Out and About...

I love Heathers 'On my camera' posts and I hope she won't mind if I steal her idea! There are so many things that I would like to share but don't warrant a big post individually. So here are a few snippets of my month in picture form.....

 I love old style phone boxes and Bournemouth has them everywhere. 

The carousel is in town! I loved these as a kid but haven't been on this one. My daughter has though!

I LOVE Bournemouth's beach huts. They start off as yellow and go all the way through the rainbow. 

One day I will get a camera that will allow me to nail this kind of shot. Shadow jumping.

The Christmas lights were turned on in town tonight. Of course my rubbish camera phone will not pick the lights up properly. But I love them anyway. 

Watching waves today. There's nothing better.

XXXX

Queen of the Castle

 

First of all I would like to say thank you for the birthday messages!

As it was my birthday and I could decide exactly where to drag the family, we trotted off to Corfe Castle yesterday. I'm sure I've mentioned before, I do love a good castle. My mum also jokes that I have 'Queen of the castle syndrome' because I LOVE being up high. For those who haven't come across it, there is a rhyme we used to say as kids when we were up high....

I'm the Queen of the castle and you're the dirty rascals!

When we started out the sun was shining and the Autumn colours were amazing. The castle is on top of a natural mound  and looking up I had high hopes for spectacular views from the top.

We were greeted by this dashing fellow at the bottom ...

.....and set off into the castle. Now Corfe Castle is a ruin but it's still a lot of fun. The kids found hidey holes everywhere and had fun playing hide and seek while us adults looked out on the view..

As you can tell, the blue sky had vanished the minute we hit the entrance and the mist? Fog? Had started to roll in. For me it made the view very atmospheric but I would like to see it on a clear day too. We did find a good spot to watch the steam train go by....

And have a good view of the village of Corfe...

Where we stopped for sweets in a cute little sweet shop, I was quite taken by the window decorations (and the fact that I could buy fizzy cola bottles!)

We took a little stroll around the village and came across this Wishing Chair..

Which I think is related to Enid Blyton's first novel The Adventures of the Wishing Chair. Although I've yet to look it up, apparently Enid was evacuated to Corfe during the war and her Famous Five books (which I LOVED as a child) were inspired by Corfe Castle. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong though!

Anyway, all in all it was a glorious day (even with the mist!) and I suspect we shall be visiting Corfe again in the future. Thanks for sitting through my photo's with me!

xxxx

ETA I forgot to ask, does anyone know how I reply to comments directly in blogger? Quite often I get direct messages from blog owners in my email. I would love to do the same!

We did it!

I am coming to you from my rather cosy little flat in Bournemouth! It's been a monster few weeks, full of change, unpacking and a little (ahem) beach time. Everything seemed to move supersonic quick in the end and it was stressful.Very, very stressful. But we are here now and I must admit I like it. My first impressions of 'every day' Bournemouth is that it's rather arty and creative, everyone seems to have a positive attitude (that I've met!) and it all feels more relaxed compared to busy buzzy Coventry.

So even though the move was stressful, every day life since has taken on a more relaxed pace. The week we moved down here, England's late summer heat wave began! So as you can imagine, we've made good use of the beach. After living in the middle of the country for 10 years, the beach is quite a novelty to us! And what a gorgeous beach it is.

Our move also coincided with Bournemouth's art festival. Although we have by no means attended it all, we did pop in to bits and pieces.

 This 'electronic rain forest' for want of a better word, was amazing. To my children's amusment, I was sooooo impressed! They had neon flashing lights at the top and sensor activated rain forset sounds. Okay so my description does not do them justice! We had lots of fun with these.

Neon Caravan - Westbeach

The neon caravan. I have to admit ....I was expecting a caravan covered, top to bottom, in neon lights. It wasn't. However the ladies from the art's college down there were lovely!

  We also went Vampire hunting and sewing ghouls on Boscombe beach. I have no photo's from actually down on the beach as my phone died. However I was given a pretty little business card during our visit yesterday....so I can tell you exactly who the lovely lady organising it was - Jill Adams from Nursey Bang Bang . The kids really enjoyed being let loose with googly eyes and luminous paint and I would happily take them down to her workshop again.

 Finally, this is what I've been up to in between unpacking and hopping around Bournemouth. When I was packing I realised just how bad my little stash had become. Not only have I a bad case of WIPitous, I also have a million little balls of yarn that NEED to be used up. Yes they need to be used up otherwise they turn into a big tangled mess. I AM NOT starting anything else or buying any more yarn until this is finished! I have promised myself. So this is my one and only project at the minute and I am determined to finish it. There I've said it, now I just need to stick to it!

Anyway I hope you are all well....Now I am back online I have some serious blog hopping to do!

xxxxx

Marcus Butler

....In the past week I have....

.....Visited Bournemouth

.....Swam in the sea

.....Watched a surprisingly amazing Air Show

.....Took a boat trip around Old Harry Rocks (and was not sea sick! Hurrah!)

.....Ate Fish and Chips on Poole Harbour

.....Hunted Lions dotted around Bournemouth (there are 50 - we found 13!)

.....Sat on the beach in the rain.....more than once (who says us Brits aren't weather hardy?!)

.....and finally ....

House hunted.

