Eat Your Carrots

Passport Tickets Money

Usually when you go away on holiday the mantra of the three things you have to remember is "passport, tickets, money". Not for us this year. Thanks to those uselessly inefficient wallies at Kosmar we don't have to worry about tickets this year, as they've forgotten to send us any. Instead we have to join yet another queue at the airport to pick up our tickets there, before joining the queue to check in. Bleary-eyed at 3am, joining more queues than I really ought to is not something I relish.

Christmas @ Castle Howard

We went to Castle Howard on Sunday. At this time of year it's their "festive season" and the rooms of the house are decorated accordingly. By and large this means that almost every room has a Christmas tree in it and a large amount of candles. It's billed as "1000 candles" but who was counting? Certainly there were a lot of candles and I imagine that it's an insurers worst nightmare, especially considering that they've already had one major fire here, albeit in 1940, when the entire dome (in picture above) came crashing down.

Castle Howard is a lovely place to visit (if the weather is right). The extensive grounds and gardens are lovely with their various sculptures and the views back to the house. The house itself is typical stately home stuff, room after room filled with kitsch old furniture and often hideous paintings, though to be fair to the place it's certainly better than some others in this respect. At least in most rooms (that we could see) the furniture matched and there weren't too many paintings of dead animals.

Architectural highlights are the great hall with its dome and the chapel, but the real highlight is the Howard family's children's Christmas lists, casually displayed as if left for Santa in what is perhaps the best room on view. Girls will be girls and the Olivia's wish list includes a dalmatian puppy, a baby sister and a furry pony. Bizarrely it also includes a butternut squash! Perhaps she just likes the sound of the name - I know I do.

An added bonus is that normally photography in the house is forbidden, but during the festive period it is allowed. Various pictures are shown below.

The only downside was the totally inedible baked potato I had (or rather, didn't have) in the cafe. I was unlucky, the other 5 in our party all had decent potatoes, although the "served with side-salad" failed to materialise and their idea of "baked potato with cheese" is to give you a solid block of cheese on the side of your plate next to the potato. Oh, and the plate was so small that you struggled to keep it all on board! Anyway, wife gave them what for and we got a refund. It was only baked potato but you really expect better at a place like Castle Howard. I mean come on, James Martin's dad used to run the catering and he himself has cooked there on occasions!

New Toy

I've got a new toy - a Garmin eTrex Venture HC. It's a hand held GPS unit with full colour screen and high sensitivity GPS receiver. It has on-screen mapping of topographical features - roads and tracks, contours, streams & rivers, forests - the stuff you need for being out in open country as opposed to navigating by road as you do when in a car.

I bought it for mountain biking, for three main reasons;

1. So I know where I've been. Strange as this may sound, after many rides where someone else is leading I have absolutely NO idea where I've been!
2. So I can follow those routes (and others) again. The unit has route guidance built into it, though it's not the "get me to there" type of guidance that you get with car-based sat nav units.
3. 3 So I know where I am if I happen to get lost.

It's a lovely little device. Coupled with Memory Map mapping software it lets you see in great detail exactly where you've been - it's actually been a surprise to me how accurate not only this device but Ordnance Survey maps are. The routes we follow on moorland tracks and bridleways tie up with the maps almost to the inch. It's comforting to know that this degree of accuracy is achieved.

Being a bit of a stats whore the features that the Garmin/Memory Map combo provide are fantastic. Speed, times and altitude profiles of your route are shown, with a nice little "dot" that moves around the route and the profiles at the same time so you can tie them together.

I'm a bit obsessed with it at the moment though, and take it with us when we walk to the shops, then analyse our performance when we get back.

Wife really needs to pick the pace up a bit!

AutoStitch

I often take panoramic photos when I'm away and then use software to stitch them back together when I get home. I tended to use Photoshop because that's what I use for everything else, and it has automatic panorama stitching built into it. The results are a bit variable and you can usually see joins in the blending. Sometimes they're really obvious and even manual intervention can't get them perfect (see below).

