After Cornwall we headed up to London (thanks for the lift Dad!). There we stayed with my cousin Thomas and had the unexpected pleasure of getting to see cousin Catherine and her husband Alex (who I’d not had the fortune of meeting yet).

It was such a lovely time as it always is seeing them. Cath also brought along a rather nice bottle of port which her dad had given to her a long time ago which she’d saved, lost, found and now opened. Excellent excellent time. Someone hurry up and invent teleports please.

Maaike and I also managed to get a few hours in with my old college roomate and fellow engineer Declan.

Again, really great to be able to catch up with him, if for too short a time. He’s still as wonderful a trickster as ever.. some things never change.

We had a quick trip down to Cork to see Paddy & Becks. Unfortunately, Becks was called away on a business trip to New York, so we didn’t get to see her. It was a lovely break down there. I’d not really spent much time in Cork before, so it was nice to have a wander around.

Not that these are really pictures of Cork.. but hey ho. I’d forgotten just how incredibly narrow the streets are in Irish towns. We had a lovely time though. Paddy is now working for Heinekin so there was no end of nice beers to try.

We did go for a nice ~4km walk along the coast

Definitely a useful thing to do, as I realised that the shoes I’d bought before coming travelling were _eating_ my feet alive. A good thing to know as the rest of the trip was going to at least involve walking (in Iceland) and I needed decent walking shoes. A quick trip to the handily located Patagonia European outlet store (in Dublin) was arranged and I ended up in something I could actually walk in.

Ok, not that exciting a story about the shoes, but honestly, it meant a lot at the time ;)

We had, apparently, as a planet, the hottest June on record. This is most of the reason why you’ve not seen any posts about skiing.. the ski fields, at least the ones around ChCh simply haven’t opened.

Intead, there have been a few walks, the CUTC sale (representing Snowpool), the Banff Film Festival (excellent, also representing Snowpool)… there have been a couple of walks..

Some games

^ that is excellent, the stones are magnets and you place them on this super smooth surface. Object is to place them down without any being forced to connect. Kinda like reverse Jenga.

I also went along to a basic electronics meetup.. made this awesome thing:

No skills required, just connecting dots, but lots of fun. I’m planning on getting into using my Raspberry Pi a little later on in the year.. just some small projects (timelapse photography etc.) .. but quite looking forward to it.