December in Banbury

We've been keeping busy in December. Lucas has been growing up very quickly. We bought him some Renault 'children's' clothes. The T-shirt is for ages 4 and up, the cap for ages 3-6. As you can see.... it doesn't look out of place on him at the moment.



Lucas has now decided to move beyond his 'Tommy Tippees' for drinking from.. and he wants to drink straight from the bottle like a big boy. We decided to start off small.



Auntie Abi dropped in for a visit. And Lucas got given a bit reindeer balloon for Christmas from one of his friends at playgroup (well.. parents of a friend of his.. because if the child itself had earnt the money it would have been child exploitation).



We were fortunate enough to attend a wedding at Mansfield College in Oxford. The chapel in the College was absolutely beautiful.

















By this stage, Lucas had decided that he needed to drink from an even bigger water bottle.



Lucas then had a big Christmas party at the local National Childbirth Trust drop-in... featuring his favourite.. a big bouncy castle!



Moments after these photos were taken Lucas took a swan-dive off the edge of the Castle causing a big lump on his forehead (and lots of tears). He follewed this up a few days later by being so excited to see Mummy through the front window of our house that he walked straight into a wall.... clever boy. His forehead currently resembles the Himalayas.

Oh.. and I've put on the video of Lucas and his water bottle.

Cornwall - Day Four

We decided to get up with Lucas (as he was regularly waking at 5:30 am) and get on the road early. We left the Treyarnon YHA at 6:30 am and headed south-west to Bodmin and then on the A38 (lovely road BTW) to Plymouth. We entered the outskirts of Plymouth at just after 8:00 am.. enough to catch the beginnings of peak-hour traffic, so we decided to stop just before the bridge into Plymouth and enjoy a slice of English culinary expertise.

'Little Chef' is a chain of roadside restaurants that flourished in the 50's and 60's as the nation traveled on A-roads. With the arrival of the Motorways, increased average speeds, and families stopping less frequently on their travels... Little Chef has fallen upon hard times and has recently been taken over by Hungry Jack's. Nowadays, Little Chef survives on lorry drivers for its income. I had the pancakes, which were actually very good and quite reasonably priced. Natasha had the American Breakfast... which featured two brown oxidised strips of miscellaneous meat product (supposedly bacon), pancakes, and some inedible scrambled eggs. Oh well, you live.. you learn.

We headed into Plymouth and had a walk around the fantastic harbour, naval base and waterfront. Unfortunately the weather wasn't too kind.









Heading back home, Lucas decided that he wasn't too sleepy, which made the drive from Plymouth to Exeter rather tiring. After 45 minutes of him continually whining, we stopped off for an early lunch at the M5 services. Once we has asleep, we drove like a bat out-of-hell up the M5, through Bristol.. and then turning right towards the old Roman town of Cirencester. From there we headed home through the Cotswolds on the A429, which is an old Roman road. The drive was fantastic and it was nice to see parts of the Cotswolds that we haven't managed to get to. Once we got to Stow-on-the-Wold we turned off towards Chipping Norton and Banbury. We managed to drive non-stop from Exeter to Banbury in about 2.5 hours.. not bad going!

Cornwall - Day Three

We spent the morning walking about the cliff tops and beach that were located out the front door of our hostel. As you can see from our choice of clothing, it was still a rather chilly day with a very strong and blustery wind.









During Summer, this beach is packed with swimmers and sunbathers... and is surrounded by paddocks full of campervans and portable cabins.



Our hostel is the main cream-coloured building just to the right of centre.



We then got in the car and headed south, past Magwan Porth to Newquay. Originally we had planned to stop here for lunch and to go to the aquarium, but as Lucas was still asleep we decided to press on to St Ives.


















After lunch in St Ives, we travelled back to Newquay, to vist Reefworld aquarium. Lucas absolutely loved it.... he got to see fishes of all shapes and sizes... along with sharks, sting rays.. octopuses.. turtles.. cuttlefishes.. sea horses.. crabs... basically everything that lives under the sea. As I said.. he absolute adored it.. and I really regret not taking any photos of him. We bought him a toy soft-toy shart as a momento.. and partly because his favourite story at the moment is 'Smiley Shark'.

We were the only people in the aquarium at the time.. apparently they are piled in during the summer.

Cornwall - Day Two

We left Cheddar early and headed South-West along the M5, and then the A38 through Devon towards Cornwall. The A30 is a sensational dual-carriageway that rises and falls through the hills of Devon. There was little traffic on the road (being an early Sunday morning)... we ended up having lunch in St Austell.



St Austell is a lovely town perched on a hillside just a mile or so inland from the coast. It is also home to Cornwall's biggest brewery. We had lunch at a cafe in the centre of town, and Lucas got to stretch his legs in the car-free streets. Lucas has just began to run now.. which makes looking after him a tad more difficult. We have got him a new big blue winter coat.. he is very much a 'Paddington Bear' look-a-like these days.