In search of something better I stumbled across AutoStitch. Not only is it way better than Photoshop, it's also totally free! It claims to be fully automatic and that it can stitch together a whole jumble of pictures, so long as they can actually form a panorama. I tried it with a bunch of pictures that were of the same basic scene, but not an actual panorama, and it told me there was no match. Well done.

Below is the result of the same panorama when produced using AutoStitch.

No visible blend lines. It's amazing. You can adjust image output size to be anything you like. I've set it so that the output height is the same as the input height, the width then autoscales to match. At that resolution (about 13,000 x 2000) it took 5 or 6 minutes to do its work, but the result is worth the wait. Smaller resolutions give in a quicker result, which may be useful for just seeing how the photo is going to turn out.

For the money, I doubt there's a better stitcher on the market.

P.S. The photo is of Vittoriosa (or Birgu) as seen from Senglea (or L'Isla) in Malta.

Maltese Memories

We're back from Malta & Gozo. It was a great holiday and we have a lot of new memories to treasure. Our visit coincided with a lot of festas (local festivals celebrating the patron of their church) - we saw 4 and the tail end of a 5th - and also a "free" wine festival.
There you bought your wine glass and then you could have it filled as often as you wanted with any of the 27 Maltese wines on offer. The stalls were strung out along a street/park that is on the edge of a ridge giving spectacular views down to the coast. Food was also available (though we didn't partake) and the whole night was one to remember. Getting those precious wine glasses home was a major exercise, but we managed at the third attempt to come up with some decent packaging. We bought a box!

We visited some of our favourite places - Valletta, Senglea, Vittoriosa and Xaghra - and took a ride in Malta's equivalent to Venice's gondolas. It served us as a taxi from Vittoriosa to Senglea and cost only 50c. Mind you, you don't get serenaded and they use and outboard motor, so Venice has nothing to worry about just yet.
We could have taken the gondola to Valletta for 1LM, but Valletta wasn't in our plans for that day. It was a nice little trip and save us a load of walking time, which got us to Senglea in time to catch the climax of the festa.
New places that we visited included Xlendi on Gozo, which we really enjoyed, and the same with Marsascala on Malta. Both are fairly low key resorts that had a real air of tranquility about them which we found to be very agreeable. We went back to Xlendi a second time and intended to do the same with Marsascala, but Zabbar's festa proved way too tempting and kept us away.
We also got to Birzibugga, a strange place that is a quite pleasant place to while away a few hours in a cafe (we did) or sit on the lovely sandy beach - while looking at the enormous container port barely 200m away across the bay. It's a strange place, Malta. Different rules apply than at home when it comes to things like that. Danger and/or unsightliness don't seem to matter.
Other memories that stand out are "the naughty boys of Senglea". These boys play happily in the calm, but very deep, waters around Malta's dry docks. They have loads of fun diving off the mooring pontoons and climbing up the mooring ropes of the enormous oil exploration vessel that was in at the time.
We were most surprised on closer examination to find that these "naughty boys" were in fact girls!
Food played a big part in our holiday too - as always. We'd actually planned where we were going to eat - all of our favourite places from last time - but in the end only ate at one of those places, and that on the first night. Chances are we wouldn't even have eaten there if we'd had a chance to recce more beforehand. We found a number of new places to eat in Malta, the most notable being The Kitchen in Sliema, The Blue Elephant in Portomaso and Heat on the Valletta waterfront. In addition we ate at loads of good places in Gozo too.

I think Malta now joins Cyprus as our top foody destination and the hardest thing was trying not to have large lunches as well as large dinners. We didn't always succeed.

The Blue And The Green

We've just got back from Malta and what a wonderful holiday it was. I think we'd both thought maybe we'd like Malta a bit less now that we've discovered Greece, but quite the opposite, we love it more than ever. We saw and did a few old favourites and also quite a few new things. We were lucky enough to visit no fewer than 4 cities that were in the midst of their festa celebrations and one of these in particular proved to be quite an experience.

For the people of Zabbar the festa is a time of great rivalry, the town being split into two factions ,"the blues" and "the greens". They're actually adherents of the two different band clubs in the town (band clubs play a big part in festa celebrations) and during the morning of the festa they face off against each other down the main street that leads from the church.

