy travellers Em and Chris from New Zealand. They are currently living in Norway but were visiting Britain for an Easter orienteering event in Newcastle.

We had a nice day with them out at Glentress Forest near Edinburgh - not doing the usual touristy stuff, but instead a fun-filled activity day of mountain biking, orienteering and walking. Nice :-) Unfortunatly we didn't take any photos of that.

Kiwis galore - L-R, Mark, Chris, Steve, Em, Anitra, Abbie, Ed

Em and Chris were able to give us valuable advice on cycle touring based on their experiences. Eg. if you buy a secondhand old mountainbike, seriously overload it and then ride down really rough paths, you can expect important bits to break.

Mr and Mrs Steve George visited us at Easter. Ele and Steve live down near Wales (sounds awesome!) and came up for Tom's wedding, some hillwalking and of course to see us! A good time was had by all, doing some more traditional touristy stuff on what was actually quite a nice day for Edinburgh.

Edinburgh does get called the Rome of the north, but this piece of faux-classical architecture is actually a Victorian folly (never completed)

Standing on Calton Hill, looking out over Arthur's Seat and the Salisbury Crags

The recently renovated St Andrew's Square

This panarama came out slightly wonky! It's St Mary's Cathedral, and it's right across the road from my work. Despite biking past it twice a day, I had never actually been inside until now. I'm not sure if it's because we're spoilt for cool old buildings in Edinburgh, or because you tend to under-value the attractions of the place you live in, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it's really cool inside. It's quite a modern cathedral by UK standards (late 19th Century, similar age to the Chch cathedral I guess) so had fewer tombs, sarcophagi etc. But it did have soom cool contemporary stained glass. Thanks Ele, for making sure we went inside :-)


It was really great to catch up with some good friends we haven't seen for a while, especially since we're leaving soon and may not see them again before we go. On that note, Sylvia and I both gave our notice at work last week, to finish at the end of May. I guess our travel plans will be the topic of future blog posts/emails but the rough plan is to arrive back in NZ in early October after visiting northern Scotland, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and the Balkans, Greece and maybe Turkey and Canada. Whew!

A week in England

A couple of weeks ago we crossed the border to go visit some of our friends 'doun south'. It was a bit of a join-the-dots exercise, and we still didn't get to see everyone we would have liked to.

First up was Cambridge to visit my aunt, uncle and cousin. Mark had only met them at Christmas 2007 when he was very sick so it was great to get to catch up without him trying to cough his lungs out.

From there we swifly moved on to our next university town, Oxford, where we had the privilege of staying at Christ Church College with Helen. Here we are with the grass that you're not allowed to walk on.

She also gave us the grand tour of the city, including the Bodlean library, and a cake that looks very like the Bodlean library (but presumably tastes better).

From here we moved to the illustrious Guildford, where we stayed with Pac, Kristyn and Stuart the rabbit in their lovely flat on the South Downs Way. We borrowed their mountain bikes and went for a little ride and then a little run. We also had yummy raclette. To say thank you we left Stuart a present.

From there we made a lightning quick visit to my uncle house in Devizes, before arriving at the the highlight and purpose of our visit: Swindon. And yes, we did go round and round the magic roundabout (6 roundabouts in one). And yes, we did have a competition to see how many roundabouts it took to get home from the park (26, I won). But that actually wasn't the reason for our visit: our good friend Lindsay was turning 30 and along with a load of other folk we'd made the trek for a wonderful weekend house party to celebrate. Unfortunately we don't have any photos of the event, but be assured it was loud, fun and messy... and that was just Yana.