May Flowers 2016

We arrived back in the country this year on the afternoon of 30th April. It's now 31st May and I wanted to get this post done today before the marvellous month of May ends. I do so love the word 'May' - with a capital letter. It makes me think of blue skies and light air and floatiness.

I had thought often about how we were missing winter this year, apart from our week in Japan in December. What I hadn't thought about what how lovely it would be to return to the UK for May and see it all at once in its Spring glory. I try to keep a flower diary where I record my first sightings of each flower each year. It has made me much more aware of flowers and I have learnt the names of some more and am pleased when I do it. It does however stress me sometimes to be always looking for the new flowers and I sometimes forget to appreciate them at their peak. This year I have been able to enjoy May in its fullness. I am sure my flower diary is packed away in some box or other so I can't write in their about this month. Instead I shall record here the Spring life that I can remember. 

- Gorgeous heavy blossom. I love it when the trees look laden. 

- Oil seed rape, or as I like to think of it, 'fields of sunshine'. 

- Roses

- Forget-me-nots

- Lilac

- Gorse

- Wild flowers that I don't know the names of. 

- Geraniums

- Pansies (not sure if that's the proper plural!?)

- Wisteria 

- Clematis

- Lupins 

- Tulips

- Rhododendrons 

- Iris

- Forsythia 

- Horse chestnut pink and white blossom
- Daisies
- Dandelions
- Valerian - Mum identified this one for me.

Return from travel musings

We are back in the UK! We have had such a fantastic year, that we have had mixed feelings about returning. We have been so pleased to see family again and they have greeted us so nicely. Here are a few other things I've noted on being back: 

- It was nice to breeze through immigration for a change although arriving at Gatwick station we were greeted with the message: 'due to signalling problems, the 15:03 to Reading has been cancelled'!

- It has been colder than I was expecting. I tried to run home from Malvern station to get the car for our luggage. But it felt more like December to me and the cold seemed to fill my windpipe. 

- I hadn't thought much about seeing the delights of Spring: blossom, forget-me-nots, fields of oil seed rape. All are making me smile. 

- I keep getting surprised to be paying in pounds with no tax added to the final price. 

- It's exciting having data out and about on the phone! Although wandering around Loughborough looking for the museum, it took us a while to remember that we could use our phone to check how close we were!

- Finding even the grey skies, slightly grimy streets, posters and graffiti familiarly reassuring. 

- Pricking my ears on hearing such a variety of British accents and remembering that that is as it should be here!

We started our plans of getting outdoorsy in the UK by visiting some Bluebell Woods with John's parents. (Even though we were yet to find some trousers in our belongings!)

   

   
The other great excitement on our return has been Leicester's great win of the Premiership! Having missed the majority of the season, it was super for John to be here for the celebrations and he even managed to make it on to the BBC News Channel. 
 

I thought I would also add on here this Dave Henson song about LCFC's winning year which I really love and have listened to so often.  What a genius.

Photos

A quick reminder for me when wanting photos on the hard drive. 

Hold the alt key while clicking on the Photos icon on the dock, while the hard drive is plugged in.  Then I can choose which version of Photos I want to open.  Hope that helps me!

Travel Musing Fiji

Travel Musings Fiji

- Tides are peculiar. I never really understood what we learnt in physics about the moon causing them. And it has been strange to see and feel their effects here as the sea has become hard to get to over the Rock and coral at some of the beaches. 

- Fiji is hot. Our first days in Nadi, I don't think I've felt so hot anywhere else before. So so sticky and humid and how I longed for air conditioning. I always thought it a nice luxury but here it seemed a necessity. Fortunately since we have been on the islands without AC, it had usually been windy enough to be cooled a bit. I don't like the feeling of never being dry, even after a cool shower I am sweating again before I am dry. And very gross how hard it becomes to pull shorts and knickers up after going to the toilet as thighs are so sticky. I think it's hotter than Uganda, Ghana, Queensland. I remember being shocked by the heat of Qatar at 6am getting off the plane but I wonder what it would be like there the rest of the time? 

- It feels like we have met more travellers during our time in Fiji than elsewhere and it's been a different sort of experience at each resort. 

At Barefoot Manta where we were volunteering we didn't have that great a time with fellow travellers. For meals we were on a table with the 10 volunteers, mostly English. They weren't horrible but every meal they spent on their phones which seemed strange but I wondered if that was just the youth of today. 

We were reassured when we moved to our next island, Safe Landing, where we met a lovely group of travellers. We tried to play a few card games with a nice group of three but we all chatted too much to get very far! And that evening at dinner the rest of the travellers put the tables together as they thought it was more sociable and we had a nice time chatting to a German couple. 

Sadly all the guests left the next day and John and I were left alone on the island waving them off. Fortunately a new lot of guests arrived. I was initially worried by the arrival of half a dozen lads and lassies from Essex, but we ended up getting on well with the lads, sharing our NZ Frenzy knowledge, learning about photography and playing lots of Push It and even Cut the Cheese!

From there we moved to White Sandy Beach. The travellers weren't such a great bunch there. We were the only Brits there, which was nice for a change. We got on well with a Swedish couple, playing lots more Push It. It was a rather down time with cyclone worries but we made it through, with the help of Daniella who was working there and her mother in Australia. 

At our final resort, Naqalia, we had a different selection of fellow guests each night. There were lots of different folks, some we got on with, others less so. There was an English couple from Nottingham who I somehow find quite hard despite the fact they were so talkative. There was also a couple who were living in Sydney. She was Chinese and my first impressions of her had been so wrong. She turned out to have travelled to all sorts of places in the world including Cuba, Iran, Iraq and Antarctica and was ever so kind showing us photos and sharing how to take good photos with our camera!