A Saturday at Blenheim Palace and Oxford

Another great (and grey!) day in England. Today we took another London Walk to Blenheim Palace and Oxford.

We started early this morning, which after spending the night out at the pub with some friends was a bit painful! We took the train to Oxford and headed out to Blenheim Palace. The palace is huge and absolutely beautiful. Queen Anne gave the Churchill family the money to build it (I think 200K pounds at the time) after they helped her win against the French and save England. Winston Churchill was actually born there (its his cousin's families home and his parents were visting when he was born). They had a great display on his life.

After exploring the grounds we boarded the bus and headed into Oxford. Lovely little university town, and the university is gorgeous! I would have loved to study there. After a guided tour of town we shopped for a while and then headed back to London. All in all, a great day!

My pics are below:

October Update and a Visit from Rob

Well, I've been back at work for a month now. Blah. I suppose we need some way to fund our expensive habits like travel. I would love to win the lottery though! Currently I am at a client that is 1.5 hour commute from our house. I have to take the tube then an overland train then a taxi. Good times. At least I can read a book in transit.

Scott got a job and started this week. His company is a small private company http://www.ie.com/ that does some sort of work for large banking clients like Barclay's. He has to commute by overland train for about an hour each way, but he is enjoying the challenge. He thinks this will really set him up for some great City jobs (The City of London is the business distict, like downtown Vancouver) in about a year.

Rob, one of my coworkers/friends from Vancouver visited us last week and we had a great time showing him around. He just finished writing his UFE and was heading back to Vancouver to return to work on Sunday.

Other than that, not much is new. The monkeys are doing well...we finally bought a new flatscreen tv, and work is work. Looking forward to Ken's birthday on Sunday and meeting Christie for curry tomorrow night!

My Italian Pics (updated)

Here's the first of my Italian vacation photos - these are all from Rome. More to come as I edit them.

October 17 - Ive updated more photos and added them to the stream below...more to come later...

A Birthday Party in Limerick, Ireland

We headed out to Limerick, Ireland for Christie's 50th birthday this weekend. There were about 15 of us, a good show indeed! We flew out Friday afternoon on Ryan Air. It's one of the low cost airlines, and they don't assign seating, which means when they board the plane it is a mad dash to grab a good seat. Scott and I "splurged" and paid the extra 2 pounds each to get on the plane first. This worked out great as we got front row seats with tonnes of leg room! We also got to rub that in to the rest of the group who had made fun of us for paying the extra! Good start to the weekend!

We arrived at Shannon airport, dropped our bags in the hotel and headed to the bar in the hotel to start the weekend off right. After a few rounds we went to Moll Darby's for a fantastic dinner. http://www.molldarbys.com/ Food was excellent, company evn better.

Saturday dawned a foggy morning and we started off with a good ole Irish Breakfast. Unfortunately Ken and John had a few run ins with the restaurant staff due to past date yogurt amoung other things.

Limerick's main street O'Connell street is a large shopping area, so it was nice and busy Saturday morning. We wandered around taking pics and had lunch with Ken and John at a nice cafe. After lunch we toured King John's castle (An English castle in Ireland, quel horreur!) and spent the rest of the afternoon watching England kick Australia's ass in the World Rugby Tournament...much to the Irish fans dismay.

After a few more pints at the hotels bar we headed to Dolan's Pub http://www.dolanspub.com/ for dinner, drinking and the birthday celebration! Delicious food again, who knew the Irish could cook??? They had live Irish music, which was fantastic. In the spirit of Limerick, Scott and I wrote Chrisie a Limerick for her birthday:

We headed to Limerick in the cold
We drank whenever we were told
Christie turned 50
We said she was nifty
But really we thought she was quite old.

Hahahahaha...ok, we won't win any writing competitions but we had a great time. Here are some pics from our virgin voyage to the Emerald Isle:

More Pics of Italy

We're just going through our pics and thought we would post some of the great photos Bruce took. He has some great ones of the family: