This is honestly one of my favourite events at the moment. Every 4 years my extended family comes together. Any descendant of my great grandmother comes together every 4 years. My great grandmother was called Danny because dad (the eldest grandchild) wasn’t able to make a “Gr” sound)! My siblings and I were running the event this time. We decided to re-run it (after consulting) at the same place we had the previous one – Kelling Heath. It’s a nice campsite/cabin place in Norfolk and it’s easy enough for the UK based family to get to. It’s a dark sky area, there’s a pool, plenty of space, and we can hire out most of the cabins about a year in advance so we’re all clustered in the same spot.

It’s an absolute dream for Anna as she has a dearth of cousins in NZ, and there are cousins everywhere you look while at the GOTC. I had “fun” putting a website together for the event. I was absolutely determined to put as little effort in as possible (mainly so there’d be no maintenance burden). I started off with Google Forms, then we decided we’d want to be able to display it on a site, so investigated extracting the content and parsing it etc. etc, eventually moving to firebase. Anyway, it was getting more and more and more complicated (I’ve been accused before of being a rube goldburg programmer ;, so I decided to throw it all away and just build one from scratch in my regular programming language. Having to think about features like “no logins” and “85 year olds using it” etc. gave some interesting constraints. Still, I’m happy enough with how it turned out and it’ll be easy to re-use for following events.

There were over 100 of us altogether! Over 100!! amazing. And we really all just get on well. Pimms was drunk, bike rides went on, games were played, laughs were had – and the time flew by. We also put on a “show” at the end, and the kids (and adults) had a lot of fun with that. Rob – one of the in-laws was a great addition to the group, as he’s great on guitar and really helped keep everything on the track!

Anyway, just a really lovely time.

When I was young, dad read me swallows and amazons which is a lovely book about a bunch of kids having adventures in the lake district of the UK. It’s set in the 1930s I guess but it’s pretty progressive for its time. One of the characters is Nancy Blackett who’s the pirate captain of the Amazons. The author (Authur Ransome) named his own boat the Nancy Blackett. Anyway, I’ve been reading the books to Anna, and there are a bunch of nautical terms (like halyards, mainstays, painters etc. etc.) and I was searching for a video to explain the terminology. It turned up this beautiful video ->

Now, I had no idea where Pin Mill was (where the boat is moored), but, turned out it was just a few hours away from where we were going to have our family gathering, so, we went for a sail. It was wonderful to be present on the authors boat. The boat itself features in the book we didn’t mean to go to sea. I tried reading that one to Anna, but, it was just a little bit too nautical so we skipped over it. Maybe we’ll come back to it some day.

Anyway, a fantastic day out. I can totally recommend joining the trust and going for a sail if you’re a fan of the books and in the area.

Whipsnade Zoo is located outside of London and is a massive outdoor zoo run by the Zoological Society of London for conservation purposes. We had a lovely day wandering about and seeing the various animals. I had two favourite parts – the butterfly room (amazing) and the bird show (and environmental messaging) was also excellent.

We took the boat over to the UK and drove towards iron bridge which we’d intended to visit (and go the Victorian themed park). Unfortunately we’d underestimated just how popular it has become (or perhaps just how busy the UK is) and either which way it was completely sold out for the morning.

Undeterred we headed to Warwick Castle which was super fun anyway. Well, it was a big old castle and you don’t get those in NZ!

We headed on that evening and met up with Maaike’s old boss Martin. Lovely to see him and Elaine again.

It was time to head on to Ireland.  Not entirely sure if it was the strain of so many late nights, or just a bug or what, but, Anna was really under the weather when we were leaving (and for about a week). She was a complete trooper with the travel though, just getting on with it (not that there was much choice of course ;)

It was lovely to be back in Dublin with my family. My sister was over from the US (in prep for the big family gathering the following week) so it was really special to get to spend some time with us all together. Can’t happen enough!