The flight over was easy enough as we left Darwin and flew to Singapore and stayed there for 24 hours for a bit of a rest and a look around the city.
I have to say that we simply love Singapore. Everything there is done so efficiently and with such politeness it makes the rest of the world look rude in comparison.
Aside from checking out the shops (and how many specialist designer shops does one city need?) we went for a ride on the Singapore Flyer - currently the largest ferris wheel in the world.
It was an amazing thing to do and the views (we were blessed with a beautiful, clear day) were astounding.
One the way up! Singapore is an apartment city and these apartments look to be some of the nicest.
Difficult to see easily, but this building has a boat perched on top of it!
We left Singapore on a Qatar Airways flight, stopping over in Doha for an hour. Great service, great planes, but the Doha stop is one that would make us think twice about flying with them again.
Perhaps once they have built the new terminal and you don't have to suffer with the bus transfers.
England - well predictably, this was not as warm and pleasant as Singapore (nor home in Darwin) so we ended up rugging up and trying to avoid the wind.
We drove to Crewe to see Karen's sister in law, Glynis, and then a couple of days later we drove over the Peak District to my old home town of Chesterfield.
Yes - it was snowing! As you can see, it can be really pretty when it is snowing, but it is definitely survival unfriendly.
Speed limits officer? What speed limits?
The little Vauxhall we rented. At ten pounds a day ($16 Aussie) it was a great little runaround.
The view from my brother's place.
Us with my brother outside a local pub. Yes, it IS snowing.
Snow is not a bad surface to drive on as it has some grip and is predictable. It gets worse when the road surface underneath is covered in ice though.
Chesterfield is an old town - it has its origins as an early Saxon settlement before the Romans took over and made it a Roman town. The earliest architecture left in the town is medieval though.
Anyway, the pump above is the old medieval town pump and is situated in the middle of the market. It has been dressed up a little, but it (apparently) still works and forms the centre of the town.
There is an old area just off the market place called "The Shambles" which also dates back over a thousand years. The pub in this photo is in the middle of The Shambles and, according to the plaque on the wall, was used as a recruiting post for the Knights Templar when they were looking for volunteers to go and fight in the crusades.
I grew up with this stuff and thought nothing of it, but now I am appreciating it a little more.
We returned to Crewe for the wedding and to buy me a new suit.
We did the shopping around the town and then went to Nantwich (where we found a suit that we liked) and enjoyed a couple of beers there.
Nantwich is an old town too and the pics above show some of the buildings that date back 500 odd years. Nice town,
The new suit - I don't really like the modern style of having things look too small, but what the heck.
Karen's outfit - she loved it in the shop and hated it when she got it out for the wedding. I liked it though!
One of a million wedding photos!
After the wedding we drove south to see friends on the south coast. I really dislike the UK motorways these days. The lanes are narrow and crowded and the people seem to drive so very fast and so close together. I can cope with the speed, but the fact that someone is only a couple of metres away from my rear bumper at 140kph is quite disturbing.
So I decided to take the more scenic route through the Cotswolds and around Oxford and these photos were taken on that trip.
Yes, it was snowing.
We stopped for a bowl of soup at a cafe and some cheeky devil parked his Aston Martin DB9 next to our powerhouse Vauxhall!
We reached Milford on Sea and settled into our B&B before catching up with Carolyn and Bruce.
Carolyn had donated a kidney to Bruce (what a generous and heroic thing to do!) a couple of weeks before we got there so they were both less than lively but it was great to catch up with them.
While we were there we took a walk along the cliff edge to Barton on Sea to get a bit of exercise.
These little huts are bathing huts and each is owned by a person and they use them to store their beach things. Given that the beach is made of pebbles measured in inches across this probably includes some substantial boots.
We left Milford on Sea and headed off to Sway in the New Forest. This is close by so we detoured to Bournemouth to check it out. We walked the pier and nearly froze solid - Cold just doesn't do it justice.
We ran away from freezing Bournemouth and headed to Sway, but we called into a local pub there before we got to Sway. Magic - pubs are one thing that the UK does really well.
While we were staying with Judith and Paul in Sway we had some other mutual friends, Jayne and Bob, come along as well. I have to say that this couple of days was the best fun we have had in ages. We had forgotten just how much we loved these people.
Everyone took the day off work for our visit and we pent that day chatting. At lunchtime we went for a walk through the New Forest to a pub for lunch and it was just a magic time.
New Forest ponies - more of a road hazard than roos over here!
Look! It isn't snowing!
The obligatory silly photo. The track we walked was often under water so we all got muddy and wet, but somehow that didn't matter!
I will leave the story there for now, but to summarise things, we had a great time catching up with people and even if the weather was typical British winter stuff, it didn't dampen the joys of the trip.
