Chocolate, waffles and beer

You’ve guessed, we are in Belgium.

We arrived in good time for the Shuttle this morning and were glad to be offered an earlier train.  We’d feared a long queue, this being the first Saturday of the school holidays, but thankfully, we were wrong.  There were no queues at all at this hour of the day.

But as we waited in the line of cars, the heavens opened and the view through the windscreen changed somewhat.

The advertising hoarding opposite seemed to issue a rather prescient warning as well.  Hmm.  We were hoping for dry weather at least, even if it were a little overcast. 

But never mind, we’re on our holidays!

Our first target was to be Bruges, where we’d booked our first overnight stay.  Though we’d been here several times previously, it had been a few years since the last time and for Mary, this was all new ground.

Sadly, there wasn’t much of the Flanders countryside to see.

It had stopped raining when we made our way from the car park to the hotel – not very far at all, thankfully – over treacherously slippery setts.  I was lucky not to fall flat on my face on a couple of occasions and was very relieved to step onto a dry floor at last.  The proprietor greeted us warmly, though was a little preoccupied himself as he awaited the arrival of the red fire engine to pump a few inches of floodwater out from his cellar.  We hoped for rooms on a higher floor!

We lost no time in getting out into the city and really enjoyed pottering about the old streets.  It was pretty busy, but we avoided the main shopping areas and found the quieter places equally attractive.  The rain had passed by now and the afternoon brightened up considerably, for which we were grateful.

Our favourite spot was Van Eyck Place – by a small canal and with a splash of colourful cafe umbrellas here and there.  We stopped a while, took photos and having perused the menus, decided to book a table for dinner.  Fingers crossed the rain will keep off.

Not only did the rain hold off, the sun came out and we enjoyed a beautiful evening there in the square. 

As we walked back through rather quieter streets this evening, there was a spot or two of rain but not enough to prevent us lingering by the rather characterful centrepiece to t’Zand, the marketplace outside our hotel.  These cyclists were my favourite group of the whole arrangement, I think.

But there was something about the mermaid that appealed to me, too!  Looks like she’s had a rough time of things, doesn’t it?

I’ll finish with some chocolate shop advice for your consideration.

Goodnight!

Road Trip 2013

For some reason, this year’s road trip has been a long time coming.  For sure, we are a little later than usual, not normally waiting till the end of July before buzzing off for some fun.  But we have been looking forward to today for what seems like an age.

At last, on Wednesday afternoon, my Hero collected Mary from Heathrow because this year, for the first time, our road trip is going to be on this side of the Atlantic.  This morning, having packed up and made sure the housesitters were up to speed we were on our way towards Folkestone, where we’ll stay the night before an early morning shuttle tomorrow morning.

 

We arrived in Lewes around lunchtime and drove straight into a parking spot right where we wanted one to be!  Mind you, a Californian blue badge comes in handy, too (and yes, it’s valid more or less worldwide, too).

Lewes was looking lovely in the sunshine, but we were hungry so wasted no time in making a beeline for Bills.

We’d enjoyed their stylish offerings in Brighton and were not disappointed here either.

 

I like their approach to food almost as much as I admire the handwriting.

But, much as we’d like to have lingered longer, we needed to make on through the Friday afternoon traffic to Folkestone.  We avoided the motorways and stuck to the ordinary roads, through the Romney Marshes and the Cinque ports.  Right now, we are settled into the Premier Inn near the tunnel and hope for a peaceful night.

The fire alarm has gone off just the five times so far…

What to say when there isn’t anything to report

(or who’d be a Royal Correspondent anyway?)

The announcement was made:

“The Duchess of Cambridge has given birth to a baby boy, weighing 8lb 6oz, at 16:24 BST at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, west London - mother and baby are "both doing well", Kensington Palace says”

The BBC news channel went straight to Bucklebury, home of the Middleton family for some reaction:

“We could almost hear the sound of champagne corks popping behind closed doors when the news was announced”.

From the comfort of our own ringside seats

We haven’t been able to see a great deal this year.  Whether the wind was in the wrong direction, or maybe yesterday afternoon, the cloud cover prevented us from seeing the main attractions.  Sadly, our usual vantage point for the Fairford Air Tattoo hasn’t proved to be the best this time round.  As you can see, one of us (not me) was taking the opportunity to lubricate the tree lopper and tackle some rather determined brambles which have been bothering us last week.  But I settled down with the paper and a drink, and waited for the flypast.

I got a shout from my hero just before I made my way into the garden to come and look, quick!  Apparently, the first time these three flew over, the two smaller planes were being refuelled mid air, one from each wing I am told.  But by the time I got there, I’d missed the main event so grabbed my camera and settled for second best.  Looking at the photographs, it’s hard to imagine that the sky had been so blue only hours before, but really, for much of the afternoon, it was overcast but warm.

