I promised you a few weeks ago that I would post some pictures of my daughter’s wedding. Well, the official photos are now available (courtesy of Fox Moon Photography) and so it gives me great pleasure to replicate some of them here.
To say that it was a very special day would be the biggest understatement of understatements. The sun shone brightly and everyone had a fabulous time – especially the bride and groom, who were smiling throughout day.
I’m not quite sure why it is, but I always seem to hear my type of music being played wherever I go. It doesn’t matter if I’m in the local supermarket, or any of the shops around town, the airwaves are filled with Mike’s Music. Even during the Geneva Open tennis last week, they played songs in between games to entertain the crowd. As well as Celebration there was this particular song by Indeep, which was released in 1982. Enjoy and have a great week!
Our lives are nothing if not varied… 😊 My wife, Jude, is a big tennis fan and she noticed that Alexander Zverev had chosen to play in the Geneva Open, as a warm-up for the French Open next week. Other ‘stars’ were also due to play, like local Vaudois hero Stan ‘The Man’ Wawrinka, so we bought tickets for the quarter finals on Thursday. Unfortunately Stan was knocked out early in the competition, but we were still treated to some excellent tennis.
The venue and event is small and very intimate and, at least on quarter finals day, you can get up close and, if you’re lucky, even chat to some of the players. (E.g. see pic 5).
The eventual finalists were Nicolas Jarry and Alexander Zverev, who subsequently played out a very close final yesterday evening, with Zverev winning 10-8 in a 3rd set tiebreak.
It’s hard to believe that I’ve now been blogging for over 4 years and this is the first time I’ve posted pictures, well, close up pictures, of one of the world’s most iconic mountains – the Matterhorn. My excuse, if I needed one, is that Jude and I have been to Zermatt so many times before, with almost every one of our friends and family who came to stay when we first moved over to Switzerland.
Anyway, my sister, Karen, has been visiting this week with her partner, Paul, and they were keen to go there. So, we drove around to Tasch, parked up and took the shuttle train to (the car free) Zermatt. Now although the Matterhorn looks impressive from almost any angle, it’s far best viewed from the Gornergrat at 3,100m (or 10,170ft). But do not worry if you are averse to hiking, as there is a train which will whisk you up to the top. 😊
To give you some idea of the scale of what you are looking at, I’ve posted a picture (no. 4) of the ultra modern, ‘space age’ looking, Monte Rosa Hut, which is 5 storeys high and sleeps 120 people. Picture 5 zooms out a little (and you can, I hope, spot the hut in the centre of the lower part of the image) and then picture 6 shows the full extent of Monte Rose (also called the Dufourspitze and is Switzerland’s highest mountain at 4,634m or 15,200ft), with the hut towards the lower right.
I’m normally quite strict in posting things in chronological order and so, at this point, I should be blogging about my daughter’s wedding. However, as things turned out, I didn’t get the chance to take many photographs (and the ones that I did take were quite ordinary). So I (and you) will have to wait until the newly weds return from honeymoon (in Houston, New Orleans and Miami) for me to post some of the best official photos.
So, in the meantime, I’ll get you up to date on the rest of our time in the UK…
You may recall that Judith and I had rented a cottage in Hathersage and on our last day there, before heading up to Scotland with my other daughter, Joanne, and her partner, Aaron, (see post tomorrow), we went for a quiet stroll along the River Derwent. (Regular followers may recall this post nearly 2 weeks ago).
By the time most of you read this I will probably be at my daughter’s wedding. Eventually I will post pictures of said event, if I’m allowed, but for the time being, I’m trying to keep up to date with recent events, otherwise you will all be bombarded with an even longer series of posts when I get back home…
So, on Thursday, while my wife was enjoying herself baking cakes and finishing off her dress for the wedding, I set out to do a loop from Castleton. It started by walking south west up Cave Dale, before striking north west and over Mam Tor (at the dizzy height of 517m / 1,696 ft), to follow the ridge or crest north east over Hollins Hill and Back Tor to Lose Hill, (which is also called Ward’s Piece for some reason) and then returning to Castleton for a well earned refreshment. 🍺
The forecast was for ‘good’ weather, but the sun seemed to take an age to burn off the early morning mist, so the pictures below are a little murky. Being pretty much in the middle of England, the Peak District is easily accessible to many and, as such, the paths can get very eroded. So the powers that be have placed massive paving stones to help alleviate the problem.