After lunch we took various B-roads north-east to Padstow.. now christened 'Padstein' after guru chef Rick Stein has opened a few restaurants in the small town... creating a new wave of gourmet tourists who are apparently taking over the town.



Even though the sun came out, the wind was still howling... so it was necessary to rug up! We retreated to a nice pub near the waterfront for a St Austell Ale, "Tribute" and an opportunity to warm up.



After that we drove to the Youth Hostel at Treyarnon Bay, a tiny settlement perched on the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic(Treyarnon is close to Constantine Bay). The winds that night were probably the strongest I have ever experienced...and that includes being stuck on Mt Hotham in the middle of a blizzard.

Trip to Cornwall - day one

So off we went to Cornwall last Saturday. The weather wasn't kind to us initially... and as we drove south the clouds continued to look bleak. We headed down the A361 through Chipping Norton and Burford.. then quickly onto the M4.. and then taking the very scenic and beautiful A46.. descending into Bath. The traffic around Bath was an absolute nightmare so we ended up having lunch in a beautiful little town called Bradford-on-Avon... which featured some of the hilliest and narrowest streets I have yet seen in my time in England. The heavens opened continually throughout the day... and after lunch we drove via various B-roads to our destination for the evening, Cheddar (yes.. home of the famous cheese). We stayed at a very old and homely YHA. Cheddar is also home to a famous gorge.. which was quite breathtaking. Alas..the continual rain and overcast skies meant that there were no photo opportunities.

London Science Museum + Blackburn Rovers vs Fulham

For the last weekend of November, I decided to treat myself to a visit to London. First stop was a trip to the London Science Museum.

First up was the Space and Rocketry exhibits. Here we have the J-2 rocket engine, designed by Werner Von Braun at Huntsville Alabama. This engine went on to power the 2nd stage of the Saturn V moon rocket. Five of these engines were used in unison to power the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen-powered stage. Also shown here is Bill Anders space suit, worn aboard Apollo 8. Bill Anders (along with Jim Lovell and Frank Borman) orbited the moon in December 1968. In doing so, they became the first ever humans to leave the Earth's gravitational pull, the first humans ever to orbit another celestial body, and the first humans ever to see who Earth in its entirety. They also became the first ever humans to see 'Earthrise'... and are most remembered for their live TV broadcast back to earth for Christmas 1968 during which they read the opening of the book of Genesis during and Earth rise.













Also on display was the Whittle gas-turbine Jet engine (the world's first), and the Merlin V12 engine, which powered the Spitfire during WW2.



The funny looking contraption is the 'Flying Bedstead', an aircraft powered by a vertically-mounted jet engine with reaction control rockets located at the extremities, designed to simulation the behaviour of the lunar module in Earth's gravity. The commanders of the Apollo mission used this to practise. Neil Armstrong famously crashed and managed to eject safely a few months before he landed on the moon.

Also on display was a scale model of Von Braun's V2 rocket which was used by the Germans during WW2.

The piece de la resistance was the Apollo 10 command module. This spacecraft orbited the moon in early 1969 as a dress rehearsal for the Apollo 11 landing. The astronauts were John Young, Tom Stafford and Eugene Cernan. The Apollo 10 Lunar Module descended to within 15 km of the Earth's surface as the final test run of the Lunar-Orbit Rendevous method before the actual landing was attempted a few months later on the Apollo 11 mission.

According to the 2001 Guinness World Records Apollo 10 has the record for the highest speed attained by a manned vehicle: 39,897 km/h (11.08 km/s or 24,791 mph). The speed record was set during the return from the Moon on 26 May 1969. That is why the command module has such a charred appearance, as the ablative heat shield had to dissipate all that energy.



















Also on display was a 1999 McLaren F1 car driven by Mika Hakkinen during the German Grand Prix. He famously crashed out of the lead due to a rear tyre failure.



After that it was onto the aviation exhibit.. feating loads of real-life planes hanging from the rafters. The silver plane is a Hawker P.1127, the protoype for the Harrier Jet, the world's first in-service V/STOL aircraft (Vertical/Short Take-Off and Landing)... all made possible due to its unique thrust vectoring engine.



Here are a couple of famous warbirds, the Hawker Hurricane and the Supermarine Spitfire.

Finally, a unique plane, the Messerschmidt Me 163 Komet, the world's first (and only) rocket-powered operational fighter.










I also found an interesting exhibit in the Computing section. This is an example of Hewlett Packard's first programmable pocket calculator. I believe that my dad still has the same version at home.

At the end, Bruce, Heather and I spent about two hours at the museum and we only saw about half of it, but we had to leave in order to meet up with Laura and Marius in Fulham for the big game.

Blackburn managed to come from behind twice to secure a 2-2 draw. I didn't take any pictures inside the ground, so these are from Marius!