Matt & Kat

As we turned inland from the French Riviera the landscape changed to old farm houses and fields of grapevines and olive trees – our first taste of Provence. We stopped briefly in Aix-en-Provence which I found very charming. The whole town seemed to be roofed with sycamore/plane trees – very pretty. Lynley and I enjoyed strolling through the market there and found some nice locally made soaps to buy. We had our first introduction here to the ‘Mistral’ which is a very strong dry wind that characterises winter and spring in Provence.

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We came home with over 600 photos between our two cameras and spent a good few hours today sifting through them and writing some captions. The first installment can be found via the link below: Photos from Nice, Monaco and the Cote d’Azur More to come in the following days as we find some more time to edit and caption the rest.

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We got back last night from a fabulous week away in France and Spain. We visited some gorgeous places, oohing at the stunning vistas and ahhing over the charming buildings and places. I’m feeling very relaxed and content after a week of good food and wine, warm sun and no work! Part One – Côte d’Azur Our holiday started on Saturday with a 6am flight to Nice (thanks to Kieron for the ridiculously early airport drop!

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Happy Easter everyone! We had a fabulous easter weekend, enjoying the company of Susanna and Daniel and showing them around some of Irelands sights. It was great to see old friends again and fun to get out of Dublin and enjoy the sunny weather. Susanna and Daniel arrived early on Good Friday after a long train + ferry trip from London. Matt whipped up another batch of hot cross buns for breakfast (very impressive) and then mid morning we went out to walk around the city center stopping at all the main sights around the place.

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4 short days until Easter starts. We’re staying in Ireland with Daniel and Susanna coming over from London for the weekend. We’re looking forward to catching up and spending some time showing them around our adopted home city. To get into the spirit of things I whipped up a batch of hot cross buns this afternoon. They looked pretty good and tasted nice too. Comment from Wendy (Mum) on 2009-04-17 Well Matt.

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It’s been a tough Monday getting back into the swing of things after our weekend away. Truthfully I’d much prefer to have spent my Monday relaxing in a piazza in Florence, sipping wine and eating antipasto. We flew into Pisa airport late on Friday and on Saturday we spent the day in Pisa. In the morning we went looking for some geo-caches, before most of the town had woken up. We wandered through the old town and eventually ended up where all tourists in Pisa end up – at the Leaning Tower.

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This post originally appeared on Matt’s Musings (Matt’s computer focussed blog). I was very pleased to wake up this morning to the news that National has delayed the introduction of S92A via an order-in-council. It’s a nice short-term victory, but I’ll save the champagne until the law is fundamentally rewritten. The most pleasing aspect of the decision is simply that it was made at all. Within two weeks, a small band of protesters were able to harness the power of the Internet to direct international attention and place enough pressure on a Government, whose Prime Minister admitted to not having read the bill prior, that he then took the time to understand the issues and personally announce the delay in implementation of the law.

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This post originally appeared on Matt’s Musings (Matt’s computer focussed blog). If you’re reading this post via the website rather than a feed/planet then you will notice that the site has gone completely black in support of the Creative Freedom Foundation’s campaign against S92A of the NZ Copyright Amendment Act which is due to come into effect on 28th February 2009. I’ve also joined the wave of people blacking out their “avatar” on Facebook/Jabber/MSN, etc.

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Already over a week since we were Scotland and I’m only just getting around to writing about our second day there! The new year is certainly off to a roaring start. On Day 2 (Dec 28) we started out from Inverness on a very cold, frosty and foggy morning and attempted to see some more of Loch Ness, given that it was pitch dark and foggy by the time we arrived in the area the day before.

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Our Scotland jaunt started last night when arrived at Prestwick Airport after only a short delay from our Ryan Air flight. We picked up our hire car and made it into Glasgow for the night without incident. Our hotel room for the night (Ibis) was serviceable (and a carbon-copy of the room layout of the Ibis hotel in Bratislava!) if not particularly cozy and we were glad to get on the road in the morning.

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