a quest for a white christmas

With our first ever Christmas away from home and family, we gathered 4 other 'orphans', Duncan, Alderet, Simon and Nadine, and headed up to the Scottish Highlands. After a approximate 12 hour drive through rain and ice, we finally reached our destination - Big Sky Lodges, just north of Inverness. Just to put into perspective, we were just over 57 degrees North Latitude, which is pretty far. We had about 5 hours of light every day, which didn't give us much time to explore, but did however give us more of enough time enjoying the locally brewed whiskey, beer and the home made mulled wine. The lodge we rented was more comfortable and beautiful than we imagined, a beautiful wooden cabin with three bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, a reasonable kitchen, wood burning fireplace, loft area and a nice living room. Fantastic! To our delight the farm also housed four 'Heilan' coo', or Highland cows. We always refer to them as "Buffy Koeie", referring to my mom's hairy pooch named Buffy.





The days before Christmas we spent exploring the country side, and took a drive down to the famous Loch Ness. No Nessie, but we did visit Urquhart castle on the banks of Loch Ness. This castle is estimated to date back to the sixth century, and we couldn't help but wonder if any Macfarlanes where involved in it's destruction a couple of hundred years later.


We went that far north with one main objective in mind - a white Christmas. This was unfortunately not to be, not with snow in any case. We awoke on a very chilly Christmas morning, with everything covered in a considerable amount of frost...close enough, we considered it to be our first white Christmas. The roads were all nice and white and I even got a chance to stand a frozen solid water pond.




We had an absolute feast for Christmas, in fact we had two. Tamara and the girls slaved away in the kitchen to prepare two of the best meals we've had in a long time. The first one on Christmas eve, and then of course Christmas lunch. Well done Tamara and her little helpers!

To our great disappointment the distilleries and castles in the area were closed between Christmas and New Year, but we still had a drive out to the country side. One thing about the roads in the UK is that they don't all have hard shoulders, and we can't just pull off the road to take a photo, which often has you hanging out a window in a moving vehicle to try and take a snap shot, and of course just as you press the button a car or a tree will jump into your shot. We did get a couple of nice photos on our little missions, but not nearly enough! These photos were taken around the lodge, Inverness and Brodie castle.






We also took the orphans on a day of Geocaching, which was very cool. We were kind of looking forward to moving on towards the end of the trip, and changed our plans a little bit to stop over at Nadine's sister's place in Falkirk, a short drive from Edinburgh, in order to visit the beautiful city of Edinburgh. The trip to Edinburgh was great, but more on that in another chapter.

canterbury

For Tami's birthday we decided to get away from London for the first time and do some quality tourist stuff. Canterbury is not to far away and everybody we spoke to told us it would be great place to visit, and it was. We took a train cross country on Saturday morning and pulled into the hostel, which was, as most hostels are, not great! Perhaps to much time at the 19th Hole has spoilt us both.
Canterbury is an awesome town with nearly the entire town centre only for pedestrians. The town still has a large section of the old city wall that use to surround the village, and is also home to the very impressive Canterbury Cathedral.


The cathedral visit was awesome, my first time inside a cathedral. There was a formal choir practice with the organ playing at full blast - pretty impressive.
The town was awesome and shopped till we couldn't any more. Just about all the shops that you'll find in central London are here, but they are so much more accessible.



This photo is of a freezing Tami on her birthday, in her first semi-winter outfit. We refer to this photo as "die winter-meisie". We missioned into town with the mistake of thinking the sun shining means warm weather. She is wearing a couple layer of tops and my 'puffer'bodywarmer.
On the Sunday we went to Dover to visit Dover Castle and do the War Time tunnels tour. It was freezing! The wind was pretty strong and let me tell you, on top of that hill there was more than a slight breeze. It drove the cold air straight through our best fleece's form K-Way and Cape Storm and chilled us properly. Here's a photo of Tami in front of the main gate of the castle and one of us on the top. Don't let the sunshine in this photo fool you, it only lasted for about 3 minutes!

tami and john-fluffy's birthday

Tami and John decided to have a joint b-day bash in a local pub called The Boathouse on the Friday night. A whole lot of people came, but unfortunately we only took photos of the same bunch as always. We sort of actually 'forgot' to take photos and by the time we realized we did, every body either had moved on or we couldn't care!