Music plays loudly in the streets, there's a lot of singing, chanting, pushing and gesticulating - mostly aimed at the other side - and an awful lot of beer gets drunk. The rival sides dress and paint themselves up in the blue or the green and the streets at the opposite ends of town are decked out in the appropriate colours. It all makes for quite a sight and quite an atmosphere.

Below are some photos from the day.

Parasols for sale in the green quarter. We've never seen such use of parasols as we did at Zabbar. As well as these "personal" sized ones there were larger ones over eating/drinking areas and a couple of truly immense ones in the squares that unfortunately were not yet opened up.
Gathering for a drink beneath a large parasol by the Zabbar Shooting Club in "the green zone". Food and beer was being served from every available outlet.
Even pets dress for the occasion. I'm not sure that Charley would take kindly to being dressed up in blue or green garments, but this dog looks happy enough!
Spraying dye on your body, hair and clothes is also popular, though these boys in the blue zone took it rather to extremes! We were lucky to get away with our natural colour intact, though wife did find she had a green arm and, several days and several showers later, that she had a blue lower leg!
The church at Zabbar as seen from the back of the blue crowd...
... and again from the front of the green crowd. Notice the number of policemen separating the two crowds.
They're even more in evidence here, and although they generally seemed relaxed about the whole thing I can't help but feel that they'd be relieved when it's over.
The blues band club, dressed up in all its finery. Many of the buildings down the main street sport decorations, though these were perhaps the most lavish.
Inside the church. It's really gorgeous if you like that sort of thing - lots of bright paint and gold embellishment.
We left soon after midday while the festivities were still in full swing - we had other things to do and more festas to visit. We never got to see it by night but from pictures and videos that I've seen since, Zabbar church looks to be the most amazingly lit church that I've seen. Next time we go I hope to coincide it with Zabbar festa again, and this time we might get there in the evening.

There's a video from last year's festa here on YouTube, it's exactly as it was when we were there, even down to the same music playing. There's a delightful (and delightfully tacky) piece of video editing part way through that reminds you just what all this mayhem is actually supposed to be about ;-)

Weekend In The Lakes

We went to the lake district last bank holiday weekend with BFG and the whole batch of in-laws. We stayed in the log cabins at Burnside Park (last picture) on the outskirts of Keswick, the third time we've stayed there. They're great cabins with all mod-cons, including this time an electric plate warmer! Every home should have one.
The weather was great and we did a couple of lovely walks, one round Buttermere (first 5 pictures), the first time I've ever done it in the sunshine, and the other around the head of Derwentwater (next 6 pictures). It was lovely, everything was so, so green, something that comes from (usually) having lots of rain I guess!
The best thing about it though was, in BFG, having someone with whom to enjoy a few pints of the very fine beers that are to be had in Keswick. As wife would have it, "every time she looked round we'd vanished into another pub". I had Yates' bitter for the first time since we were there for New Year three New Years ago. It tasted just as good as I remembered.
Boy was it busy though. We could barely get into a pub on the Saturday and certainly couldn't eat in one, it being standing room only - we had to go to the chippie, so no hardship there. It's the busiest I've ever seen Keswick's pubs and we've been there at every time of the year.

So many thanks to BFG and SIL for providing free board and lodgings for the weekend, and for providing me with a drinking partner who appreciates a good pint of ale!

Cyprus Was Great

What a fantastic two weeks we had in Cyprus, and what a lovely country it is. There's so much history there, some of the best archaeological sites I've ever seen. We managed to get to quite a few, having hired a car for 10 days, and it would be hard to pick just one favourite from them.

The mosaics at Paphos would be hard to beat, but so too would the subterranean Tombs Of The Kings, the early Roman examples of plumbing at Amathous, the amphitheater at Kurion and the breathtaking Sanctuary Of Apollo Hylates.

Then there's the churches and monasteries, particularly those up in the mountains. 10 of the Troodos churches are UNESCO heritage sites, and justifiably so. Most look like nothing more than a barn from outside but inside they are a wonderment of ancient frescoes and painted icons - we got to see two of them. And if frescoes and murals are your thing, and you're not put off by religious opulence, then you'll find Kykkos monastery stunning. It really did take our breath away, the phrase "jaw dropping" was invented for this place.

