The Long Weekend

Over the Easter weekend David and I and two friends who also live in London hired a car and explored the deep south of England; Cornwall.  It made me realise just how much of a separate world London is from the rest of England.  Cornwall was full of rolling hills, stone walls, battered cliff faces, and cute villages.

To The Lighthouse

A couple of weeks ago we spent a week in Amsterdam, followed by a day in Gent in Belgium.  We had a lovely time of it, though the weather could've been kinder to us (I think we've used up all our allotted sun-time here in London.  Until this week, it's been weeks and weeks of gorgeous weather).  A campground on the edge of Amsterdam became our home for the week.  The plan was to sleep in our tent (unfortunately we don't have a photo of it - but it is seriously small), but the rain forced us into a cabin for half the nights we were there.  We hired bikes for most of the time and explored the beautiful city that way; until our bums got too sore and we couldn't face sitting on the bike seat for another day.  We tended to avoid the tourist hotspots - coffee shops included - and just went where our bikes took us.  It's an amazing city; be prepared to be bored by canal photos.

After our six days in Amsterdam (and the outlying countryside - most of the photos with a blue sky were taken on one particular day when we went out on our bikes to a gorgeous fishing village.  The bike there was easy and gorgeous; it was only until the return journey that I realised why it was so easy - we had the wind on our side.  The bike back, on a bike with no gears, took three times as long and some serious mental and leg power).  On our way back to London we stopped in Gent for a day.  It killed two birds with one stone; we got to visit a city we'd been told was gorgeous - it was - and we got to see our good friend Acacia who lives in Brussels.

- Hana