P.S. Re pic 10: Don’t worry, I do plan to have a shave and smarten myself up for the wedding. You may not even recognise me! 😊
This week is a double celebration for me, with my birthday last Saturday and my daughter Sarah’s wedding this coming Saturday. So there was only one song that I could pick for this week and that’s Celebration by Kool and the Gang. I love this song. I could play it all day.
Released in 1980, it reached no. 1 in the United States in February 1981, but only no. 7 in the UK, though it was in the charts for 13 weeks. I hope you enjoy this song as much as I do. 🙂
I’ve just returned from a fabulous extended weekend in Krakow, Poland. I was invited by my future son-in-law, Karl, to participate in his Stag weekend together with his dad, his 3 younger brothers and 3 of his best friends. We arrived on Friday night and after a few beers, (of course), found a nice restaurant and a few more beers in a local bar.
The following morning, it was down to a nearby Park for the 5k (3 mile) Parkrun which started at 9am. I wasn’t going to run (due to my dodgy calf), but decided to give it a go. It lasted about 4.5k before I had to nurse it along to the finish to be 125th out of the 201 runners and 3rd of the 6 of our group who ran. 🙂 I mention this ‘result’ because the next event was Go-Karting, where I was soundly beaten into last place! It seems Karl and his brothers played the Super-Mario Karting game a lot when they were younger and Karl always chose to be Yoshi. So Karl was suitably dressed up for the occasion – as he was for the trip to the Games pub in the Old Town for the après-Kart celebrations.
After a nice breakfast and a quiet walk around the Old Town on the Sunday morning, it was down to the Bull Pub to watch the Liverpool v Burnley Premier League match. The guys had to leave by 6pm to catch their flight back to the UK, but I stayed on for two more days and I’ll post some more pics of that tomorrow…
I received such positive feedback on the village photographs in my last post, (thank you Jet and M.Oniker), that I decided to take a few more pictures for you to enjoy. But first, a little background…
Evolène is a village at around 1,380m (4,525ft) in the Val d’Hérens, which itself is in the southern part of the Valais canton of Switzerland. The population of the whole commune (which includes the neighbouring villages of Les Haudères, Villa, La Sage, La Forclaz and Arolla) is only about 1,700. Despite this relatively low number, we have 8 bar/restaurants in our village alone. These survive due to the number of visitors that we get both during the winter, for skiing, and the summer for walking, cycling or mountaineering. I read that 55% of the available light (i.e from when it appears from, or disappears, behind the mountains), is sunshine. And with little wind and a fairly dry atmosphere, not to mention some beautiful scenery, you can see why it’s quite popular.
At the moment we have the annual Carnival, which this year runs from 6th January to 5th March, (this explains why some of the pictures still show what appear to be Christmas decorations) and in the summer from 10th to 15th August there will be the biannual, CIME mountain folklore festival. More posts to come on these no doubt… 😄
I think it’s fair to say that there was a modest turnout for the 13th Edition of the Evolène Nordic Skiing event. However, I’m sure every single one of them had a wonderful time. After around 4″ to 5″ of overnight snow, the conditions were perfect underfoot, if not overhead, due to the grey skies.
There are junior events covering 1 to 2 kilometres, but the main, senior, events, for both the Classic and Skating styles, are 10k (6 miles) in length. The course is 2 loops of 5k/3 miles and the Skating event started 5 minutes after the Classic, so the participants do get mixed up quite a bit. I wasn’t even sure who had won, especially as the (apparent) winner of the Classic event didn’t seem to be out of breath when he crossed the finish line.
And, just in case you are wondering, yes, I have thought about entering, though purely to say that I did it. However, it is a bit disconcerting when the winners have finished before some of the slower competitors (and that would be me) have even started the 2nd loop!
