Santa Barbara, Day 1

The kids got up bright and early and trotted upstairs to snuggle with Grandma

while Rhodri and I got up just as bright and early and zoomed off to play golf with Butch and Dorothy. Grandma then took the troops to the SB Zoo with Kristin and baby Billy, then met us for lunch at Glen Annie Golf Course.

Tryfan wanted to see the giraffes

Rhiannon, Billy and Tryfs

On the golf course

Dorothy, Rhodri and Butch having lunch at Glen Annie

Kristin and Billy

Libby also joined us for lunch before she headed off to LAX to fly up to Washington with Phil and Ruby. 

The rest of the afternoon we spent at the Birchim's pool with Kristin, Billy, and also my dear friend Denise and her 3 kids Ava, Liam and Lucas. We have been planning this reunion at the Birchim's pool for the past couple of years!

The best pool in the world

We are so lucky to have a lot of close relations and dear friends in one place, and such a gorgeous place too. We love visiting Santa Barbara!

San Clemente to Santa Barbara

Today we went down to the beach again but the other direction to yesterday. We did some more boogie boarding and diving through waves, then headed back to the awesome house to get packed up and dried off. We sadly said goodbye to the Pearces and hit the road to drive up to SB. Although it was a short visit, it was so great to reconnect with Deanna and Mike and their gorgeous boys. Our kids sure adored those two! 

Mike, Aidan, Deanna, me, Tryfs and Rhiannon

We left at 1pm and got to "601" (what we call Grandma's house) at 4pm, so no terrible traffic through LA. All good! We pretty much just dropped our bags, gave Grandma Debi big hugs, and then headed over to the Birchim's pool next door.

Rhiannon at In-n-Out

For dinner we went to In-n-Out and it was sooooooo good. Hurray for cheeseburgers animal style!

The rest of our first full day in California

After the house intruder adventure, we went swimming in a neighbor's pool

Neighbor's awesome pool with jacuzzi and slide

Making Jell-O with Tyler

Grooming the dog whose name I can't remember

In the evening, we 4 drove back down to San Diego (La Jolla) for a lovely dinner party with our former colleagues and friends from the marine electromagnetic world. The party was hosted by Steve and Cathy, and we were thrilled to spend a whole evening with them along with Arnie, Jacques, Kerry, Carolyn, Len, Lissa, Jim and Maren...all our old homies!  We had lovely wine to drink and delicious Mexican style food, and all the details were right. These 2 are professional dinner party hosts! The kids were a bit grouchy (well, Tryfan was anyway) and uber-tired, so eventually fell asleep on the couch while Rhodri and I enjoyed the rest of the evening. It was truly special and wonderful, but eventually the night had to end and we had to say goodbye again. I didn't take any photos because somehow that felt wrong, but it was such a special night. 

House intruder!

When we got back from the beach, I went into the Pantry of Fun to start foraging for lunch items and immediately heard a loud rustling coming from the back corner of the room! I couldn't see much, but I knew straightaway that it was bigger than a rat and had a black appendage. We had left some sliding glass doors open while were at the beach (which apparently is what the owners do as well) and something had clearly come into the house and was now in the pantry! I quickly shut the door and we three adults conferred about what to do next. Skunks inside people's houses are a big problem locally, and getting them out of the house without them spraying their nasty skunk smell is notoriously difficult. We quickly researched "what skunks like to eat" and "how to get a skunk out of a house" and similar topics while relocating the dog to a neighbor's house and locking the kids in the ground floor room (not as bad as it sounds with it's own patio, massive TV, indoor trampoline and kitchen/bar!).

Then we built a tunnel of chairs and other miscellaneous furniture to help coax the intruder from the pantry out to the nearest deck area. We had found out in the course of our research that skunks allegedly like raw eggs, so we sacrificed a few onto paper plates leading outside. But as we were moving furniture around, we noticed some little splots of melty poo on the floor, the couches, the rugs... hmm... Anyway, Rhodri then set up his laptop as a video camera and skyped it from his phone so that we had remote video coverage.

Finally, when everything was staged and people were in their positions, I slowly opened the pantry door with the skype camera focused on the path of egg plates.  I peered inside and confirmed visual contact with.... a crow. Boy did we laugh! We were so relieved to discover that the intruder was just a crow rather than a skunk! That explained the melty poo all over the house. Anyway, I found a broom and shooed it out of the pantry, but it was really disoriented and flew around the living room and dining room, landing briefly on a piece of expensive artwork (eek!) before finally getting back outside to freedom. We celebrated for a few moments, then started trying to scrub crow poo out of the rugs and couch cushions. Anyway, it was an adventure.

Beach Day #1

Tryfan, Tyler, Rhiannon and Aidan with Deanna in the back

After foraging for breakfast in the Pantry of Fun, we headed down to the south beach from the house.
We took a couple of boogie boards and Aidan took his surfboard.

Walking down to the beach with the house in the background

Awesome patio at the house

San Clemente south beach, near San Onofre

We all went swimming and boogie boarding in the waves - Rhodri, Deanna, me and the 4 kids (Mike was at work) - and it was sooo great to be out in the water diving through waves and getting sandy. The kids had never boogie boarded until today, and although the waves were pretty big to start on, they got some good action in the white water.

 

We had a great few hours down there and then headed back up to the house when it started to get close to lunch time.

San Diego bound!

Today (yesterday  now) was the long-awaited day that we flew from London to San Diego. It was a long ole flight but we all settled in just fine and watched the movies of our choice and tried to get some sleep too. Tryfan slept about 5 hours (of 11) and the rest of us managed to get at least 1-2 hrs, so it was a success.

We landed around 6:15 pm, rented a mini-van, and drove an hour north to San Clemente to stay with Mike and Deanna and their kids Aidan and Tyler.

 Mike and Deanna had scored a dog-sitting job at an amazing house in a gated community in San Clemente, and this coincided with our visit so we got to enjoy this place as well ! By the time we got there and Deanna had whipped up some dinner for us, we all had a second wind and so were wide awake and happy to be sitting outside in the fresh California air on the comfy couches around a fancy gas fireplace drinking wine (adults only, of course). Deanna and I stayed up past midnight chatting and it was soooo wonderful.

R & T at sunrise on the patio, with comfy couches and gas fireplace in the foreground and the Pacific Ocean in the background.

 We all woke up pretty early and helped ourselves to the pantry full of fun things to eat. Beware anyone who allows the Lewis family or Pearce family to house sit for them if there happens to be a pantry full of fun things to eat!

We are going to go to the beach and various swimming pools today, and life is very good!

Cousins unite

Gabs and Valentin and Auntie Nia came to visit today and they are going to housesit for a week while we are in the USA. We were hoping for a bit more of an overlap with them, but we made the most of the day we did have.

Ice lollies on the couch before bedtime

We did lots of playing outside in the back garden and making a mess in the bedroom by pouring all the Lego onto the ground.

Tryfan and Gabs playing the Quiet Game before dinner time

 It was great to see them and we are really grateful that they are going to housesit for us!

Teacher presents

Finally the school year is coming to a close tomorrow.
This year we missed the strawberry picking window, so the kids wanted to make some special fudge to give as the end-of-year teacher presents. They actually did the whole thing themselves except for pour the really hot liquid candy into a bowl near the end of the process.

They did a great job but I think our thermometer needs some recalibrating because the fudge stayed a bit too soft. It was still delicious though!

Tour of Wales

Rhodri and his Welsh homies have been planning to ride their bicycles from north to south Wales, and finally the day has come and gone.

Rhodri, Bleddyn, Gareth and Huw

Here is the route that the boys took, with overnight stops in Barmouth, Aberaron and Bryn Amman

They had fabulous weather and nobody got hurt, and by the sounds of it they also had a good time!

Awesome storm (for England)

We've had some hot and sunny weather, and tonight we had a pretty good storm come through while we were all over at Cat and Bruno's house.

Here is a video that Rhiannon took: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgNEZxwfYrc

Beavers performance

Sam, Rory, Harry B, ??, ??, Tryfan, ?? and Ollie DF

Tonight was the final night (and performance for the parents) of Beavers, which is the scouts group that comes before Cubs in the UK. Tryfan joined Beavers a couple of months ago, but we still haven't gotten around to buying him a uniform or doing anything committed to this group. We were able to scrounge a jumper for him at least for the grand finale. Here he is with his Beaver homies singing some funny song about a squirrel.

Sk8ters

This morning we went to Argos and bought some inline skates for the troops, then spent the afternoon skating in front of Cat and Bruno's house. It was a gorgeous day with big dark clouds moving quickly across the sky.

View from the front patio to the end of the driveway where the kids were skating

Rio, Lil T and B

Littlestock 2014

Our friends Rob and Macha and their neighbors Mary and Julian put on their 2nd annual "Littlestock" festival on their property this weekend. Originally we were going to go and camp and do the whole festival thing, but Rhodri and I weren't really up for doing all of that so we just went along for the evening.

Although it rained a lot during the night last night and this day started out cloudy, it turned into a fine warm day and we were happy for the hosts to be able to enjoy this party that they had spent so much time planning. They had a sort of square dancing caller who called a few dances (which Rhiannon participated in, but none of the rest of us did), and there were loads of nekkid children running around. It was a nice atmosphere, but I myself didn't feel like chitchatting too much so was pretty glad when we left around 10 pm, just as it was starting to get turn to twilight.

Nearly lost both of them

The first one fell out, and now the 2nd one is really wobbly!

Kristiansund revisited

This week I went back to Kristiansund, Norway for the 2nd of my 2 visits. It coincided with the semi-finals of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, and I couldn't resist staying up late with my colleagues to watch the games outside at a Brazilian restaurant.

 It happened to be stunning weather while I was there and while we had to be inside working for most of the day for Tues-Wed-Thurs that I was there, we did make a trip round the island in one of the boats just to get some fresh air.

Stanley let me drive this workboat and I was pretty nervous at first, but then I got the hang of it and found it really fun.

Me driving the boat with Paul and Rick behind

 I flew back early on Friday morning - flight left at 7am from Molde, which is a 1 hour drive from Kristiansund. It was a gorgeous morning with beautiful light and clouds over the mountains.

One great thing that happened on this trip is that I received a gift from the universe! I had finished the book I was reading on my flight to Norway and had forgotten that it is hard to find books in English over there, so I was resigned to reading magazines and doing work on my travel back to England. However, as I was waiting to get on the plane in Molde - and I was one of the last people to get on the plane - I was standing by a trash can and I saw that there was a book on top of it in English! Nobody else was around, so clearly someone had finished reading it but couldn't bear to put it in the trash, so left it for somebody to find... and that somebody was me! I was absolutely thrilled to dive into "The Circle" by Dave Eggers on my travel back today.

Skate park

The other day, we took the scooters over to the relatively new skate park in Forest Row and the kids scootered around. They also like playing on the exercise equipment that is set up there.

Eggs

I noticed the labeling on our eggs this week and thought it was funny to brag about the inquisitive nature of this particular breed of chickens:

A project begins...

This week we started making some changes to Chalfonts. It sure is a mess now!
We are starting by having the house rewired because the electrical system is dodgey and we've also been changing the lighting systems so that we have LED lights recessed in the ceiling rather than floor lamps. We are also replacing the boiler and all the radiators so that we'll have a more efficient heating system. All good changes, but these are just the start!

 The guys who have been doing all the work are Nathan the electrician and Barry the plumber.

Rhodri, Nathan and Barry taking a break on the back steps

They are awfully nice guys and have a soft spot for Bentley, who has been taking advantage of their good will and sandwich morsels!