The Secret Life of Bebe

We started the day with a spot of laundry-doing. It’s always a pleasant reprieve from the travelling to pause for a couple of hours and watch your clothes spinning around.

After that, we were on a mission! We were off to see Battle, where the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066. We were not disappointed – the battleground (really just a big open field of grass and sheep) has a great pathway and audio guide that gave us the full history of the battle. What amazes me, looking down from the English front line to where the Normans were fighting from, was how the English managed to lose. The Normans had to battle their way up a steep slope to get at the English. It really was the English’s battle to lose, and lose they did. King Harold (only crowned a few weeks prior) was killed in the fight, and William the Bastard walked away with a new title – the Conqueror.

We made a quick trip into Hastings to swap my sunglasses (the ones I had purchased in Oxford were broken) then made our way to Ashford for the night. Hastings was an …interesting… place. Let’s just say that the average wage here seems like it’s a lot lower than other places we’ve visited.

We chose to stay at Ashford Holiday Inn rather than driving into Canterbury – it’s much cheaper to stay in smaller places just outside main cities, and the hotels are better set up for working travellers, so we can usually get a big breakfast and wi-fi included in the room rate. And we don’t have to worry about parking.

I had a really tasty Indian meal at the local pub – amongst the best I’ve ever had!

We drove into Oxford in the morning to look around, but mostly so I could do some shopping. Gap, Marks and Spencer, yes! Oxford Castle was expensive and not terribly impressive – just a stumpy mound with no actual stones. So we went in search of other, less stumpy mounds in the area.

Berkhamsted Castle was a good place to stop for lunch. We parked up at the train station and wandered around town. Berkhamsted village had the feel of being quite wealthy – perhaps inhabited by workers who commute to London, and London retirees?

From there, we made a beeline for Stevenage, so we could meet up with Dave and Margareta – Stephen’s gamer friends from way back. We met up with Margareta in London last time we were here, but Stephen had never met Dave IRL before. Dave was in Ghana for work last time we were here.

We had a lovely dinner out with them – nice to have other people to talk to! It was a late night for us – we didn’t get to bed until about 11pm, and considering we’ve been waking up between 5-6am, that felt quite late.

This day contained a lot of driving. It’s a bloody long way from Plymouth to Oxford!

We’ve been taken aback by how big Cornwall and Devon are, and how much slower it is to get around. The roads are much smaller and everything is more spaced out that the north, so there has been a lot of driving. The up side is that the countryside is just lovely. I could definitely have spent more time in this area, but we needed to make our way to the South-East ready for the boat ride to France.

We had a couple of quick stops along the way – Farleigh Hungerford Castle. It’s an impressive ruin – built later than the other ones we’ve seen – in the late 1300s, and more of a trumped up manor house than a fortification.

We also stopped in Avebury to have a look at the very impressive standing stones there, and to have some dinner at the local pub. The stones here are quite different from the ones just up the road at Stonehenge, and in a way, more impressive. The stone circle is massive (420 metres in diameter) and the stones are all just sitting in the fields with the sheep. You can walk all around them and get up close – Stonehenge keeps you at a distance (understandably so).

We finished the day early, heading to our (very interesting) hotel in Witney, just outside Oxford. We were given the four poster room….we slept like kings that night…

We hit the road early this morning, and headed straight for … you guessed it, a castle!

Launceston Castle is another motte and bailey castle, much larger than Okehampton. It was also built shortly after the Norman conquest. It was a wealthy and powerful castle, being the administrative headquarters for the Earl of Cornwall. You can definitely see the difference between Okahampton and Launceston – Launceston is huge!

We happened to arrive in Launceston village just as they were starting their annual 10km fun run, so that made life a bit interesting. A bagpiper sent the runners on their way. We watched them leave from the town square, and then wandered down to the castle (aka the finishing line), and were just leaving the castle as the first runners came in – accompanied by the pipes. It made the whole visit a little bit interesting.

The next stop was a prime destination for me – Tintagel Castle. I’ve dreamed of going to this place since I was a small child – I read a lot of books about castles and this was my favourite. And it was everything I imagined. Tintagel the village is cute and touristy, the castle complex is huge and spectacular. The main castle is on an island just off the end of a peninsula, with a bridge connecting the two. There has been buildings on the site since Roman times, but the castle that’s there now was build in the 1200s.

Tintagel is most famous for being the place where King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table hung out – though there is no evidence that this is actually true facts.

