When the Road Runs Out

September 10-12 saw us attend our first UK music festival, End of the Road at the Larmer Tree Gardens in Dorset. EOTR is about as far removed, though, from the big summer festivals like Glastonbury and Reading as could be imagined, which was basically what we wanted as we sought the closest experience to our festival of choice in New Zealand, Camp(us) A Low Hum. I must say, this compared very, very favourably to CALH.


The first thing on the agenda was of course to set up our tent. We had bought it a few weeks previously but had not had a chance to have a test run at pitching it yet, and it wasn't until we had almost finished that we really how tiny the thing was. We managed to fit in it though. Just.

Please ignore the flag behind my head.

Some people were clever and hired these darling wagons for their accommodation; possibly something to look into if we go again next year.

"Purveyors of Fairydust"

Here is the central field of the grounds that held most of the food stalls, shops, pubs, activity tents and three of the smaller stages. Hopefully this gives you an idea of the laid-back vibe of the festival.


We enjoyed many fine local ales from the three on-site pubs: The Badger Inn, The Peacock Bar, and The Black Crow. My favourite drop was the Hedge Monkey - a malty, hoppy deep amber ale brewed in Somerton, Dorset.


For non-alcoholic beverages the Tea Stop, operating out of an old double-decker bus with a garden out the front, proved to be an excellent option. Here I am enjoying a milkshake and the view from the upper deck.



This is the main stage from afar. It was a lovely setting with lots of greenery and that cute archway off to the side. This picture was about away as far as you could get from the stage, and it was very easy to get up close for a great view of the performers.


Wandering amongst the mazey paths of Larmer led to many unexpected delights, including the macaws and peacocks that inhabited the site. Unicorns and zebras hid in the trees...


...while this delightful scene popped up in a clearing. It later hosted a lovely ensemble who played Joanna Newsom covers.


We probably spent too much time in the games area playing giant Connect 4. Here is an epic draw that we played out.


Oh yeah, a whole bunch of great bands played as well. As it happens we barely took a single photo of any of them, which probably says something about (a) how engaging the performances were, and (b) how much other fun stuff was going on around the place. If I were to pick two highlights from each day it would be Modest Mouse and Wolf Parade for day one, Iron & Wine and Caribou for day two, Errors and Wilco for day three.

There is a pretty high chance that we will go back next year, and early-bird tickets are already on sale... very tempting! For now we have our sweet t-shirts to remind us of the great time we had. His and hers, respectively:

¡hola España

I'll let Oren write about the End of the Road festival and I'll discuss Spain.

For the first time since arriving in the UK, Oren and I left these fair shores for a European adventure. I was easily seduced by the idea of Spain at the Spanish festival in Oxford Street. Oren had introduced me to paella at some stage, so Valencia made sense.
I can happily report that there were no transportation hiccups this time around. Begrudgingly we were up to catch a bus a little after 3am to the middle of nowhere aka Stansted Airport. Any claim that is even remotely near London is a lie. You always think the flights are cheap but then you have to factor both the time and cost to travel to god knows where.

However the good thing about early morning flights was that we arrived in Spain just after 11am and caught the metro into the city. Valencia airport is probably one of the few airports that Ryanair flies into that is actually near the place it claims to be so it was only a 20 minute Metro ride into the city. I instantly loved Valencia. It reminded me of a sunnier, friendlier Paris without any worry that you will be hassled by people trying to sell you Eiffel towers or tie "friendship" bracelets around your wrists.

We ended up wandering around the marble streets in the rising heat just having a look with no real idea of where we were going. We found this Cathedral:


I had found out that Valencia had a large aquarium that housed Belugas and desperately wanted to go so, full of paella from a local cafe, we walked down to the City of Science and Arts which is basically an architectural wet dream. Myself, I found it slightly tacky. However the walk through the gardens in a now dry riverbed was lovely.


By this time it was unbelievably hot. Having come from a rainy wet London to a very dry sunny Valencia at nearly 30 degrees, we were both melting. I though the aquarium was indoors but a lot of it was outside as you walked between the mostly underground enclosures.



The belugas were amazing but also a bit sad. One spent several hours floating at a gate wishing to get through and the other was doing a constant repetitive pacing through its tank. At one point the one at the gate started making the most screeching whale sound that echoed through the underground viewing area. It's sad that these majestic creatures have to be in aquariums so people can understand why we need to conserve our environments.

