I love to ride my bicycle

Bulli cruising past the thatched cottages

Well it was an adventure but once I remembered where we had to pick the bikes up, learnt how to use gears and stopped freaking out about cycling to our B&B before dark (with quite some additional distance given I messed up the bike pick-up), I loved loved loved our 100kms of cycling on the Isle of Wight. There are so many disused train lines on the island which are now cycling tracks, for a beginner like me it was the perfect cycling destination.

The view from our lovely B&B

Here we go, here we go, here we go

After a disastrous, shambolic let down of a World Cup, some of us are (blindly) keeping the faith. Enjoyed a great night at Wembley seeing England take on Bulgaria as Capello's lads 'rebuild' (again) for Euro 2012

Stevie G takes the corner

My garden

These geraniums were the pride of my window sill this summer : ). One day I look forward to having a garden that is bigger than two window boxes!

Lunch on a summer's day

It's still a novelty celebrating my birthday in summer, and this year I made the most of it with a lunch from 1pm - 11pm at the lovely Atlas.

Out and about in Auckland

Usually I spend a fair proportion of my year in London counting down until the trip to the southern hemisphere and this time was no different....anyway after an excellent looong flight on the lovely Emirates A380 we arrived in sunny Auckland. I was very happy to see our old London friends who have now set up in Auckland, and spend time sipping wine on Bulli's parents peaceful balcony. We did get out and about in the great outdoors a lot - two fun nights on the road with Lynn and Rog down at Rotorua and Mt Maunganui and some great day trips. I also loved our stops at the rugged, hostile-looking beach at Piha, and the run over the black, hot sanddunes where you're rewarded with a dive into massive, almost deserted fresh water lake down the other side.

I was also lucky to go to Villa Maria winery with good friends and enjoy a chilled afternoon/evening watching Dave Dobbyn, Tim Finn and Bic Runga perform crowd pleasing classics under pink, fluffy-clouded skies....

We did a four hour walk around Waimangu Volcanic Valley - see the thermal steam. It was cool, we got there early and there were no other people in sight for most of our walk.

Tour leader Bulli led another big walk, this time around an Auckland Regional Park called Waitakere. It was really dense vegetarian, lots of old old Kauri trees

After yet another walk! This time at the top of Mt Maunganui. We swam in some amazing beaches; the joys of mid week day trips = no crowds!!

Olivetti's, Red Hill

There's no place like home, and I really enjoyed the fun dinner with the Bryden ladies, Mum and Zoe at Olivetti's in prep for Zoe's wedding.

Egypt and Jordan experience

Here are some snaps from our two weeks in Egypt and Jordan. It was amazingly interesting, educational, eye-opening, fun and only occasionally frustrating (notably: mistakenly giving 20 USD to a toilet attendant instead of the obligatory 1 Egyptian pound; spending 14 hours on a ferry - four of which we spent looking at our destination waiting for the tug boat to come and save us; learning that the trip notes are useless, i.e. when they say you don't need a sleeping bag for a winter's night in the desert, you really really do).

Sunset in Wadi Rum - Lawrence of Arabia Territory and home to tribes of bedouins

Our camp for the night in Wadi Rum

Another style of accommodation - our overnight train from Cairo to Luxor. The ladder is to my top bunk and under the little shelf you can see is the basin. This was an old old train, and it's uphill to Luxor. Consequently I kept hitting the wall, literally, everytime the train lurched uphill. I can say we had every form of transport on this trip - plane, train, bus, boat, camel, donkey, horse and cart...

Back in the Jordanian desert - me and my camel

Chris's camel was always hungry

Some scenes from our boat as we cruised up the Nile

More life by the banks of the Nile

From the top of Mt Sinai - it surprised me that this was one of my highlights of the trip. We were lucky to get to Sinai due to flooding the week before. The roads were really washed away in parts and it made for some hairy driving. Very windy conditions at the top, one guy did take a tumble when the wind picked him up. We came down by torchlight.

After much discussion with previous Egypt travellers I decided to take the 4-hour, dawn bus trip to Abu Simbel, temple of Ramses II. Was very worthwhile. Hard to believe it was covered by sand for centuries, and that they moved it and reconstructed it to save it from the rising dam waters.

An Egyptian friend in Edfu temple

Me and some very well preserved sandstone rams at Karnak Temple, Karnak. They don't look 3000 years old do they?

The sandstone temple of Queen Hatshepsut - imagine in it's time it was brightly painted, with grass all around path leading up to it...

Feluccas lined up on the Nile

Chris in Karnak temple - our guide here was amazing, and gave us so many intricate insights into this place. Nothing was as simple as it seemed as there was symbolism and a story in everything.

Hot air balloons early morning above the Valley of the Kings