WanderingFoxFarm

One of our longest drives this trip, just over 3 hours to the east coast and a town called Holland on Sea. We will be here for about 2 weeks while Rob starts on some refurbishing work here. The house is about a 1/4 of a mile from the seafront and there is a very nice coastal trail for us to take.

Every morning we take a walk for about 2.5 miles in one direction and then return. Mostly it can be very windy but we have been lucky that there has been very little rain here. Depending on the cloud cover, you can see all of the wind turbines out in the sea, I believe there are about 48 of them. Up until a week ago there were a few cafes open every morning along the path but they have closed up for the winter now. We generally see a lot of dog walkers in all shapes, sizes, and quantities, I am pleased to say that they are all very good and scooping the poop, even on the sand.  Here are some of the views from our daily walk.

My stepson and youngest grandchild came to visit for a few days and while they stayed at his mum’s, we took care of Zari their Labrador and she took us for a walk a couple of times each day. 

The sea is the North Sea so as you can imagine it is pretty cold, that does not seem to deter the locals and we frequently saw people swimming in the sea, kite surfing and even an organised photography group complete with a horse to model for them.

On the Saturday we decided to extend our walk out to Walton on the Naze. Along this coastline you will see these brightly colored beach huts, the vast majority are privately owned and usually have a seating area and the ability to do some basic cooking. There is no running water or electricity. When they go up for sale they cost between 20 to 40 thousand pounds. On the stretch of the walk between Holland on Sea and Frinton, the original seawall is still in place and at regular intervals you can still see the gun and lookout turrets from World War 2. The walk there and back was just over 11 miles but all flat so very easy to do.

Tomorrow we are taking the train into London for 2 days.

After the Swindon retreat, I drove back to Sarah’s and then on Monday we went to Oxford. A lot of the UK towns have a system called park and ride; it works very well. You park up pretty close to the city, and then there are busses waiting there to take you into the city center. The cost includes the parking and the bus ride and is very reasonable, about 6 pounds (9$). 

Sarah was looking for some specific clothes, which was a belated birthday present from me, and also we wanted to go visit a particular bookshop. Given that Oxford is a university town, the bookshop was very impressive, and I could have stayed in there for hours.

Tuesday brought the “rinse and repeat” part. Rob arrived at Heathrow and caught the coach out to Reading, and then I drove us both back to Wales to see my mother again. This was a quick visit, and we used it as an overnight spot to then go up to the Welsh Valleys to see all of Rob’s family. Below is some old photos of me that are at my mums, including one of me completing half marathon ahead of the London marathon. And one of Rob and my mum

Tuesday was actually the anniversary of the Aberfan disaster, and this is the town that his relatives still live in. Any of you that have watched the Crown on Netflix will know what this relates to, but if you have not, on Oct 21st 1966, just after 9am, a mountain of coal waste slid down and completely covered the local school and some of the village. We lost 116 children and 28 adults. Rob’s uncle’s 2 daughters were off school that day with the flu and so were saved. But Uncle Tom was the local policeman and had the horrible job of working with the rest of the town and the subsequent rescue teams to recover everyone. As you can imagine, this had a profound effect on everyone and still does to this day. Although I was brought up some 20 miles away on the coast, I still remember clearly our teacher coming into the classroom that morning in tears to tell us. 

OK onto happier things, the Welsh are very warm and welcoming, especially up in the valleys. There is nothing that gives them greater pleasure than to feed you. So despite phone calls to say, “ no need,” we were greeted by a full house of relatives, a couple of bottles of prosecco, and a very nice curry.

We left late afternoon and went back to Sarah’s and had dinner out at our favorite pub. 

Friday morning we travelled up to Holland on the sea, and that will be the next update. 

On Thursday I drove to Swindon ready for my sampler retreat. At the original registration for this event we were offered a choice of 2 out of 4 free classes that take place on the Thursday and Friday morning ahead of the official retreat start time. I chose a Huswif from Jane Greenoff and a Castle box from Cissy Bailey Smith. I was a late entrant to the retreat so was able to get the pre-stitching done for Jane’s class but not the Castle.

Both classes focuses on the finishing techniques and were very well planned. On the Thursday the vendors were all open as well and of course there was a huge array of beauties to feast my eyes on. I would like to say that I had great will power and bought nothing but that would be far from the truth. I bought linens from Swan Bay, Tabby Cat and Fox and Rabbit plus beautiful silk packs of 100/3 silk thread. I had also pre ordered a floor lamp and magnifier with UK fittings for when I am over here.