Our hotel was only about 10 minutes walk across a large bridge after the aquarium where we could delight in the air conditioning. I'm becoming a pro at booking hotels and we had a lovely place I had scored a 45% off. It was very fancy.
Our hotel was also in a good location, between the beach and the city and right beside two shopping centres. We ended up getting some bread, chorizo, duck pate, juice, beer and crisps and settling in for most of the night before wandering the other shopping centre and watching a man fail at selling corn outside our hotel window.

We woke up late due to a well deserved sleep in and were welcomed for a cooler day. It was mid 20s for most of the day. We decided to walk down to the beach via the America's Cup village. I guess the unfortunate thing is that because it's been in court so long, the village is dead but we took photos of the NZ building.
We walked right around to the beach and found ourselves a nice spot to rest. I decided to have a swim which was very refreshing in the heat. I liked that no one on the beach had any qualms about their bodies, no one was perfect, it was hot, they worn what they wanted. It didn't feel like a fashion or beauty competition like I had expected.
We both had been working hard so were happy to have a quiet day. We eventually made back to the shopping centre by our hotel and went to a Spanish place that sells montaditos which are a sort of tapas. It took us our first order to realise they were just baby rolls and were served with crisps! I really liked it, it was a lot of fun and with every order we got giant glasses of Spanish beer for only a euro! This of course lead to us napping in our hotel room later before going to another tapas restaurant for dinner that served lots and lots of meat. Oren did very well in proving that money spent on Spanish language papers at Canterbury Uni wasn't entirely wasted. I was very proud of him as I spoke no Spanish at all!



Unfortunately the next day we had a 11am flight back to Stansted. We took the metro and said goodbye to the heat and the sun to return to rainy London.


Next weekend we head to Dublin for which will probably be the last trip for a couple months as Oren can't have leave over the Christmas period from work.

A Weekend Tour, Part 2 - Sunday Driver, Yeah

We had had vague intentions of spending our whole weekend exploring the eastern counties, but after deciding to go back to London on Saturday night we made the call to head out west on Sunday. Our first destination was the inevitable visit to Stonehenge, but unfortunately we were left pretty disappointed with it. Overpriced and you can't get near the site without paying more to go on a guided tour, we found the whole experence a bit sterile. But here it is anyway, to prove we were there:


Luckily, though, Stonehenge is not the only ancient stone circle in the area, so we headed next for the lesser known monuments at Avebury a few miles north. This proved a fine choice that quickly washed away the disappointment of Stonehenge. Avebury's stones are in a much larger formation with an outer circle that skirts around the edge of a small village. With free and unrestricted access to the stones, in a pretty location with a nice atmosphere, I would recommend a visit to Avebury ahead of the more popular alternative.


At this point our Sunday was decidedly lacking in cathedrals, so we drove to Salisbury to get our fix.






Our final stop turned out to be my favourite of the whole weekend. While in Avebury, Jo had picked up a brochure for a nearby ruins, Old Wardour Castle. Neither of us had heard of it before but it looked lovely from the brochure so we decided to have a look. It was not easy to find, with no signage on the main roads, but after making our way through narrow country roads and thatched-roof villages we came to this wonderful place.








If we learnt one lesson that day, it was that the best attractions are often these lesser-known, off-the-beaten-track types.

A Weekend Tour, Part 1 - Cathedrals and Roundabouts

Last weekend was my first full weekend off since I started work (usually I work on Saturdays), so we decided to make the most of it by hiring a car and seeing some more of our new home country. We didn't have many concrete plans when we set out, and we ended up covering more ground than we expected, in all passing through 10 counties over the two days.

Our first (and more-or-less only) settled destination was the small town of Brandon in Suffolk, the home of Jo's great-aunt Dora. But first we had a journey of 2-3 hours ahead of us, and it wasn't long until we had developed an intense frustration at the British motorways. There is one particularly awful feature that you may well have heard of or experienced yourself: the roundabouts. Every bad thing that people say about them is completely right. The British road system is littered with hundreds of the buggers, and they serve no practical purpose other than to annoy. Often after you successfully negotiate your way through a three-lane monster complete with traffic lights and many exits, it is only 20 seconds further down the road until you encounter another. Sometimes there are even two or more roundabouts placed adjacent to one another, so you exit your roundabout... into another roundabout! Just in case you couldn't wait for the next one! Many of them have poor (or non-existant) signage, instructing you to get into one lane before making you swerve violently across others lest you miss your exit. Other countries have perfectly functional highways without these monstrosities, and I cannot figure out the need for them. I know I have been ranting about roundabouts for a while now but I just hate them so much! And I wasn't even driving!