Natural beauties included Aphrodite's Rock (main picture), the Akamas peninsula and the countryside in general. Visiting in spring was a real boon as everywhere was a carpet of flowers (this is a field from near Amathous). I don't know all the flower varieties, but there were convolvolous and statice of various shades, poppies and gypsophila. I imagine it all looks a lot more barren by summer.

The mountains were a little disappointing, being not very scenic. Not at all like the Alps, nor even The Lake District, Wales or Scotland. They're just a bit "soft" looking, not giving at all any impression of height, the only clue to that being the chill in the air (8 up there opposed to 26 at the coast). The treasures that the mountains held though (churches, monasteries, old villages) more than made up for that, and the gentleness of the mountains made driving in them a lot easier than I'd expected.

Did I mention food yet? Food plays a big part in our holidays and the food we had on Cyprus was superb. I'd say that at least 10 of the meals we had there would rate in our list of best-ever meals, with one place in particular standing out - The 7 St. Georges in Geriskipou village. Here the only meal they serve is mezze and the dishes keep on coming until you tell them to stop. We totalled 26 dishes on our first visit and 24 on the second. Our first taste of Lebanese food too, at a place in Nicosia, proved to be quite sensational. Again we went for a mezze-style approach only this time the dishes were not mezze sized and we ended up totally stuffed!

We took one trip into the northern part of Cyprus, that part of it occupied by the Turks since 1974. We went to Famagusta, an old venitian walled city that was formerly Cyprus' main tourist resort. I'd seen a few pictures and read a few descriptions of the place and I was hoping it would be worth the long treck.

It was worth it and then some! The city is packed with huge churches in various states of repair. Some almost perfect, some totally ruined, but all immensley picturesque, especially as the rest of the city is low-rise and the ruins tower above them giving a real sense of scale. My only regreat was that the long trip gave us so little time there. Next time we'll hope to go for longer.

Before the holiday I'd wondered if I'd like Cyprus. On returning I'm wondering just how soon I can go back there.

I'm In Cyprus

In case you didn't realise. It's great, especially the food. We've had four of the best meals we've ever had in the last week.

More when I get back.

Bye for now.

The Bingley Arms - Britain's Oldest Pub

We went to "Britain's Oldest Pub" on Saturday. I'm sure it's one of those things that's hotly disputed, but it's listed in The Guinness Book Of Records and there's other evidence too that indicates that this, The Bingley Arms at Bardsey, near Leeds, is indeed the oldest pub. It's proven usage dates back to 905 and as well as its age it's filled with items of apparent historical note that make a visit here worthwhile. And that's before we even get to the food and the beer!
The Inglenook fireplace makes a cozy place to sit these days but in the past it was used to hide Catholic priests, there being not one but two priest holes hidden up the chimney (just about visible by virtue of judicious lighting). There's also (apparently) a hidden passageway between the pub and the nearby church by which means the priests could make their way to refuge in the pub.
The bar of the pub contains a stove from Kirkstall forge as well as a dutch oven (shown here) that dates from the 1700's, apparently the only one in all of Yorkshire.

We ate at the pub, a light lunch of Brie & Cranberry sandwiches, huge, chunky, real chips and garlic bread. It was all very tasty (the chips were out of this world), with decent portions and at a decent price. The hand pulled Tetley's beer was spot on too.
The village is small and pleasantly attractive without having too much else to see beyond the pub and the aforementioned church. This church though is a bit of a stunner as churches go, being of an unusual style that looks very attractive.
The style comes from the fact that there's an original pre-conquest recangular church (with tower) hidden inside the later addition of sloped extensions. It's obvious from a look at the stonework, and its worth noting that the extensions aren't keyed into the original in any noticeable way. Probably wouldn't pass bulding regs these days!

The Bingley Arms is at

37 Church Lane
Bardsey,
Leeds, LS17 9DR

Tel: 01937 572 462

Bardsey village is just off the A58 Leeds-Wetherby road.