We Walk the Wight

A few weekends ago, as some of you will have noticed from FB, we walked the Walk the Wight in aid of the Earl Mountbatten Hospice. A worthy cause to be sure, and we certainly earned the sponsored funds we raised for the charity. We chose the 8 mile walk.....ok I did and then Sammy told me I was soft and upgraded us to the 14.5 mile walk. That is 23.5 kms! And I am here to tell you that is a long way to walk.

I have not had much chance to keep fit or cycle since we got here, so I admit I was a bit nervous leading up to the day. Sammy jogs regularly but even she was a bit nervous the night before. The walk was well organised with lots of free shuttle buses to take us to the start and the islands normal bus services allowed free passage to all participants. Sammy and I started just after 9am, well prepared with water, energy drinks and snacks to keep us going. We started from Carisbrooke Castle and the idea is to walk the route at your own pace from there to Alum Bay, finishing the race at the famous Needles. Now Carisbrooke Castle is on the top of a hill so we started off down a very steep path, everyone around us very excited and Sammy out of the gates like a racehorse so to speak. I had to slow her down several times in those first couple of miles. This is how it went:


Me: Sammy slow down angel, we have a long way to go

Sammy: No no no, I can't take it when old people overtake us!

Me: Um, those two are no older than 25?

Sammy: Still, pick up the pace slow coach!

We walked for what seemed like ages, but the pace was pretty hot thanks to Sammy and her race face. It was also very very pretty as we keep on mentioning. The route got steep pretty quickly and followed a path up past the radio masts that transmit for the island. I felt we were making good pace and at about 6 miles we came across the first water point.

Waterpoint Guy: Here chaps, have some water and an energy drink

Me: Thanks Mate, are we making good time?

Waterpoint Guy: Not too bad only a few hundred past here so far (11 000 walkers in the event so not too shabby)

Sammy: A few hundred?? Hurry up Rich we need to get going!

Me: Baby we have already done at least 6 miles so don't stress we can pick up the pace now

Waterpoint Guy: 6 miles? Um no sport, you are at 3.5 miles and you have 11 miles to go.

That shut us up a little bit....

The route undulated through a few pretty hills and dales and some really nice forest bits, at this point a cold breeze had got up and we put our jackets back on for a bit. After what seemed to be a long way past that water point we came out the end of a forest section and could see ahead in the distance Freshwater. A great feeling but short lived.

Me: How far do you think we have gone now Sammy?

Sammy: At least 10 miles, look there is a water point in the distance, at the bottom of the steep hill. Can you see it?

Me: No because I am too busy looking at the steep hill we have to climb after that!

Sammy: That's not so steep! Hurry up and stop dragging that leg.

Me: I am not dragging it, it stopped working at 6 miles

Sammy: Mmm, my legs are getting a bit tired too. See if you can harden up and make the next 5 miles

When we got to the bottom of the hill it turns out we had only done 8 miles and still had 6.5 to go. The hill Sammy had decided was not so steep turned out to be so steep, even a mountain goat had made his home on the side of the hill, and was watching us struggle up in amusement. Sammy's gungho attitude was replaced by a milder encouragement and we had to really push ourselves. As we neared the bottom of Freshwater, even the mild encouragement had dissolved.

Sammy: Is this walk never going to end?

Me: I am not sure I care anymore. Lets just walk off the edge of the cliff, it would be less painful

Sammy: I think I am bleeding from my eyes? Am I bleeding?

Me: No baby you have just got your eyes shut because the wind is howling at us!

The last 3 miles were desperate! You have to walk up yet another ridiculously steep hill into a howling gale that blows straight on at you until you arrive at the Needles. We did pick up the pace somewhat on that last climb. Not because we wanted to overtake some people, but because we were so tired if we stopped for even a second we would both begin to cramp and stiffen up.

Me: We are nearly there baby, just a couple of hundred metres to go to the battery at the end of the Needles.

Sammy: At last, I don't think I can feel my face anymore from the wind

Me: I don't see the finish, do you think we made a wrong turn?

