20050613 Last week on Days of the Bowens

This must come as quite a shock, yes an update in less than a week since the last! We have had a couple highlights this week, long boating on Wednesday, Gwyn rolled off her City and Guilds project and is moving onto a new project at Siemens in Staines (Ali G hails from Stains too), our anniversary - eight years as an item, bank accounts finally being sorted out, both now with national insurance numbers, booked our trip to Le Tour (Tour de France), and I saw the Bat mobile!

Long boating…. in London?... sounds a bit odd, but Shawn’s god mother, Josie, who lives over in Maida Vale (posh area) has a long boat, and yes there are canals in London. We were invited to a dinner cruise which took us from Maida Vale up to Camden Town and back. We were welcomed on board with a ‘long’ glass of wine and set off with Shawn at the helm, guiding us down the windy cannel through some long tunnels under roads and past some of the wealthiest areas in London. Houses here go for a staggering £10 million and are owned by some rich Arab sheiks. Now we know where to hide if the Al K’Aida decide to attack London…the only place that won’t be bombed! Mom, we saw Michael Flatly’s place too,not too shabby! We moored up at Camden, all of the market was packed up, but the weird people (punks, fairies, goths, walking S&M advertisements, pin cushions, etc) were still around. To continue past Camden required going down a lock, which was just too much effort after the amount of wine that we had already consumed, so it was an about turn, off to find a spot to settle for dinner. Strangely we came to a holt alongside the London zoo…. Josie prepared us a pasta dinner and the 7 passengers sat inside, enjoying the spoils. After that, we decided to take ourselves for a tour of the zoo, strangely, one can walk straight into the zoo even though it was way past closing time, now 21h00 and still light. It felt a bit odd being the only visitors, and so did the creature features, all giving us the look, which eventually got to us... so we moves on our way. We only managed to home at midnight, but it was well worth it!

Saturday, we popped down to Waterloo station to get our Euro Star tickets for our France Trip, very efficient system the Euro Star people have going. Looking forward to seeing Lance come home for his seventh gold! Shawn and Nadia went off to The Parade of the Colours, celebrating the Queens Birthday and were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the royal family, Camilla and William included. Then we popped down to Covent Garden, and guess what, Batman rocked up, promoting his new movie Batman Begins, giving us a sneak peak at his car, wow wow wow… Gwyn had to drag me away, it must have had a V12 under the hood, lots of flaps everywhere…. Any mans dream. Saturday night, to celebrate the Eight years that Gwyn and I have been a couple, it was out to supper at an American restaurant called Old Orleans. We decided on a ‘Chocolate Brownie Sunday for Two’ for dessert, and when it came all the heads in the restaurant turned, a little boy sitting at the table next to us chirped up, ‘look at the size of it’. It was huge, the equivalent of a gold fish bowl full of brownies, cream, ice cream, caramel and all the good stuff…. This was after we had a huge meal…. So much for the diet! Anyhow this feasting was followed by a movie, ‘Mr & Mrs Smith’ well recommended!

Next weekend we are off to Birmingham for a visit, so watch this space for updates.

Lol & Gwyn

20050602 We have Contact

Houston…we have contact! Sorry for the delay in updates, but when you read the rest of this web page, you will understand the amount of changes in our lives over the past month, hectic! We just actually got back from a great adventure to the Lake District, where we stayed on a stud farm, minutes away from one of the northern Cumbria towns, Keswick. A bit more about that later….

Since our last update we have moved from Southfields (Southern London), to Ealing (Western London) to a little ground floor flat which has made our lives a lot easier (no more stairs to climb with shopping and suitcases), the tubes and trains are just down the road and we are in walking distance to all the shops… really cool. I got a cool job with British Sky Broadcasting, probably the reason why the comms have calmed down.You have probably seen Sky News on TV, well Sky in the UK are something like Multichoice, only difference is that they also own their own channels, like Discovery, Sky news and Sport, National Geographic etc… I am responsible for the website http://www.sky.com/ordersky/home, am part of the 300 member DTH (direct to home) Marketing team and am loving it!

Now back to the Lake district, Monday was a bank holiday in England so we took the opportunity to use our long weekend constructively, so after work on Friday we caught a bus up to Manchester, which was supposed to arrive at 24h00 in the evening but only got there at 2h00 the next morning due to all the bank holiday traffic. We then stayed the night at Gwyn’s moms place (very bright but very cute) and shot up to the Lakes the next morning. Only about a 2 hour drive from Man and well worth it. Tessa had to work on the weekend, so Bronny and one of Tessa’s colleagues, Cornel, joined us on our road trip. The lake district reminded me a lot of SA strangely, but not of one place in particular, bits of and pieces, like driving along the waters edge of Knysna lagoon, the stark green mountains and crystal streams of Lesotho, the forests and waterfalls in Mmpumalanga and the town atmosphere of Dullstroom along with its fishing. The first day almost blew us away, literally, the wind was pumping, the ferry to cross lake Windermere was closed and all I could think was, where is Jonny with his wind surfer, Bjorn Dunkerbeck would have given his left ….. to surf in that kind of wind. So we meandered our way along the lakes from Newby Bridge, Past Windermere (Peter Rabbit lives there), then Ambleside, Grasmere and to Keswick had a cool pub lunch and then checked in at the lovely little guest house / horse farm. After the lack of sleep the evening before we had a bit of a power nap and relaxed for the remainder of the afternoon. At about 20h00 (only goes dark at about 21h30) we took a stroll along the Derwent Water (lake next to Keswick) followed by dinner at an Italiano restaurant, where some smelly Italian served us awesome Italian nosh!

The next day was more sight seeing, a lot of driving on small country lanes and stopping at picturesque little villages. Our first stop was at Hawkeshead, were Beatrix Potter used to live and then took the ferry across Lake Windermere (it wasn’t so windy this time). We tried to stop at a couple of places, but the sun was out and in true British tradition, all the poms were out, which meant that there was no parking for the tourists. In the end, we went through to Grasmere where we took a tour through Dove Cottage (Wordsworth’s love shack by the sounds of it) and then strolled through the village looking at all the little shops and galleries and crystal clear rivers (fly fishing of note guys!). All of this action obviously tires one out so the power nap followed shortly. At 20h30 we awoke, still bright outside, and went for a long stroll into the country, and low and behold, we found another river of note….please excuse all the river pics in our gallery, I could not help myself. The area where we stayed had lots of little country walks where the farmers have seemed to open up their lands for the good of tourism, making the area very popular with the outdoor and adventure junkies.

Our last day started off with another hearty breakfast, and slowly starting making our way back to Manchester where Tessa was awaiting us for lunch. After lunch it was back to the bus station for the long trip home. After an hours delay, again!, we managed to get settled in our reasonably luxurious coach (when compared to Friday’s) for our trip home. We left Manchester at 16h00 and arrived back in London at 20h30, meaning that we only got back to the flat after 21h00. Lessons learnt…..go to the Lake District again on a non bank holiday weekend and always take the train.

Other than our travels, we are managing to settle in quite well. The ADSL line is up and running and the bank accounts are almost sorted out. We are awaiting our credit cards now so that we can start booking more holidays. On the 18th, we are going up to Birmingham to visit Gran and Grandad, looking forward to that, and then hopefully Tessa and Bronny will be coming to London over Wimbledon, but we will see how it pans out.