*Deep breath*

Shortly into our journey, our rental car started beeping at us and flashing symbols on the dashboard, which we eventually figured out was it telling us we were low on fuel. We checked the map for nearby towns to refill, and I saw we were near St Albans, which my friend Elizabeth had recommended to me a while back. It turned out to be an fine decision, providing us with the first of many excellent cathedral visits for the weekend.







Our other port of call in St Albans was to stop for lunch at the local waffle house at the recommendation of our Lonely Planet Great Britain guidebook. It seemed that a lot of other people had also read this, as the restaurant was very busy, though we were lucky to arrive at a time when we were able to be seated within five minutes before watching the queue extend to around five times that length while we ate. The restaurant serves a large variety of waffle dishes, including exotic-sounding savoury ones (eg: Mediterranean vegetable waffle, waffles with curry). In the end we went for the more familiar sweet waffles: Dutch apple waffle with loads of maple syrup for me and banoffee waffle with vanilla ice cream for Jo; both incredibly good.

With both our car and our stomachs refuelled, we set out again for Brandon. It rained.


We did make it eventually though, where Jo and Dora had a very touching reunion after three years had passed since their last meeting. Dora, still very lively at 92 years old, was obviously delighted to see us, and kept saying how she often thought of her relatives in New Zealand but never thought she would see them again. She was the perfect host, having made us ham sandwiches and cheese scones and it was lovely to sit down and chat with her for a couple of hours over our food and tea. Possibly our biggest mistake of the trip was not taking any photos with Dora, but we will make up for that next time we visit her.

After saying our goodbyes we headed for nearby tiny Lakenheath station, where Jo's grandfather and grandmother (Dora's sister) had met during the war, and later lived when her grandfather was the station master there.




Our next stop was the small town of Ely in Cambridgeshire to check out another famous cathedral. We didn't go inside this one as we were there later than the 7pm closing time, but it was a spectacular enough building from the exterior.




Finally, we headed for the town of Bury St Edmunds as our last destination for the evening, where we enjoyed a lovely dinner and wandered amongst the evening streets of the village for a while. We realised it was not going to be practical to find a room to stay the night out there, so we returned to London for the night (eventually, even in the middle of the night London cannot be quickly crossed from the northeast to our home in the southwest). We were pretty knackered by the time we got home well after midnight, and we had a full day ahead of us for sunday too.

Stay tuned for the second part of our weekend trip report, including Stonehenge, Avebury, Salisbury and Old Wardour Castle.

Escaping to the Seaside

A few Sundays ago, the only day we now both have off together, I decided to book some train tickets to Brighton and take Oren to some English seaside. I had never been to Brighton either, just heard all the stories, so was quite excited about it.

However the day before, walking off a large waffle, my friend Silvia and I wandered down to Tower Bridge and found it open. Strangely enough I had packed my camera and could capture the exciting moment and now want to share it with you:



Our trip to Brighton did not start well. Why do my posts always start like this? It's almost like it's always my fault. I blame whoever runs London Bridge station and TFL (I could also blame my company for selling their stake in the tube). When we got to the station after waiting 8 minutes for a Northern Line train, we had minutes to get our prepaid tickets out of the machine. The machines had signs stating that you couldn't get prepaid tickets for Brighton. Our train was gone.

Somewhat luckily, it turned out our tickets were open off peak so we could take another one and had to wait. In the waiting we got tempted by a lolly stand.




Giant Haribo coke bottles!

We arrived at Brighton without further incident. When we first arrived it was very windy and overcast and didn't look like it would make much of a day but we decided we had to at least sit on the beach and enjoy fish n chips.



Then of course, we do what you do at Brighton which is brave the Pier. We made the mistake of walking through the arcade when we first walked down it with the horrible clang of lots of gaming machines, but managed to figure out to walk around it. We didn't take any rides but we admired a few of them from a distance. We walked around the side on the way back and I made faces for no reason.



Don't let my face fool you however, as it was very lovely in Brighton. The English talk down their coast so I thought it wouldn't be that nice but I really enjoyed it -- other than for the sunburn I endured for the next few days. We had some delicious milkshakes on the pier and a beer in the pub before heading back to the station and falling asleep on the train back.