I was already happy with the sign in process for this retreat, there was no queue to register, just a table with your name badge on that you could just collect at anytime. On the Friday morning the main room was closed to allow the organizers to set it up ready for the retreat. The doors opened at 3.30 and we filed in and found a table to sit at. The tables sat 9 people and each table had your gifts sitting at your place and also each table was named after a Victorian school. We were on Rugby, which is in the midlands of UK.

The gifts were amazing but I was totally blown away by the main one, it was a Winterbury traveling stitching case in a beautiful raspberry pink color. Nicola says that this color was picked especially for our retreat and not available for general purchase, what a treasure! There were many other delightful items including a fat 1/8th of 36 count linen for our projects on Saturday.

I sat on a table with some lovely ladies and sat next to my friend Dottie (stitching Scottie on flosstube) we had 2 very interesting presentations that evening and also a break for dinner, the food was really good, 3 course and multiple choices to cater for all needs.

Back to the room at 8.30 on Saturday morning and we were presented with more gifts, today’s project, a stitching sampler that would have been done by the young girls as their first exercise as well as a lovely book to attach this and other samples of our work to. There was also a great tin with candies in it, they were all boiled sweets as that was authentic to the Victorian era including one of my favorites, rhubarb and custard.

Lunch was afternoon tea style, sandwiches, scones strawberry jam and clotted cream plus other cakes yum! More presentations and then dinner, after dinner we had a fun speaker. He was the official photographer on the Royal Yacht and had some great images and stories to share with us. He rounded out the presentation with a song that we all sang along with him.

Sunday morning was our final project, a representative of Victorian paper craft for us to assemble and fill with either the provided ephemera or stitching pieces.

We had a lovely Sunday roast for lunch, choice of meats ( or not for me) with all the trimmings. I have to say the standard of food was excellent. After lunch we had a presentation from Red Barn Samplers and we were also gifted a pattern and a beautiful reel of painters thread. What a great trip and I left late afternoon to go and visit my daughter again and await Rob’s arrival

Flew to Heathrow and picked up my car then drove to Wales, the colors of the trees along the motorway were stunning so the journey passed quickly. A little bit of drama when I got to my mum’s, there was no answer to my knocks, ringing the bell or calling her phone!! Quick call to my Aunt, who then rang my Uncle and he came over and let me in. I asked him to check upstairs but no sign of her. 40 minutes later in she came with enough food shopping to feed the rest of the street. But at least she was ok.

We had lunch and watched the birds having fun in her garden including a very sweet Robin Redbreast

I took Mum for a ride to our local beach, and reminded myself of all the times I used to go there in my teenage years. It is only 6 miles from home and i was there most weekends. There was a nightclub there that had all the top bands at the time and also a lot of the Motown stars come to visit in the 70’s.

The log that the children are climbing over got washed up with an abnormally high tide a few years ago. The locals decided to adopt it, you know the Welsh love their dragons and dragon lookalikes. So there he stays. The land with the sun highlighting it is actually Ilfracombe which is over in England, on the other side of the Bristol Channel.

On Wednesday we went for a tour of the Vale of Glamorgan, the first stop was the beach at Southerndown, while still school age, I used to work at a cafe a short walk back from the beach, its now been converted into a heritage center. The local lifeguards were all from the international college that was a few miles up the road and we thought they were hunky, so…….. one day after work we went down the beach and even though it was freezing cold we ran into the sea and then pretended we needed help, only to realize they had shut the hut and all gone home!! Ah well, lesson learned.

We carried on around the Vale, going through to Barry Island (Gavin and Stacy fame) Penarth and back up the A48 to Cowbridge and then home.

That evening I went to dinner at my lifelong friend’s house, we have known each other since we were 7 years old. We had a great time catching up and promised to spend longer with each other next time.

Thursday morning I drove to Swindon to start my adventures at Mrs Parkmans school of needlework.

Today is day 1 of the hike, meeting at another hotel in Cusco, there will be 11 of us on this trip and our tour leader is Oscar. He has made it his mission in life to have the most positive reviews on the Backroads site and he has been the number 1 trip for the past 3 years. This should be very interesting.

