- Ruach Online -

Old friends get together again!

2009-11-08T08:05:00.005Z

Once again it's the time of year when a bunch of old friends get together for a meal and a blether. This time Mary was unable to attend due to feeling somewhat under the weather. But it was good be there and to catch up again.... remarkable how the conversation flips between reminiscing our younger days and also other newer topic such has the joys of grandparent hood ;-)

It was a delightful evening with lots of laughs and happy stories to enjoy.

Roll on next year when we hope to do it all again!!!

Mizpah!

;-)

PS
I just had to find one bonus photo to include here - and I think this is the one - sorry Barbara - could not resist ;-)

I published all the photos taken on Facebook - see here - when you can download and comment

Encouragement

2009-11-06T07:21:00.004Z

My good friend and colleague passed me the following link which describes the circumstances when the above famous picture was taken. It makes interesting reading - so I encourage you to take a few minutes to read it.

Click to read the article

As it happens "Encouragement" was also the theme at the EngageYouth event which took place at Kemnay church at the weekend. It was a great evening taking place during one of the worst rain storms we have seen this year. Despite this people travelled from as far away as Aberdeen and had a great time. You can listen to the main message for the evening clicking here.

It is also possible to subscribe to the EngageYouth Podcast where you will find recordings of previous speakers also available.

Here is the Podcast link - which you can use to subscribe in iTune - or click on to for immediate access via your web browser.

http://web.me.com/jimbuchan/Podcasts/EngageYouth.xml

Serious Rain in Kemnay

2009-10-22T15:27:00.004+01:00

Some serious rain in Kemnay over the last few days! So no possibility, of taking the usual route for the dog walk ;-)

1 year since Mam passed away!

2009-10-18T21:51:00.003+01:00

During our October break in Kemnay it was one year since my Mam passed away! We visited her grave and left some roses to park the occassion! It is remarkable how quickly time passes and it certainly does not feel like a whole year since she died. As you can see below the grave stone has been updated to include reference to both of my parents who died more or less 3 years apart.

Memories, memories!

Gamrie - October 2009 - a relaxing holiday!

2009-10-18T21:38:00.005+01:00

We have just come back from spending a week at a holiday cottage in Gamrie - see more by clicking here. This is a recommended way to get away from email, twitter, the phone - including mobiles!!! no signal!
We had a few days with the kids and then a few with just Mary, me and Abbie the dog! A very relaxing time for sure - we had the luxury of a real fire so enjoyed stoking it and lighting it each day!!!

The following photo was taken from St Johns Church graveyard during one of our many walks. You can see clearly how the village is situated at near the shore line well out of reach from mobile signals and the like!

See more photos by clicking here!

A very relaxing time was had by all ;-) Roll on next October when we will be on a cruse ship sailing up the east coast of America - that will be somewhat different!

SSDN Team Reunion - SLF09

2009-09-23T22:28:00.005+01:00

Above photo taken as I walked from the hotel to the meal venue -
featuring the Squinty bridge as it is locally known.

The night before the Scottish Learning Festival and I was able to attend a reunion event for the team that conducted the procurement process for Glow. We all worked out of Learning and Teaching Scotland for the duration of the process but some of us have now moved on to new challenges. It was really great to have the chance to catch up old friends and colleagues and also to do this at the time when there is real evidence that Glow is now being used is some very innovative ways. It is quite rewarding to see that our collective efforts back then, backed up with the Scottish Governments resolve and finding is now starting to bear real fruits.

I have published the photos I took during our meal and just afterwards (these are all downloadable for the benefit of any of the team that want to have a memento of the evening).

http://gallery.me.com/jimbuchan#100241

You can also read John Connels post on the topic which says a little more about the event.

http://www.johnconnell.co.uk/blog/?p=2257

Roll on next year ;-)

New addition

2009-09-18T15:56:00.005+01:00

Today we took a big step regarding our love of camping ;-) We have enjoyed our trailer tent and have had our annual summer holiday in Keswick under canvas for the last 20 years or so! But after a particularly wet holiday this summer we decided to start looking around for a caravan. As fate would have it someone locally in our village was selling one which was in pretty good condition. We passed it with its "For Sale" sign a number of times and then eventually decided to approach the owner explore the conditions of sale!

We did not commit on the first visit be returned again on Wednesday and shook hands on the deal! So we now own a caravan complete with all the accessories that we could conceivably need! We will continue to look around for an awning but there is no real urgency for that since we will not use the caravan proper till next summer!

Mary is very pleased with the acquisition and is looking forward to getting up in the mornings when camping and not having to make the now customary walk to the campsite toilet for relief. The caravan has a built in toilet - what luxury !;-)

And you can have a look inside!

http://gallery.me.com/jimbuchan#100254

Cisco Telepresence - the facts

2009-09-17T13:41:00.002+01:00

Further to my last post which is about the impact of HD TV on the network - see below a video which is about Cisco's Telepresence which provides an transformational improvement on traditional Video Conferencing.

http://www.twitvid.com/19B5B

I have had the opportunity to participate in a number of Telepresence meetings recently - the last was between three end points Glasgow, Bangalore and Sydney. The experience was as close as it could be to us all being together in the same room! I am afraid that you simply have to experience this to realise who true this is!

Of course for this to work you do need a pretty solid network with a need to support a minimum of 8 Mbps in each direction for each video stream. And to setup conference is a simple as scheduling a meeting in Outlook with a press of one button on the day to initiate the session.

One interesting feature is that the voice channel working in full duplex - which means that anyone can speak at any time and will be heard by all. That is a significant departure from H.323 based VC system where the voice is usual simplex ( one direction at a time ) which is necessary to eliminate audio feed back which is caused by the latency of such systems!!!

HD Video for Education

2009-09-17T11:19:00.003+01:00

Becta have made some information about HD Video and its implications for network load etc... See the following link

http://emergingtechnologies.becta.org.uk/index.php?section=etr&catcode=ETRE_0001&rid=14433

This states that HD video requires about 1Gbps to transmit HD Video uncompressed in real time. There are of course compression techniques which reduce the bps required. In a school situation where it can be expected that there will be significant concurrent demands to consume HD resources as they become more available. The Glow project in Scotland is an example of a national Intranet for school users which could serve HD content. This content would be stored on a central server at the Glow Data Centre and would be accessible in any school in Scotland - and of course to users when accessing the service from home.

One essential link between the national data centre and the school is the link between the school and the Local Authority network. This could be anywhere between 2 and 100 Mbps in capacity. the uplink form a Local authority could be between 45 Mbps and 1Gbps. Clearly many concurrent streams of even compressed HD video could result in these links becoming congested to the extent that the network will slow down greatly. One strategy to overcome this problem for the Local Authority to block video traffic - and there are certainly some LAs that will already have implement such a traffic policy.

One has to reflect on the impact that this will have on the underlying network as use of HD video starts to take of. I am of the view that school users will want to use HD video resources to enhance the current range of online resources which are available for teaching and learning! Imagine the possible impact when lots of people, pupils and teachers using their Flip camera to capture HD video and then sharing them online!

One technology which can provide some essential support in this context is to implement a Content Delivery Network. This is a series of devices with one positioned in each school which has the facility to have HD assets pre-positioned on a built in disc during periods of low network usage - such as over night. If this is the case, each time a user in the school accesses a HD video and it has been pre-positioned on the local content engine, the video will be served via the schools Local Area Network. Which can be based on Gigabit Ethernet technology!

Thankfully the Scottish Government had the fore-sight a number of years ago to invest in such a network for all of Scotland schools which has the capability to pre-position network based content which cannot be delivered in real time. Of course it is also possible to increase the capacity of the network elements but I would suggest that this is a less viable strategy in view of the fact that wide area bandwidth still comes at a relativity high cost.

The Global Growth of Broadband

2009-09-17T07:43:00.006+01:00

It seems that Africa is now connected to the Global Broadband network via a sub sea fibre optic cable - this lead to the BBC publishing a model which makes interesting viewing. It shows how the Internet had evolved since 1999. You can see how the density of broadband subscribers has increased over time and also how the international interconnect circuits have improved. According to the model West Africa has been connected since 2004 with the West coast being connected this year.

This caused me to reflect on my own trips to Botswana in the late 90's when I setup an email system there which connected to the UK via initially a modem ( dial-up ) link and and subsequently via the government network and a satellite link. The former was 9.6 bps on a good day and the latter over a shared 256kbps which was of course much better.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8255695.stm

The following article provide some additional background to the linking of Africa by means of this new sub sea link.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8257152.stm

And a blog post about the experience of using the new infrastructure to do live video broadcast!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/09/live_from_mombasa.html

Beautiful morning in Kemnay

2009-09-09T08:50:00.004+01:00

Just back from walking the dog - beautiful morning in Kemnay, warm and sunny with blue skies ;-) How many more mornings like this will we see before the Autumn kicks in proper.

Kind of special day today has the following time in it 09:09 09/09/09. So I am trying to make this post a close to this time as possible ;-)

The following photo shows the orange/red colours of the first one to start to taking on its autumn colours.

Reunion - 20+ years on!!!

2009-09-07T11:41:00.003+01:00

This was an interesting reunion when Phil met with some who knew him when he was too young to remember her! This lady was the Midwife who helped deliver Philip just over 20 years ago. She remembered the occassion because she was about to go of shift and predicted that the baby would not come until she came back on duty that evening - Philip was delivered about 20 mins later to everyones surprise ;-)

Daniel & Dave - Baptism

2009-09-07T09:07:00.009+01:00

Yesterday, Mary and I attended a baptism service which was held that the FootDee mission hall at FootDee ( pronounced Fitty ). During the service there was some singing and both Daniel and Dave explained why they has decided to be baptised. This sort of thing is more normally done in a baptistry ( big tank full of water ) in a church but these guys wanted to make a very public statement by having it done in the sea at Aberdeen. They had of course made the event known to lots of people and the hall was filled to capacity with standing room only remaining. In the Photo below you can see the crowd of people who turned out to see the event after they had moved down to the beach for actual baptism ceremony.

And here is Daniel waiting to be baptised which involves being completely submerged under water and brought back to the surface by the two church elders standing either side of him. The elder to the right of the picture is Daniels dad, John Cow who is also my lifelong friend.

And here is a photo of Dave just before he was baptised. I should say this was taking place in the North Sea which is never warm by any standards ;-)

The rest of the photos are available in my online photo album which you can see by clicking here

I also took some video footage with my camera which you can see here below

Witnessing this event reminded me of the day my own son Phil was baptised in a similar ceremony in the river Don at Kemnay near where we live.

Wet Wet Wet........

2009-09-04T10:20:00.006+01:00

It has been raining here in Kemnay for the last 24 hours at least! Lots of problems on the roads in this areas and the river Don is also very full! The following photos are taken from more or less the same point and show the river as it was a couple of weeks ago and today. The contrast is considerable - on the one hand very slow moving and safe and now very fast moving and quite dangerous.

A few Weeks ago
What you cannot see in the photo below is the speed at which the water is flowing. But you can see that if Abbie was there today she would have been under the water level. The river today is also running very brown as opposed to the very clear water that was flowing before ;-)

This brings back many memories of excitement when I would have been making preparations to get into my kayak and run the river. But that was at a time when we took to the water regularly and needed the added power to of spate conditions to provide a challenge. Hard to believe that this would have been some 20+ years ago!!!!! How time passes!

Barbee at Fraserburgh

2009-09-02T11:49:00.004+01:00

Had a Barbee at Fraserburgh with my sister and her family. This involved meeting for the first time my Nephew and Neice's girl friend and boy friend. It was good this time together and to work together to put up and enormous Gazebo. It did actually rain on the day so it was worth the effort. I think that all had a really good time together - hopefully we will not need to wait to long before we meet them all again ;-) You can see all the photos I too here

Martin Davies 9th April 1950 - 19th August 2009

2009-08-28T09:51:00.006+01:00

Martin Davies 9th April 1950 - 19th August 2009

The above picture was taken at the memorial service for my great friend Martin Davies who passed away after fighting cancer for approximately 11 years.

I met Martin when I first travelled to Botswana in November 1996. This was my first travel to a foreign place and as you can image I was a little nervous about what would confront me when I arrived in Botswana. It was an overnight flight and recall the first person to greet me at the airport - it was Martin - this was our first meeting. I immediately felt at ease with a sense that I was not alone and would be guided through my first stay there. I still recall his enthusiasm and rigour for getting things done. This whole project was a very new venture for me, I travelled to Botswana 13 times over a three and half year period. During these visits I was regularly welcomed at Martins home by his wife Ok-keong and his two children Thomas and Sain. During these visits which were typically 2 - 3 weeks in length I grew very close to both Martin and OK-keong, they made me feel just like one of their family and that helped me deal with the inevitable feelings of loneliness which often occur when you are away form home on business for extended periods - visiting them was a welcome replacement for the solitude of the hotel room.

Professionally, Martin was a real breath of fresh air. He had so much energy and was so committed to making a real and lasting difference. We worked very closely together and travelled all over Botswana visiting Colleges of Education and Education Resource centres as we established a country wide email system - which was a first for Botswana. In the end we had 9 locations outwith Gabarone connected to the email system and installed computers (Apple Macs of course!) and software in each location so that the people there could have immediate access. In addition to this Martin was responsible for setting up a learning resources centre where teachers could access all manner of learning resources. The amount of energy Martin put into this work was nothing short of inspirational.

I learned so much through working with Martin. He made it his mission to know all the right people in the country when we needed to get permissions to get things done. Getting things done in Botswana was often a real challenge because of the government bureaucracy which was cumbersome to say the least! Because of his input the part of the project we worked on did succeed in meeting its objectives. Without his support and influence I cannot imagine how I would have been about achieve a fraction of what we did.

In addition to being a great professional Martin was a really good friend. From day one, we seemed to get on really well - as if we had along association from the first day that we met! Martin was very caring and knew what it meant to be away from home in a strange country! He and Ok-keong welcomed me to their home more times than I can recall. We had such good times together - they made me feel that Botswana was a home from home. I can not find the words to fully express my gratitude for the care they took of me, which went way beyond any expectations that I could have had.

The Botswana experience was certainly a huge influence on my professional development and that was due in no small way to the impact of one person who guided, mentored and supported me throughout the entire project, Martin.

Of course after the project came to an end, our ways parted and we kept in touch only infrequently. But at each telephone call or meeting it was like we had never been apart. We seemed to be able to pick up from the same point we left off! That is a hallmark of genuine friendship I think ;-)

The picture below show the Davies family when we attended a "first communion service" of the child of another one of the in country project workers.

I was delighted to hear at the memorial service that Martin became a professing Christian just a few weeks before he died - this is sometime that we talked about a number of times both when in Botswana since then. Although we did not spend a huge amount of time together in life long terms, I will miss him and I am certain that that his close family will feel the pain of this loss for some time to come. But as Christians we should hold to the great hope of a great reunion sometime in the future after time as we know it comes to an end.

Dog walk with a difference!!!

2009-08-14T09:23:00.002+01:00

Well for the whole of the summer we seem to have had a dog staying with us. This has made an inevitable difference to our daily routine!!!! For me this has meant a daily morning walk with the dog just after breakfast! Yesterday, Abbie went home to Glasgow with Linda so we are back to the "normal" situation with no dog to look after! Funny feeling as my body was telling me that it was time to take my morning walk - but with no dog as an excuse! I did feel the benefit of these walks to decided to go in any case.......

First, I needed to find some poo bags after heading in the direction of the cupboard I remembered that there was no dog, so no need for poo bags! Then, were is the dog lead - opps again remembered that there was no dog!!! So I put my jacket on and headed for the river as usual!! Photo of me just before I set off!!!

Michty me this dog has some pull!!!!!

Last Morning walk with Abbie

2009-08-13T08:57:00.008+01:00

Today is the day that Abbie goes home with Linda to Glasgow. She has been staying with us in Kemnay most of the summer and came on holiday with us to Keswick. So this morning I set out for our last morning walk together until we next meet! I thought I would post a few photos of our walk today which took us long the River bank then into Kemnay village centre and the back via the river again to Ruach ( name of our house ).

Above you see Abbie striding out as we make our way along the river bank just after leaving the house.
Above is a view of the River Don - today the water level is low and very peaceful. It is the most pleasant and relaxing place to be! You can see the reflection is vivid in this photo!

In the last photo you can see the river in the foreground and Bennachie ( Mither Tap ) in the background which today was shrouded with low cloud! Of course I did take a number of other photos which I have posted in my online gallery click here to view.

Marratech - Audio issue with Plantronics 645

2009-08-12T06:42:00.004+01:00

This is a rather geeky post!

I was involved in a Marratech meeting to test that a Glow Meeting room was properly configured and working. Marratech is an application that I used very regularly in my last job so it was interesting to come back to it after quite a long break in use - I now use WebEX daily which fufills the same purpose. They both feature the ability to conference using voice and video.

The purpose of this post is to document an issue that I experienced with using the Marratech Client and my recently purchased Plantronics Headset - 645 USB model. This headset cost about £23 including postage and is configured as an analogue device with an additional USB Analogue/Digital audio converter. The headset can be used as an analogue device plugging into a PC or Macs headphone (output) and Mic (input) ports.