Sammy: If we did I am not going on you can come and fetch me later

As it turns out, the sadistic cruel organisers had decided that we would have to turn at the Needles and walk down a path another mile to the end at the Alum Bay Amusement Park. Funny that because we were not amused! Still despite being totally exhausted and full of blisters by the end, we are proud to say we made it! Below are some pictures. The early smiles are genuine, the later pics are all photo shopped to remove the tears, blood and sweat it takes to do this walk!

All nervous smiles before the walk, waiting for the bus.

Slightly amused at the prospect, that look will soon disappear.

Just after the start in Carisbrooke, up one of the first hill.

On the way to the first water point.

Sammy with a sarcastic grin as some people go past us while she poses.

Um, just me.

Its soooo pretttty!

Starting to overtake some people just after the first water point.

Awesome forests.

Coming out of the forest!

The view towards Freshwater and yes we had to walk all the way there!

Ok so this is getting a little long now.....

Closer look at Freshwater

Yip it just goes on and on

The hill the mountain goat lives on

Hairy cows, never seen them before.

Golf course at Freshwater

I look happy but I am knackered!

Sammy not wasting energy posing anymore

On the last stretch and the wind was howling!

Almost there!

The battery

Whew! Just one mile to go

Well that's it and as I said in the beginning, its a long long long way to walk! Give me my bicycle anytime!

Friday Gremlins part II

Morning all. Some gremlins returned last night for round two in the blog and chipped out a part of the fun at home paragraph. I have fixed it! Grrrrr.

No need to panic folks

Sorry chaps, Sammy pointed out that my baiting all of you with the new addition sentence and talking about Angie may have sent the wrong message. Its not a baby yet, nor is it a new pet labrador or similar. Its just my new car for work!

So sorry if you got the wrong end of that stick.

Our boxes have arrived!

Can we just say upfront that moving countries really teaches you that you can live with very little of your own possessions and still be happy. I mean, I honestly have not even thought about the stainless steel bicycle tool that I put in the boxes to be shipped. It seems like an eternity since we had the boxes packed and removed, in reality it was three months ago. Wow, three months! Time does fly. We have been here for two and a half months and as the weekdays melt into Friday nights and the weekend, life has taken on a familiar tone again, of hard working weeks and awesome weekends. Sorted.

Until the boxes arrive. And then suddenly I was overcome by a Gollum like need to open boxes and go through all of our worldly possessions rushing from box to box going through the contents and caressing my motorbike kit like it was the gold that Smaug had guarded in middle earth all those years ago (thanks JRR Tolkien, and no need to thank me for the punt on the upcoming movie of the book The Hobbit). Opening just the first box was met with a lot of emotion, from both of us, and probably more so from me. Still the more sensible of the two of us (that would be Sammy) kept things fairly calm, although with Watershed playing in the background and me clutching my SA flag bandanna, you would swear I miss home. Well I do really, but we miss all our friends and family more so than the country. And my KTM, but Sammy gives me a funny look when I say that. So we decided one box was enough for tonight and carried the rest upstairs. We actually are just fine and loving our new adventure.

You will have noticed a drop off in posts and two of the most recent were sheepish statements of intent, but without the posts to follow. I think we are back on track now, but work is very busy and Sammy is very busy too so it takes time and logistics to find a moment to sit down and write a blog for everyone to enjoy. We love doing it and will keep them coming even if no one reads them, they are fun to do. The last couple of weeks have been very busy (yes I have said that but they were really, promise). We have had some adventures, look out for a blog this weekend about our epic walk for charity.

Everyday brings a new challenge for us. Mud Island is proving to be a bit of a misnomer at this stage. The UK have had one of their warmest and certainly driest Springs on record. I mean seriously chaps, Springbok and Kuruman have had more rain than we have. So I generally roll into the office like this - brief pause here in the story, to tell you that I have developed a pukka South England accent. It was that or continue to receive blank stares every time I open my mouth. When in Rome and all that. Of course I don't speak to Sammy like that, but I am not far off! - back to the rolling into the office story.

Me: Morning chaps you alright? (pukka South England accent)

Colleagues: Morning Big Rich (in chorus and beaming because they now understand me) (also they call me Big Rich cause there is another Richard and he is a cool cat, but um....vertically challenged)

Me: Someone once told me back in SA I was crazy to come here because it rains too much. I think he is wrong.

Colleagues: Oh no it is so dry and normally it rains....