First stop this morning was a woman’s co-operative and animal sanctuary, We toured the alpaca, llama and vicuña that they kept there and also saw 3 condor that are being rehabilitated ready to release back out into the wild. The purpose of the community is to provide work for single women and also to keep the weaving and natural dyeing traditions alive. They start the learning process as children and all of the patterns and designs are learnt without written instructions,

We then started part of a gentle hike for today, and surprise number two was that Oscar had arranged for the local shepherd to hike the first part of the trail with us with her alpaca, one of which was a beautiful 2 week old.

We arrived at our lunch spot and were greeted by local music. We were then treated to a 20 minute ceremony performed by an Andean Priest. Which included a lot of information about the reasons for the rituals.

Then we went to enjoy lunch, I am sure they will not all be as fancy as this but we did throughly enjoy it. Lots of local foods that we have not had before.

After lunch we continued our hike, past the temple of the moon and then onto the Inca temple of Sacsayhuamon where we were given a brief history of what was currently known as about the site and its uses. We then walked on back to the town and had a relax in our room before dinner

Today we decided to stay in and around Cusco and just take it easy ahead of the hike start tomorrow. After breakfast we walked up to another part of town that we have not visited and because we were a little later, the streets were already crowded. Late morning we went back to the hotel and just before we left to go get lunch it started to rain so we about turned and had lunch in the hotel.

The rain stopped and we went out again, while walking around the main square we bumped into a couple of Brits and after a brief conversation, worked out that they were from the same town as Rob, they were part of a tour group and as they were walking away, they mentioned they owned an Alpaca farm in the UK !! How small is the world sometimes. Their farm is called Pennybridge Alpacas and they have over a 100 animals.

Dinner tonight was Italian and it was excellent but on the way there we saw a parade it was a bit spooky as some of them had full face knitted mask, talking of which, how spooky is this piece of art in our hotel room!

After dinner we walked down to the main square again and there was national dancing happening again. Will post the video to facebook later. Tomorrow we move hotel and start the hike to Machu Pichu. May be able to blog tomorrow night as we are still in Cusco but will then go dark until a week Sunday.

We spoke to the concierge and explained what we wanted to do last night and they suggested a driver and 3 locations. So it was booked for 9.30 this morning. We had breakfast at the hotel and were serenaded by what looks to be an electric harp. Then got ready for our trip

Our driver was called Juan and the transport was a nice roomy SUV/people carrier. For which we were very grateful, given the state of a lot of the cars on the road. Tread on the tires seems to be optional. Juan spoke very little to no English which was about the limit of our Spanish, so there was a lot of hand gesturing going on. He pulled over for us to take photos of lake Huaypo a very large horseshoe shaped lake. Once we were outside of Cusco it was interesting to see all the crops growing and everything being done by hand. The soil looked excellent and it was good to see that the crops were being rotated to allow the soil to recover.

We carried on up to about 12000ft and stopped at the Maras salt pans, here is a link to get all the information for those of you that are interested https://www.peruhop.com/maras-salt-mines/. We had a good walk around and as you can see, the salt is still collected by hand. We found our driver and headed out to our next stop

Next stop was the archaeological site at Moray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moray_(Inca_ruin) we walked around for about an hour marveling at the ingenuity and skills of these ancient Inca tribes

On our way to our next location we briefly stopped to see these ancient food storage buildings built into the side of the hill, I can’t tell you where exactly this was as hand gestures just didn’t cut it!

Last stop was at Chinchero, we roamed around the town with its endless textile stores, most of which were shut as it was May Day. Finally at the top were more Inca ruins and just before we explored them, the locals were gathered in the market square, dancing playing music and drinking beer. Alpacas have been seen by the side of the road for most of this journey and they were also wandering around the ruins. https://cosituc.gob.pe/chinchero/

On the way back to Cusco I noticed a lot of the houses had little ceramic bulls on the roof, somewhere in pairs and some had a cross between them. With the help of the internet, i found that they are called Pucara Bulls and they represent strength, fertility and protection. These bulls are all made by local artisans in Pucara a small town in Southern Peru.

Back to the hotel and down to the square for a much needed coffee and a cake as we had not stopped for lunch and then early evening we ate pizza at a local spot as it had proper wood fired ovens, it was delicious.

Up and out by 6am, we wanted to take photographs of some of the streets before they get crowded. It was lovely to wander around with minimal traffic and less people. I love the ornate carved balconies and the narrow cobbled streets. Most of the old historic buildings (like our hotel) have been converted into hotels, but they have kept a lot of the original stone work and design.

