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!