England

Sat 25 February 2017

Well, so far England has been fun!

The weather seems to alternate between sunny (but still cold), and raining (like it is now). Despite the cold, Laura is doing a fabulous job of coming on short runs with me - 3 times this week!

We’ve been jumping round visiting lots of people, as you can see on our map:

So far we’ve visited Beccy (my aunt), which was lovely, and she helped me sort out things like a bank account and a mobile number.

Then we went over to Cirencester and stayed with Harry, one of Laura’s friends. That was great fun, and we got to visit lots of old roman things. We went to Bath but we weren’t even allowed to get in the old bath!

After that we went to Andover, where we stayed with Becky and Tom, who are family friends of Laura’s and have 3 welsh terriers (two parents and a puppy!), who reminded me of Gromit, although much smaller and springier. We had a great time going to the bird sanctuary, and looking round Winchester (including the maybe original round table!).

We stayed there for about a week before going down to Fawley, to see Laura’s grandparents who are lovely. We stayed there for two nights before going to Salisbury to visit another of Laura’s school friends.

After that we closed the loop, coming back up to London to stay with my uncle Jon. It was great staying with Jon - I got to meet his new (to me) wife, and meet my new 6 month old cousin, Archie! We were also very close to the center of London, so we got to do lots of exploring and touristy things.

The weather has improved remarkably, and some days I can actually wear a t-shirt outside! Also, we’ve gotten to grips with the fearsome London tube system, though we still avoid it during rush hour.

We’ve gone to see two performances, one was a StageCoach show where we saw my cousin Alex perform, which was fun and surprisingly good. Nice to meet up with Beccy again too. We also went to see Wicked (it’s sort of an expansion on the Wizard of Oz) with a couple of Laura’s school friends who are in London, and that was great.

The last week or so Laura has been busy applying for graduate programmes (some of them take hours to apply for and make you do silly tests), and I’ve been busy with my new job.

We have been having loads of fun, and have started planning our trip back from The Big Cruise that Sam and Simon are taking us on. We’re planning on going from Naples to Rome to Venice (where we will meet up with Harry again!), then to Geneva to see CERN.