But that was it, for ages.  I even resorted to getting my iphone, to look up the schedule where I read that at 2.30 the British Airways A380 was going to muster with the Red Arrows for a flyover Royal Wootton Bassett on their way to the show.  No sooner had I read that, than I heard a distant rumble and looked out over the horizon to see this

Hmm.  Maybe we were going to get a flypast after all?

Twenty minutes later, this was as good as it got.

Never mind, we enjoyed a peaceful afternoon with gliders swooping in the thermals above us.  We read the paper and relaxed before going indoors to cool off.  Today, we’ve been surveying the horizon from a little further along the ridge, in the garden of our sweet friends who were celebrating with a lovely drinks party.  Though we heard a rumble and looked out into the blue from time to time, we saw nothing apart from the usual 747s and so on, en route from Heathrow to the USA.

It’s a pretty good way to spend a sunny Sunday afternoon, though.  I could get used to it!

Keep up there at the back

Around 3 o’clock on Thursday afternoon, I received an email from a work colleague.  In order to fully appreciate the augmented reality activity planned for the training day on Friday, I’d need to download an app on my phone, register and log in to follow a particular user.

Now, right then, my mind was elsewhere.  I was busy cutting out fabric figures to applique, using my Silhouette.  From time to time, I’d need to take the blade apart and clean it and all of this was breaking new ground for me.  I could manage the scanning, the resizing and saving in a format which my Silhouette software could read.  I could follow instructions on the pack of fabric interfacing to successfully cut out the shapes on the machine and, with the help of a YouTube video, I could even take the blade apart to clean it (and put it back together again).  I was keeping pretty busy and all the tech was behaving itself nicely.  Humming along, in fact.

But, hang on a sec….”In order to fully appreciate the augmented reality activity planned for tomorrow’s CPD session, please download the Aurasma app to your smartphone…”

Just a minute whilst I get my mind around that one, please.

Augmented reality? 

Well, I had heard of Aurasma in the context of advertising and even had the app there on my phone already (you know I’m a gadget girl, really!)  but I’d never used it beyond a quick try when it was first launched and quite how it could be used in Adult Education, I had no idea.

I read a bit more here and even gave it a try.  Wow!

Sure enough, my colleagues who’d been working on the AR project had come up with all kinds of great ideas and it wasn’t long into Friday’s workshop that I too was imagining some fun applications for it.  Imagine, a handout could not only have a photograph of the finished project but that photo could be embedded with a trigger to a short video of the process too!  Oooh – I was beginning to see all kinds of possibilities but we were already onto the next thing.

Muvizu.

Well, not specifically Muvizu, but one of my colleagues had used the program to create his presentation about our new Facebook page which was all a bit clever.  Hmm….the way the Muvizu character lipsynced with Rob’s voice was very neat and the whole thing was very funny.  What a great way to present way to present a raft of information!  I need to explore that – just think of the possibilities…

It was getting a little warm and the information kept on coming, so we buzzed off outside where the Gloucester Food Festival was in full flow.  A few samples later, we were refreshed and ready to go again.

More mind boggling things awaited us and in spite of the heat and the fact that it was Friday afternoon, we just had to get that Mimeo working.  The challenge was to make that flipchart into a fully functional Smartboard in less than an hour…oh my.  Of course, the features of a smartboard are remarkable.  Just think, a presentation could be prepared and annotated during the class, saved and shared afterwards.  A collaborative design could be worked out, stored in stages and then saved as evidence of everyone’s input, including screenshots and hyperlinks.  We could fix it to a window and put a sheet of paper on the other side and use the glass as the working surface, couldn’t we?  Or, if we put the Mimeo capture device on a tabletop, we could work horizontally and all scribble on the same page, in different colours if we wanted to see whose idea was what.

I think I heard the word “possibilities” again.

Now, I’d done Mimeo training several times previously.  I’ve even run a Mimeo training session myself.  But I’ve never used one regularly and sad to say, I seemed to have forgotten everything I’d ever known about this clever thing.  Anyway, we weren’t to know that we had the wonky USB connector, were we?  We got it working – more or less – and with the kind of sigh which is frequently heard on a Friday afternoon, and our heads buzzing with information about animating presentations, uploading images and creating AR triggers  - not to mention the possibilities - we called it a day.

Now, had we been able to teleport home and avoid the Friday afternoon traffic, we’d have cracked it.  But right then, at that moment, this gadget girl’s little brain was feeling a bit fried.