I shall say no more because things aren't definite. Although cardboard boxes are filling every spare space of my house right now and I can not stand the waiting!

.

Darling Dorset

Hello!

Well we are back from our lovely weekend away in Dorset and what a weekend it was! After a whopping 3 hours on the train we arrived early evening and headed straight for the beach, Where my son (the budding photographer) got snap happy arranging pebbles and admiring the sunset

After a good nights sleep and the most amazing breakfast we skipped down the the cliffs the next morning. Because there is something quite wonderful about seeing an empty beach.

Then disaster stuck. After a little pushing and shoving and a lot of 'It's my turn to take a picture!' I heard a crack and the littlies fell silent.

Yes.

My beloved camera had become a casulty of child war. I must admit I am gutted. I am gutted that it'll cost me an arm and a leg to fix but I am more gutted that we saw so many beautiful sights and I only have pixely, scratchy photo's taken from my phone to show you from here.

But onwards and upwards (quite literally!) and we arrive at a little picturesque village called Worth Matravers. Now this place is a walkers heaven. Not really being a family of walkers we decide to take the shortest route and head off into the rolling hills, where the kids literally rolled down hills and ran up!

The adults took more of a leisurely stoll and we arrived at a little cove with sea caves. We also partook in a little rock pooling!

I don't actually think this was the destination of the walk but we're happy with our little discovery and head back. Heading back is mainly uphill. I truly believe my lungs might explode and my calves might just give up and I vow to get fit! However the folk of Worth Matravers are not silly, they know after a long walk through the most glorious surroundings the perfect ending is one of these!

So we sipped our drinks, looked out at the view and I am in heaven.

On our final day in Dorset we attended the Boscombe Mad Hatters Tea Party. Alice in Wonderland is one of my favourite stories so I had high hopes. We were greeted by these guys on the high street

and were witness to quite a few other characters during our stay. There was a vintage fair, a circus workshop, live music by the pier and fire performers after dark. A very enjoyable day.

So all in all, minus the death of my camera, we really enjoyed our time in Dorset and hope to visit again very soon. But back to reality now and I have heaps to be getting on with.

I hope you all enjoyed your weekends!

Blah!

I love the word Blah. To me, Blah is a mixture of feeling... icky.... fed up...restricted and grabbing your hair and screaming as loud as your little lungs will allow. Today I have a case of the Blah's. Of course there has been no screaming but I do feel fed up. Restricted ....hell I feel confined. It's as if this house has wrapped itself around me like a cobra. This case of the Blah's is definitely not due to boredom. I have a to-do list as long as my arm.....as long as both arms and perhaps a leg in fact. I have laundry, cooking cleaning, essay writing, reading and a bunch of creative goings on hanging around half finished. But my five year old self is stamping her feet, fingers in ears and singing 'I don't want to, I don't want to...lalalalalalalalala'

I neeeed to get out. But as I have to wait in for a delivery we have the next best thing....a trip down memory lane to last summer when we had a lot of fun visiting various sights here in the UK.

So without further ado, here are just a few.....

The Queens gaff. I've visited Buckingham Palace many times but have never managed to catch the changing of the guard as we did on this day. Needless to say the whole area was packed. My claim to fame is that my Granny and Grandad were invited to one of the Queens garden parties when i was younger. I still have photographs of my Grandad in his top hat!

 

Big Ben. Arguably England's most famous building. I was hugely excited to be showing my children Big Ben for the first time, their response? .....Meh. Let's go on the London Eye.....

Massively overrated if you ask me. It cost a fortune, the cue was massive and it was meltingly hot in one of those little pods. 

On the plus side we did have a birds eye view of Central London. Here is Buckingham Palace again ....

We took our first trip to Wales last year and I was totally amazed by it's beauty. Living in a city it's easy to forget all of that natural scrumminess surrounding us. Here we have the view from on top of the Sygun copper mines in Beddgelert, Wales.

Sunset on Black Rock Sands, Porthmadog, Wales. If you look carefully you can see the 13th Century  Criccieth Castle in the background here.

 

                                

 

Next Caernarfon Castle, Prince Charles was invested here and it is also the focus of many ghost stories! We had a wonderful (if not tiring) time climbing up and down all of the turrets!

You will notice that I LOVE castles. On the 100 things to do before I die list I have 'visit all of the UK's castles.' Here we have the closest castle to me, Warwick Castle. Apparently Warwick castle was built in 1068 by William the Conqueror and of course it is haunted!

On this particularly visit to Warwick they had a Medieval day going on so we were entertained by jousting, a 'fool' and the almighty trebuchet, which you can just about see in the photo below.

Finally, just a stones throw away, Coventry Cathedral....well the ruins anyway! I moved to warwickshire 8/9 years ago out of pure circumstance. I had never even heard of Coventry Cathedral before this and i have got to admit I was blown away by it when I finally went to visit. I am not religious in the slightest but sitting in the Cathedral ruins you have a real sense of peace - ironic as the reason it became ruin's was the Coventry Blitz during the second World War.

 
Anyway I will leave you before I bore your socks off! I hope you have enjoyed our whistle stop tour of just a few of the sights we visited last summer. Now that we are on the right side of Christmas regarding the weather hopefully it won't be long before we can tick off a few more from my gigantic list!