I discovered that my MacBook Pro does not have a Mic input - it has a Line-in port which means that it is not compatible with the analogue signal provided by most Mics - this is why I wanted to source a USB based headset. I thought that the 645 model would be flexible in that it can be used both on the USB and analogue ports.

However, on connecting the headset to my Macbook Pro via the USB device the sound was completely wrong - my voice sounded as if the frequency has been increased making it very difficult to understand (bit like Pinky and Perky if you can recall that duo form UK childrens TV some years ago!). I did a lot of experimentation with the configuration thinking that this was a software problem. In the end I found a really simple solution as follows.

It seems that the USB device - combined with the Marratech client program may have been the source of the problem. I connected the Mic from the headset to the USB device and the headphones to the headphone output ( on the computer ) and everything worked fine. The resulting audio quality was very good in my opinion.

So it appears that the Plantronics USB A/D convertor had an issue when it was being asked to do the A/D conversion for both the Mic and Headphones concurrently. I did not try this with Marratech on a Windows machine - I will perhaps try that another day! I was able to repeat this on two Mac Laptops the Intel based Macbook Pro and my older Powerbook G4. There were no notes accompanying the headset to state any limitation in the use of the USB adapter but ther does seem to be an issue - at least when used with the Marratech Client!

Finally - I should add that I was able to use the headset in full USB mode with the Webex Connect Client(VMWare/Windows XP over MacOSX) and also with Audacity OSX native and the problem definitely does not exist there! So I am forced to conclude that the issue is specific to where the USB adapter is being used with the Marratech client ( at least on a MacOSX platform).

Interesting......

Happy Anniversary, Happy Anniversary

2009-08-05T18:03:00.004+01:00

I wanted to use this post to wish our good friends David and Judith and Alan and Lynda all of Gods blessings on the occassion of their respective wedding anniversaries on the 4th August 2009. For D and J it's 30 and for L and A its 36 years.

I am sure that you might be able to tell which couple has been married longer!! On the other hand they all do seem to have weathered very well!

09 Summer Holiday over

2009-08-03T09:31:00.003+01:00

So summer holiday 2009 is over and I am now back at work and at home in Kemnay! This morning its a email catchup day with a 6am start! I have had a good day so far with a breakfast breal at 8am when I took the dog for a walk. Look at this beautiful scene above! Taken during my morning walk and not a rain cloud in sight!!! Typical British weather after all the rain we say during the last two weeks ;-)

Keswick 09 - last post!!!!

2009-07-31T09:47:00.009+01:00

Well it is now Friday morning and I am sitting making my last blog post about our Keswick camping holiday! I wanted to use the following photo which shows us all packed up and ready to head home! This was taken at approx. 7.30am on Wednesday 29th July which was actually three days prior to our planned departure! You will see from my last post that the conditions on the camp-site, after a very stormy night of rain and wind, were not good! So we decided to pack up and leave for home early. You can see in the photo below the condition of the ground on which we were living ;-)

In fact there was considerable media coverage concerning this with the story about the situation making the national press. To think that the Met Office had promised a Barbeque Summer - well they seldom seem to get it right and this summer was no exception!!!!! This is the first time in about 20 years of camping in the Lake District that we have had to leave early due to the weather.

You can see the BBC footage about the event here and also some clippings from the newspaper press coverage here Police warning.

This news even made the Times National Newspaper on the Thursday morning!!!!!

Mary pointed out the following video which I think is really appropriate and I can testify that the effect created is very much like being under canvas when the rain comes..... Once it starts playing - close your eyes and listen carefully.

During the course of our time in Keswick we were quite pre-occupied with the weather. Because we were online it was possible to follow the weather forecast almost hourly and we used a couple of Web Sites to do this. The Metcheck site seemed to do well in providing a good account of what was happening. The link in the last sentence is setup to show the forecast for Keswick but you can put any UK post code on the site to get your local forecast.

We also discovered the Environmental Services Agency web site which provides details of the flood alert conditions around the country including Keswick of course - click here to view.

So our holiday is over, we are back in Kemnay and the tent has been erected and dried out and is all ready for next years annual holiday in Keswick - yes we will be going back again! It will take a little more than a little rain to dampen our spirits! But we will be praying in advance for a dry spell next July/August which would be a real bonus. I have to admit that it was nice to get back home to Kemnay and to enjoy what has been a few very nice days with mostly warm and sunny weather ;-)

I have published an album of the photos I took during this period in Keswick which was for us very memorable ;-) You can view the album by clicking here which contains photos from almost every day of the week and a half break!