We were hoping to be able to get to a couple more castles before heading for Plymouth (a barren wasteland, history-wise according to locals), but we were running out of time, so opted for Lands End as our final stop for the day. It was a lovely spot to have a coffee and a sit down.

We finally arrived in Plymouth about 7pm, weary and hungry. Our grand plans to go out for a nice dinner somewhere lasted as long as elevator ride to the lobby….we ate our meal at the hotel restaurant and retired early.

I managed to sleep until about 3.30am then I was up for the day, so did some research on where we were going for the day.

The first stop for the day was Maiden Castle in Dorchester – not really a castle at all, but a massive Iron-Age hill fort. We went up and around it for a nice morning walk. The sun was shining and the sheep were chatty. Delightful!

From there we went on to Corfe Castle, which is the name of both the village and the castle. What a beauty! It’s a massive complex, with an inner and outer bailey, and obviously grand in its day.

Next stop was Okehampton Castle – a big motte and bailey castle that was built immediately after William the Conquerer arrived in Britain. The ‘motte’ refers to the large mound that the main fortification (keep) sits on, and the ‘bailey’ is the courtyard that surrounds it, containing a main hall, kitchens, chapel, stables, workshops, etc. This one is in a lovely out-of-the way spot that was clearly a good place to  defend the area – you can see for miles from the top of the hill.

We were planning to go to Penzance from here, but we had been delayed by Saturday traffic all day, so decided to skooch across to Bude where we were staying for the night, and call it a day.

Bude is a lovely seaside town. We took a stroll in the evening, no castles to see here.

The second flight was longer – 13 hours 40 minutes – so I aimed to have a couple of naps on this one. Still got heaps of movie-watching done too.

We stopped for coffee and snacks at Heathrow after a veeeeery long queue at immigration, then picked up the rental car. We got an upgrade from a Ford Focus to a Mercedes something something, nice. Weird thing is though, the headrests are missing.

It took us a couple of go-rounds to figure out how to get on the M3 so we didn’t get to our B&B in Wareham until about 9.30pm. I was wide awake at this point, so we did some planning and called Arlia for her birthday then eventually got some sleep. Somehow we were in single beds, but I don’t think either of us cared – it was just good to lie down for a bit!

The first leg was not bad – only 10 hours 30 minutes. There were a tonne of movies to watch, so we stayed awake for the whole first flight.

Arriving in Singapore was a bit of a climate shock – it was 33c at 4.30pm. Customs and airport transfers all went very smoothly. Changi is such an easy airport to get in and out of. I’m glad we decided to stop over for a night. We went for a walk when we got into town, had some dinner and then crashed.

I’ve had my Apple watch for a week. It’s not going to surprise anyone to know that I love it.

It doesn’t really do much except sit on my wrist – it’s not the workhorse that my MacBookPro is, or the diligent-always-there presence of my iPhone, but it definitely has it’s place in my iWorld.

The features I love the most:

• The watch function – I like being able to see the time at a glance.
• The activity functions – it counts my steps, my exercise, my heartbeat, and encourages me to stand and move around every hour. I like being able to track that stuff.
• Messaging – I love love love being able to respond to texts and FB messages – it’s a great triage tool for the zillions of messages I get every day.
• Phone calls – Making and receiving phone calls is much better than I thought it would be!
• Remote – it acts as a remote for the music on my phone and for our AppleTVs.

For me, the killer feature is simply that it acts as a go-between with me and my phone, which means I pull it out less often.

It’s a toy, and it’s not something I need, but I certainly love having it.

The Apple Watch was released in the US and other countries in April this year, but not New Zealand! We’ve had to wait three months for Apple to make enough of them to start selling them here. Finally that day has arrived and Stephen and I queued online at 7am to buy one each. It should be here next Wednesday, I can hardly wait!!

Last time I checked in I was almost finished a 12-week job that involved me being in Auckland two days a week. So, over a month later, and I am still travelling, now 2-3 days a week depending on meetings. This week was the first week that I really didn’t feel like going – two days away this time. It’s been quite fun – I’m mostly only away one night a week, and it’s great to get out of Christchurch. This week I am flying home to be picked up at the airport to go straight to Tekapo for the weekend. It makes for a long week!

Next week will be another 3-dayer, then I have a 2-dayer, a 4-dayer, another 2-dayer and then I’m DONE! For now anyway. The timetable can’t change this time, because after that I’ll be in Europe for a month, wahooo!