We do 'holiday'

This week the Melodeon Master and I did 'holiday' for the first time this year.  Yes, you're right - it's September and next year we have vowed to do more 'holiday'.

Anyway, we hunted the internet and duly booked ourselves into nice looking rooms at a gastro-pub in Thame, Oxfordshire.  All went well until we arrived to find that the pub had sacked its chef earlier in 2013 and there was no food.  The husband of the couple running it did breakfast.  So, slightly burnt fried eggs it was then...

Instead of 'mosey on downstairs for a nice meal' of an evening we mostly (in fact, entirely) raided Sainsbury's or Waitrose and had a picnic in our room.  On the plus side, it does mean I've put on absolutely no weight at all during what was meant to be a gastronomic trip away.

On Friday on our way home we visited the Morris Museum of Motors in Witney (actually not in Witney - 8 miles away but no matter we found it eventually).

It was shut.

Yesterday we went to watch Sel The Fiddle row in a boat on the Taff.  He and three mates from his pub had entered the amateur regatta.  It's an absolutely brilliant idea - you enter a team, you get a rower from Llandaff Rowing Club to train you two or three times a week and be your cox, you train for all of September and then there's a regatta.  Some of the team names were great - Sel was in 'The Cricketers - Out For a Ducking' and then there were 'The Soggy Bottoms', 'The Taffia', 'Oarfully Crewed' and 'The Four Oarsmen'...

Sadly Sel's crew lost their first two races and were out.  But they had great T shirts and looked the part!

I cycled down and home again on the mountain bike - 12 miles each way, mostly downhill on the way there, and mostly uphill on the way home.  I was quite chuffed to only be 4 minutes slower on the way home - yay!  On the not-so-good side, I was overtaken at one point by a bloke on a bike wearing sandals and shorts...

And today, just to finish our holiday off in style, we went on a mushroom foray in Rhayader.  A good 85 miles from home, so we set off very early.  We never did find it - the bloke hadn't sent us the right email for meeting up, so we didn't.  We wandered round the Elan Valley Reservoir and had a cup of tea before driving home again.

We need to practise this holiday thing.