Of course I am still on holiday and will remain in this mode until next Monday when I return to the work routine.

Stormy Night - the morning after

2009-07-29T16:32:00.008+01:00

Well last night was a real stormer!!!! We had planned to attend the Keswick Convention evening celebration and then a Stuart Townend concert taking place right afterwards. This we did and it was a great evening - the convention events take place in a very large tent with capacity to seat about 4,000 people. It was full for both of the evenings events and the overflow tent too!

However, it had been a very wet day and the evening was no exception - in fact if anything the rain was getting heavier! It's always difficult to judge when you are in a tent, and the convention tent is made of a plastic impregnated canvas material which makes the rain sound even heavier. But it is true to say that it seemed to range from heavy to very heavy to torrential all evening long..... We hoped that our tent would still be dry when we got back!! It was although we could feel the water under our groundsheet!!!!!

The night raged on with a combination of rain and wind - which was very gusty at times. Gave you the feeling that your tent would collapse around you!!! But it did not! The following morning we were aware of some commotion around the campsite so decided to get up and have look outside! I took the following photo of our tent and as you can see there is a lot of water around the front of it and some big puddles to the rear - right!

It was very squelchy underfoot! The weather had calmed down for a bit and the wind had completely died away ;-)

The following tent was not as lucky as we were! As you can see the puddle beside it actually comes right inside!!! That puddle is actually joined to the Derwent Water! The lake level had risen and and the commotion we heard was people being evacuated from their locations - lock, stock and barrel as they say!!!! The folks who would own this tent were in the process of taking it down before the water level got too high! - this was one of the sites we were offered the day we arrived - thankfully for us we choose to look for a better site!

Here is another view of the site and you can see that the lake level as engulfed the two smaller tents. There were no people around! I can only assume that they got out before the water came!
The next view shows the lake! The tree in the centre view was about 20 meters from the lake shore line the day before! There would also have been a road from the position where I took the photo down to the lake edge - which is now completely submerged!

So we counted ourselves very fortunate that our part of the site was relatively unaffected by all of this drama! I would say about 50 tents and caravans had to either move to another part of the site or leave it all together!

Happy days when camping ;-)

Aira Force

2009-07-28T09:27:00.009+01:00

Monday was a wet day ;-) this seems to be the general way of things for this holiday so we decided to get in the car and visit Aira Force (the photos on the NT site don't really do it justice) which is right next to Ullswater. It is a National Trust site and is a very popular tourist attraction. In order to view the water fall it is necessary to embark on a 30 minute walk which is also quite a stiff climb! There are actually two main features the first is called Aira Force and second High Force. The climb is through a heavily wooded valley and it was both wet and muddy! See below the first view of Aira Force - because of the recent heavy rainfall the water fall looked very powerful and spectacular.

Richard and Fiona stood against the railings for this photo, at the time the spray from the water fall was very heavy although you can see that they did manage a smile!

Here we see Richard, Mary and Fiona standing on the bridge which is at the top of the waterfall - at this point we did have a well earned rest before making our way back down to the car park!

Below you can see Fiona, Richard and the two dogs - the latter by this time were both wet and very muddy!!! It's just as well that we had a towel to dry the dogs at the end of this wet trek!

Unfortunately just after this Richard and Fiona headed of back home as their short break had come to an end. We travelled up to Rheged Discovery Centre which is a really nice visitors centre just off the M6 on the opposite side to Penrith. If you happen to pass by here do take the opportunity to stop over and check it out. There is very good food, shops and a 3D Cinema. Always a good place to stop over on a wet day! We had lunch here and then said fairwell to Richard, Fiona and the two dogs!

So no dog to walk in the morning etc.... now!!

However, this does mean that we will be able to attend the Keswick Convention evening events without any worry about leaving the dog alone ;-)

Today's destination is south of Windermere - more of that later!!!

Honister Pass and Lodore Farm again

2009-07-27T22:55:00.003+01:00

Sunday we decided to do the Honister Pass again with Fiona and Richard. It was a nice run and we timed things so that we could stop of at Lodore Farm for a bacon butty. You can see some satisfied faces below. Photo taken just after the food had been consumed ;-)

That evening the dogs were happy to have a quiet time. See below Abbie who felt the best approach was to have an early night..... So here she is peaking out from her bed!!! It was hard to persuade her to come out for the mandatory late evening walk so that doggies can do what doggies need to do on a regular basis!!!