Tami's birthday was actually only on Monday the 12th, so we went down to the Waitrose to purchase some cupcakes. Not exactly a birthday cake, but they were very tasty!

cousin's visit

Kim, on a visit to her brother in Germany, decided to pop into London for a short time. She arrived on the Friday, and basically only stayed for the weekend, leaving again on the Tuesday. It was great to see her again and her visit gave us an excuse to undergo the trek and madness of a day in Camden Town.
This was my first Camden experience and I must be honest, I quite enjoyed it. We didn't buy to much but it was the experience that was cool. We didn't see loads of punks, but some of the stores where these freaks obviously do their shopping, where very interesting, especially the shoes!

After Camden we took Kim to a Virgin Megastore to purchase some DVD's for herself and to shorten her Christmas gifts-to-buy list. When we arrived in Picadilly Square I thought the shop would obviously be closed, seeing as it is pitch dark already. I stopped off and attempted to take some photos of the Piccadilly sign boards, but they didn't come out as well as I'd hoped.

This photo, to my absolute shock was taken at 17:03...and it was as black as night! Not cool! After the girls did some shopping we wondered the streets, OK we got lost, towards the correct bus stop. To out disgust we found this coat hanging in a shop window. Now, this photo didn't come out that clear because I was trying to zoom through the shop window and couldn't use the flash, but it's obvious what it is! If you were wondering who killed Winnie the Pooh, we have an idea, and they made a nice fur coat out of him!

RWC Final - southfields

We can not explain to anyone how grateful we were that the boys in green and gold managed to pull through on this one! Endless amounts of abuse from English colleagues and children were, without a doubt, in our future if the Poms had won...but, they didn't!
We chose to watch the game at a friends house in Southfields with a whole bunch of Saffa's. Our first choice was Zulu's Bar in Fullham, but when people started queuing outside at two o'clock in the afternoon, game being at eight, we gave it a skip.
Fun was had by all and the cry of "bokke" echoed through the Southfields streets.
On our way home, Putney high street was all Saffa, as hundreds of drunken supporters, most of them dressed in green and gold, roamed the street from pub to pub cheering.
Is was a great day to be in London! On Sunday morning just about every newspaper had an article claiming the "most controversial try" was in fact the turning point in the game....Blah, blah, blah!

new branches on the family tree

This post is actually a bit overdue...sorry! None the less, this is just to confirm the two latest additions to the Stofberg and McFarlane families. First came Isabel Stofberg, then a couple of weeks later, all the way across the world in Germany, Max McFarlane. Welcome to the family little people!

Max

Isabel

"sandles" in Putney

Auntie Sandy came for a quick visit right at the beginning of September. Although her visit was short, it was packed with activities. Tami managed to get a couple days off work to do the whole mother daughter thing. Thankfully the whole mother-spoiling-daughter thing also fell into place, and we both reaped the benefits of having a "mommy" around. Tamara took the old lady shopping and she got a full experience of London on foot, walking up and down high street after high street looking at shops and things to buy the rest of the litter back home. Tami's 70% discount at Accesorize and Monsoon also came in handy.
On the Sunday afternoon we took her to the German restaurant previously featured on this blog, Steins, in Richmond. This time however, we did did not attempt the 'grosse'wors platter, but instead opted for the smaller version and a cheese platter which we shared. The weather wasn't that nice as you can see by our clothing, but with a couple of beers and a nice meal you tend to forget the bad weather.

On Sandy's last night on Mud Island, she took the whole digs out to the GBK - Gourmet Burger Kitchen - to say thanks for letting her stay in our house. GBK is a legendary restaurant and is always a big hit, especially when it comes to burger lovers, should I dare say "connoisseurs", like ourselves. This place has truly magnificent burgers, both in taste and size. All patties are home made and everything is just great. GBK was the perfect way to finish off a 5 day visit to the UK. Be sure that if anyone comes and visits us in Putney, we'll be stopping by GBK for a meal.



The photos are of Auntie "Sandles"; Kobus and Allison; Felicity, Tamara and James.
One housemate, Simon, was working late and couldn't join us...he got GBK takeout though. John also joined us, but a decent photo of John doesn't exist, so I didn't post one!