It's Been a Bit Quiet in Here Lately, Hasn't It?

So perhaps this is a good time to post up our holiday plans for this year, as they currently stand.

Shortly after Easter, we shall be off for a short tour of Provence with Travel Editions, getting there by Eurostar and TGV (and travelling first class as well, because we felt flush having paid off the mortgage in February). It's a five-day, six-night tour, and seems at least one day too short for what it packs in: we probably won't have time for the archaeology museum in Arles, for example (a town which seems from the guidebooks to deserve at least a day to itself, rather than the whole day we'll get in the rather less interesting Aix-en-Provence), but we have already told ourselves that it's France, it's reachable by train, and therefore we can easily go back at another time. (Mind you, we said the same about all the stuff we had to skip in Barcelona a few years ago, and we have still to organise ourselves to go back there.)

Then, towards the end of May, we shall be paying a visit to Hadrian's Wall Country with some LJ friends, staying in Haltwhistle and exploring such places as Hexham, Alston, and Vindolanda in between riding on the South Tynedale Railway. We shall of course take waterproofs and windproofs, but hope for better weather than that. (Countryside walking in driving rain and howling wind is most definitely not our idea of fun.) Then, in early July, we shall be holidaying in Swanage on the Isle of Purbeck, in a caravan owned by (and rented from) Judith's line manager at Natural England. We shall sketch and watercolour (well -- Judith will), ride bicycles around the place, visit places like Durdle Door and Corfe Castle, and read lots of books in the evenings.

After that....hmm. Travel Editions offers a number of other short breaks in France by Eurostar and TGV, and since we'll still have some annual leave entitlement and some money in hand once the summer is over we could always try out one or another of those. Mind you, the company also offers week-long excursions to the Aegean islands of Samos (from where one can visit Ephesus in Turkey) and Rhodes, which has lots of archaeology and architecture. But we'd have to get to those by air, and these days Judith tends to look most disapproving at the thought of flying anywhere. But how else will we get to Australia next year, where we've signed up for the fourth Australian world SF convention....

New Fence

For the anoraks amongst us, here's a couple of pictures of our new fence. Of course, they won't mean very much in the absence of photographs, for comparison, of the old and collapsing one, but for the record this fence consists of feather-edged panels (turned outwards so that the bars can be used to anchor climbing plants on our side) with a trellis on top, supported on concrete baseboards (to protect against rising damp) and with concrete uprights. Full details (for those for whom one anorak just isn't enough) on the Leyton Fencing website.

To finish off, here's a picture of some more frogspawn. There are now four clumps in the garden pond (and three in the allotment pond, according to Judith -- I haven't yet seen them for myself), and our next major project will be to drain and redig that, to both enlarge and deepen it and provide a new liner that (unlike the present one) doesn't have a pinhole leak somewhere in it. That will of course require moving the frogspawn to a temporary tank, which I hope we can manage before the tadpoles start hatching out....