Me:(interrupting) Oh please, I think you all moan too much

Colleagues: no really it normally rains all the time (to howls of protest and indignation)

Me: Coffee for any of you softies?

When it eventually does rain, I will no doubt get some smug looks. But in the meantime, the clouds and rain are making friends with Kuruman, who they missed the last 65 years, and so we remain as dry as a bone. 

I have some great colleagues and I am really lucky from that point of view, and of course working for the same business has been a blessing, because everything is pretty much the same, and has made it easier to adjust. I have been lucky to see a LOT of England so far, pity that I don't have time to stop and take pictures to share with you, but I am generally in London once or twice a week, and at least once a week travel to the Midlands, or near Liverpool/Manchester, or the east of the country, places like Essex have been an eye opener. I also get to do some really horrible things like play golf with customers and other hardships too terrible to mention (OK I can't help myself, off to Silverstone for a Porsche day and Mercedes Benz world to offer Schumi some tips on how to thrash an SLS).

And of course we have fun at home too. The highlight of the week so far was last night when Jo and Mark (family and our landlords) asked us to babysit baby Noah. What a pleasure, when I got in from Birmingham at 8.30pm he was fast asleep and Sammy had green Thai Prawn curry for me (and Green Thai bean curry for herself). If only all babysitting adventures were like this! We only have one set of keys and so decided that we would leave the door unlocked. Something that is safe to do here on the Isle of Wight. We had a normal evening with Noah sleeping through and went to bed. We were still reading in bed when we heard a loud crack. Not sure what it was I went to the window to see what had happened and found Mark and Jo standing outside with red wine grins looking up at the window. It turns out that Sammy had a bout of Africaness and when we went to bed, she automatically locked the door as she passed it by. That part of us may still take a while to overcome!

The Watershed CD is nearly at an end and I don't have any pictures to post with this entry, so sleep tight and look out for that blog on the walk, and a new addition to our family, her name is Angie and we are very pleased to have her. More on that later. Much love as always and don't forget that anytime you want to come and visit, the door is open. (well it may be closed cause it can get a bit cool here, but it is open in spirit!)

Slow Updates

Hello dear friends, so sorry we have been a bit busy over here and so the promised regular updates have been slow. But we have a few in draft, which we will pop on to the blog in short time.

Friday Gremlins

Oh dear, it seems that some  Friday 13th  Gremlins krept into our blog and ate a few paragraphs of the blog. In our next blog I will rewrite the missing paragraphs for you. Have a great weekend peeps!

We visit Will and Kate but we are a day late

Woops! Its been a while since out last post, but in our defence I have been settling into work and getting into the swing of things. Its hard to believe that we are only a few days shy of two months over here! Actually its not that hard, because of course we miss all of you dearly, but we have had the most amazing time and experiences so far. A lot of our friends enjoyed my last post, thanks for all the comments and keep them coming. We have a lot of fun putting these blogs together and my little ramblings from the office are equally as fun to put together.

SO, what have we been up to? Well, actually a lot happens each week and we generally go to bed exhausted most nights! We keep on about the weather, but it really has been very, very good. Of course when the weather does go pear shaped, and we are under water and swimming to work, I will be tight lipped and talking about something else!

We have benefited from a number of public holidays recently and made the most of them by running around Mud Island again. As most of you know the big scene here at the end of April was the royal wedding. It was not all that hyped up in SA, which is understandable, but here it was simply HUGE. Sam and I had mentioned on our blog that we planned to go Osborne House to watch the wedding. As it turned out after a really rough three day week, we overslept on the morning and found that once we were up, it was a bit late to get to the venue before the wedding started and the weather seemed to be closing in too. So instead we walked down the road to our local store and bought some really nice Humus and olives, some Italian cold meats (for me of course) and some real french Champagne. The english shops were terribly sporting and had halved the price of some of the better bottles of champers, so we bought a bottle of Piper Heidsieck and it was fabulous. Sky TV had the whole wedding on from about 2 hours before, all in HD, and the coverage was spectacular. I mean it was a wedding, but on a scale I have not seen before, and the coverage was simply brilliant. Sammy and I were very keen on watching every minute of the coverage as we planned to go to London the next day.

