The blog of Doug

Just had a groovy little break in the Norfolk broads for a few days putting along in a boat enjoying the scenery along with plenty of good honest pub grub. Started near Norwich and got down to Beccles near Lowestoft with stop s at Reedham, Loddon and Somerleyton I think it was. A track of the trip back is here courtesy of the awesome Nokia sports tracker and my n95. I will add a few pics if I get a chance to. Anyway a great little break and some fantastic weather to go with it, spring has sprung.

Posted by Doug at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bit behind the times but hey good Friday was very early this year. Popped down to the south west for the long weekend, known to the religious amongst us as Easter. Is it just a coincidence it always falls on a long weekend? Anyway we hired a 'little' cottage that slept 10 right by the marina in Restronguet. Spent a bit of time wondering Falmouth which I hadn't done before and a nice trip to the Eden Project which is looking good now its all bedded in. Then off to see a couple of Sallys friends for a spot of lunch at Sand Sifters and hang out with their greyhound Myson. All good :o) A few snaps can be found here

Posted by Doug at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Had a jolly nice drive to Andorra a couple of weeks ago, zoomed through France stopping at a chateaux on the way with some posh French nosh thrown in. Makes a nice change zooming along relatively uncluttered motorways with nice scenery about the place. Anyway once in Andorra it started to snow just as we found the hotel. A nice end to a nice drive, much nicer than being cattled about on cheap flights. Quite a long way mind you. A good weeks Skiing and snowboarding ensued and we met up With Fiona and Johnny who live out there these days being ski instructors. Very nice to. On the trip back we stayed in an old coaching inn and had a fantastic Tagine in a local Moroccan restaurant. Right on to the point of all this, matching my phone to my GPS and tracking where I snow boarded. My phone has a nifty little application called sports tracker (nokia give it away for free). It stores a track of where you have been using the GPS and if you take any pictures with the phone also adds the GPS data to them. The result is a track you can add to google earth or view here: http://sportstracker.nokia.com/nts/workoutdetail/index.do?id=31831 complete with pictures in the place they were taken. Neat huh? All very easy to do now, ultimately pointless but fun none the less.

Posted by Doug at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Quicker than the human eye we made the long flight to HK whilst watching a bunch of movies (Air NZ has a very neat on demand system these days). Blades of Glory was my fave this time around. Anyway got to Hong Kong at 6 in the morning, jumped on the train and then got a cab to our very shiny hotel. They were very accommodating about us turning up at 8am and said they should be able to have a room ready for 10. Off down the equivalent to Hollywood Boulevard, past the statue of Bruce Lee, stepped on Jakie Chan and straight up to some Indian bloke. He read my palm and said I would live to 83 make a bunch of money, spend a bunch of money and generally do well. Oh and i'm a lucky man. Apparently the $10 hong kong dollars I gave him made me a cheap skate, well he didn't read that in my palm then! Wow Hong Kong is a hectic place, our hotel was an easy walk to the star ferry which we used a bunch. Went up to the peak, Stanley Market and whilst being hoofed out for wearing shorts did manage to make it up to the bar of Aqua. Food there is an interesting mix of west meet east with no one quite knowing what goes where. So I'm sure I have my fair share of ground pork and goodness knows what else but it was all very tasty. Not sure I could manage the place for much longer than a couple of days especially after being to so many quiet out of the way places but it is amazing. Kind of an Asian Vegas. Viva Hong Kong. And that was it holiday over, time to go home and face the jet lag.

Posted by Doug at 7:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Back to Auckland to see Lisa, Phil, Kirra, Andy and Kurie which made it all feel like the end of the holiday. But no, still a couple of days in Hong Kong to go and a truck load of sitting in a seat while someone shakes it about for a few hours. To round out our eclectic accommodation experiences we went with a B&B in Ponsonby run by Herman Munster and his nice gran who thought the room was for me and Phil (Sally wasn't amused). Had a great meal at some place on Ponsonby with cool views of the city after annoying the Thai place around the corner. Oh well and nice last supper. For our final day in NZ we decided to get out and about on the harbour and have a sail. We jumped on board at lunchtime for our 'Sailors Lunch' and what turned out to be a tour for just us. Not a huge amount of wind but we all had a go at ramming an ice berg (not many in sight though). All very nice and set us up for a bit of a barby at Phils just before our flight to HK that evening. Nice one to all the nice people in New Zealand, will be back again i'm sure.

Posted by Doug at 7:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)