Back to the hotel for a leisurely breakfast and then off for another walk. I wanted to see the market and as expected it was very busy and bustling, there were as many vendors outside as there were inside. I found it amusing that the meat, fish and cheese were not covered but all bread was! I decided not to take photos of the local delicacy, it’s called Cuy here but to you and me it’s Guinea pig. There were piles of them either roasted, boiled or salted yuck!

Rob decided we should get some extra hill work in before our big hike so we walked up to the Square of the Temple de San Cristobal one of the local guides told us we were at 10,000 feet. It was certainly an interesting walk up there. We could see all of Cusco below us and the mountains out to the other side.

Back to the hotel for lunch and a rest and then over to the Temple of Santo Dominigo which was the main building for the Inca religion before the Spanish invaded.

We ate dinner out at a local Vegan restaurant, I was definitely off meat after the visit to the market. The food was really good, we both had pasta dishes and then Rob thought it would be a great idea if we walked up to the top of San Cristobel again. So we have managed 8 miles today although not exactly rushing, it does mean that we are adapting to the altitude.

Although we booked the flight through Delta it was code share and operated by LATAM, they treated us very well but the plane did look pretty ancient. It was an overnight flight from Atlanta to Lima and then transfer to a Domestic flight to Cusco. We did not get much sleep and so we are dragging a bit. We are here for a 9 day lodge to lodge hike on the Inca trail with Back Roads finishing at Machu Pichu. But given the high altitudes we thought it wise to stay in Cusco for a few days in advance.

As this is also supposed to be a celebration of Rob hitting 70 last Saturday, I booked the Palacio Del Inca and we were not disappointed. The location is right in the center of Town opposite the temple of the Sun God and parts of this building at from 1250AD, it was then taken over by the Spanish when they invaded and has gone through a number of other iterations including being a museum to be the hotel that it is today. If you look at the Stone work under the flags, you will see a relief of a snake, which is from the Inca period. The Interior of the hotel is beautiful and we were lucky to get an upgrade to a suite so we are very comfortable. We were treated to a delivery of fruit from the hotel and a bottle of Wine from the guide that is leading us for the Hike.

We went for a walk around the town but we were keeping is slow and steady, we can both feel the effects of the altitude. A quick little nap after lunch. At 5 the hotel has someone conduct a tour of the main parts of the hotel and tell us about the history of the building. At the end of the tour we were treated to the most amazing ceremony to represent the Inca culture and religion, he must of used at least 12 different musical instruments all imitating and reflecting the beauty of the land, sky, animals and flora of the region. The large stone is a 8 angled stone which is very important in the Inca religion.

We had dinner in the bar and then went for a walk into town again, there was a parade of dancers going through the main square.

To round the evening out, the hotel delivered some nice desserts for us to try, I think we will both come back heavier than when we arrived!

On the Saturday we actually had a rinse and repeat day, train back to Montreal, same hotel and then off to see IQ in concert again. All good but not exciting to write about. (Girls – ed.)

Sunday turned into foodie day. I wanted to have crepes for breakfast and after googling it, the most highly rated was a 20 minute walk, down towards old town. It was called Madison Bagatelle and it did not disappoint.

We walked back down Rue St Paul, the main street in old town and noticed the queues outside of Olives and Gourmand. We walked back to the hotel and then got a message on facebook from a trusted friend that said we should definitely visit Olive and Gourmand, what a coincidence. We decided to walk back down there and after a 30 minute wait, we sat inside and were treated to a great atmosphere and really good food. I had a 3 cheese panini with caramelized onions, Rob had a chicken melt sandwich.

We rounded out the night with a visit to Siam, a Thai restaurant. I asked for a non sweet cocktail and was presented with a Green Garden. It was delicious as was the Duck curry we both ate.

Up early on Monday and off to the airport, we boarded our flight about 30 mins late but after another 45 minutes we got back off. There was a mechanical issue and they had no idea when it would be fixed. We were able to transfer to another flight and after 9 hours at the airport we were finally on the way back to Atlanta.

Reflections on the visit, even though Quebec City was the place I was really looking forward to visiting, I preferred Montreal. Old town in Quebec City although very pretty, was also quite touristy in my opinion. Also once outside of the main area, there were countless homeless people and the streets were strewn with rubbish. It is an “in between” season, no snow but also no greenery yet, so maybe another visit at a different time