We had decided to go into London for a bit to see all the sights, and then to stay over with our friend Keith and have dinner at our favourite Thai restaurant called Yupa's in Chiswick. We parked at the mother ship, (Westfields) and of course that meant another cheeky Snog! It was fabulous as usual. We jumped on the underground from Shepards Bush station. Well I say jumped, but as it turns out of the one million people who were in London for the wedding (no really, I kid you not), exactly 35 had gone home, the rest had stayed. Of those remaining, at least 10 percent were also in the underground that morning. Sardines get more room in a can. No such thing as personal space in this case. By the time we got off the underground I was quite pleased. It was then that we discovered where the other 999 000 people were hiding. Outside Westminster Abbey! I am not sure what Sammy and I were thinking. I mean really I guessed we would arrive, wave at the Queen, and pop inside Westminster Abbey for a tour of the place at our leisure and move on. Clearly I had not thought it through. It was simply so busy that the queue to go inside was still hundreds of metres long just 20 mins before closing time. We managed to take a number of photos posted below, it is a stunning piece of architecture, and it was fairly surreal to be standing on the same ground as Pippa Kate and Wills and the Queen had been the day before.

As an aside, how cool are Prince William and Kate Dutchess of Cambridge! Leaving the palace for a few hours of peace at their hotel in an convertible classic Aston Martin. You just cannot buy style like that!

Saturday night was a great evening, we went to Yupa's and it was up to its usual high standard. Sammy was eating there for the first time, and she loved it. The chef custom made some of the dishes for her, swapping the non vegetarian ingredients for vegetarian options, so she could experience the same flavours as the rest of us. Keith was a great host and we had a good time. One of the conversations revolved around choosing a side in the English Premiership. Well as I might have mentioned in a previous blog, I don't really care, but fence sitting is just not allowed. The problem is no matter what we decide, we will be upsetting one or more of our friends. So in the spirit of fairness (to us), we will remain on the fence a little while longer.

On the way home on Sunday we saw the boys again. We were fairly pensive about the visit but we are pleased to say they were 100% better with us. We just sat quietly and both came and sat on our laps, so we feel much better! Monday was also a public holiday and we made a great roast lunch, which we had with Conan and family. A great ending to the long weekend.

This past weekend was quiet by our standards and we went to Mark and Jo for a braaibraaiStratford for the day, and Stoneleigh Abbey. In Stratford she saw Shakespeare's birth house, Nash House (where Shakespeares grand daughter lived with Thomas Nash), Halls Croft (where his daughter lived with her husband Dr John Hall) and the Holy Trinity Church where Shakespeare himself is buried. Stoneleigh Abbey was an abbey built in 1154 for the Cistercian monks, before being destroyed during the Dissolution of King Henry VIII. The Georgian West wing was built in the 1700's. Jane Austin visited in 1806, and based her book Mansfield Park on the Abbey. Sammy loved it so much she has popped down to the library and taken out Mansfield Park to read.

That's all we have for you now, and we promise the next post won't take that long!

Flags on Regent Street, there were hundreds of them!

More Flags

Looking up Regent Street, it was amazing to see!

Quiet street corner.....

Sammy with the wind blowing, unimpressed with my paparazzi skills

Parliament, with great weather in the background

Big Ben, and blue skies

Sammy with a lovely smile!

More of Parliament

Sammy posing in front of the statue of Richard the Lion Heart

Richard the Lion Heart

Outside the side entrance to Westminster Abbey, note the crowds!

The main entrance, where the couple had left the Abbey 24hrs before

Sammy tired to pose, but it was hard with so many people walking across us all the time!

Madiba statue a little more in proportion than Mandela Square.

Did I mention the weather?

This clown in Ripleys made Sammy laugh, if only because I nearly bopped it!

Down with the Paparazzi!

Stratford, example of a Tudor house

Nash House I think. Sam is upstairs in the bath so I can't ask her now!

Holy Trinity Church and Shakespeares burial site

The garden view of Shakespeares birthplace

Georgian wing of Stoneleigh Abbey

Wow. River scene from the same estate

Curious roof of a building on the grounds

Period actress playing Jane Austin at Stoneleigh Abbey

Sneak photo of inside before Sam was scolded for taking the pic!

That's all folks. Sleep tight!