Saturday - eve of road trip

It's Saturday morning and Jo and I have just been to the Doctor's to join the myriad of other grey hairs to get our annual flu jabs. They say that Australia has had a very bad winter with flu and apparently we here in the UK monitor the strains that are found in the southern hemisphere and these are built in to the vaccinations.

Tomorrow morning, Jo and I start our UK road trip. Tomorrow it's Liverpool, then Winchester on Monday, Dover on Tuesday, followed by nights in Broxbourne, London (2), Broxbourne again and then Chester on the way home. We enjoyed our USA road trip this year - apart from the bug we picked up - and hopefully this one will go well too. It's a blink and you'll miss it trip, so we have to steel ourselves to get as much out of the brief visits as we can.

When we're in London, we're going to see the musical 42nd Street on Thursday night, then the Pink Floyd exhibition on Friday morning, after which we meet up with Anne and Leslie Mason for dinner at Theo Randall at the Intercontinental. Who he, you ask? Well, I'd never heard of him either but Anne is a bit of a gourmet diner and her brother Tom, a wine expert, travels the world and knows all the best restaurants and chefs and no doubt she took this recommendation from him.

Tom is the main reason we're going to London - it's his first year at running his own wine fair, but he was formerly a member of the Wine Gang and we used to go their Edinburgh fairs every year, but he's broken away from them and is doing his own thing now. He's already held one event in Glasgow and this is his second fair - https://festival-of-wine.com/london-wine-festival/

I've now booked just about everything for our Australian trip - including the overnight stays in our Motorhome on our drive from Melbourne to Adelaide on the Great Ocean Road. We're staying at 3 different Big 4 holiday parks - 2 nights each at Apollo Bay, Port Fairy and Robe. We've got our visas approved as well - just 4 months to wait now.

Kelly went to look at the accommodation we've booked in Adelaide and sent a couple of photos from different angles:

Kelly also sent us a cute photo of the boys taking their milk:

The USA big flights are organised as is the week on Maui, but we've still to book domestic flights - Denver-Medford and Medford-Maui returns. I have however booked us in to an airport hotel in Denver so we can rest then fly to Oregon the morning after our international flight.

I'm wearing my Grants Pass Cavemen Football t-shirt today. I'm supposed to wear it on Cade's match days - Fridays, but I'll claim that, with the time difference, it was still Friday in Oregon when I got dressed this morning. It didn't help anyway as, after 4 straight wins, the Cavemen lost their second match in a row yesterday. What's going on?

Holidays update

.It's becoming habitual, this blog being updated on a Wednesday. Here goes with the events of the last week.

I got the steroid/cortisone injection in my left knee last Wednesday. I was told it would take a couple of days before it would have full effect, so the first game of golf when the benefits should have been felt was on Sunday, when we played our annual Scotland v Rest of World Challenge match - and I have to say so far, so good - no pain. Now I have to trust it a bit and try to swing normally, instead of trying to protect it as I've been doing for a while.

Incidentally, Scotland won back the ugliest trophy we have:

Yes, it's a gauntlet and the only person I know who likes it is Jo, although she's a little unhappy about the upward middle finger. I can't remember if it was always like that, or whether somebody has tampered with it.

We had a very nice lunch after the golf on Sunday, with over 30 present. We sat at a table - complete with proper linen tablecloths - with Raymond and Myra Orr and Dan Corbett and Mary. This event signals the virtual end of our competitive golf season. Our weekly Wednesday Quaich competition also finished last week and all that's left now is tomorrow's Autumn outing to Edzell and then, at the end of the month, a week in Tenerife.

We were out for dinner on Saturday night at Ken and Irene Page's, with Archie and Eileen Cook also there. A very nice evening - but probably too many calories. I tried to burn off a few on Monday afternoon when I joined our cycling group on one of their jaunts. It was the first time I'd been out with the larger group for 4 months and it was a bit of a struggle - they've got faster and fitter - and I haven't. I was very grateful to the two members of the group who had their e-bikes out with them that day - they gave me a shot of them on a couple of the harder uphill climbs. I'm now completely sold on the e-bike idea. You still have to pedal to get the battery to kick in, and they are heavier than conventional bikes, so when you don't have the power on, I imagine they will need a bit more effort to propel them. I guess it's just a question of time - and money - before we're all riding them.

I've been busy on the holiday front over the last week as well and we've now locked in our dates and locations for next year's big trips to Australia and USA. The first one I booked was the USA one, where I normally try and make use of our Avios points and Companion Voucher. I tried for a couple of days to get flights online, but kept coming across error messages. Eventually, I gave up and phoned the Executive Club. They managed to do the necessary. For the first time for many years, we'll be travelling out at the back of the bus, but the good news is that I managed to get us Business Class flights on the way home. We're flying in to Denver. Now I've got to find the domestic transfer from there - and also to and from Hawaii - we're spending a week on Maui at Marriott's Maui Ocean Club:

We've been to Hawaii once before - back in 2003, Jo, Kelly and I went to Kauai - that's the island at the top of the map below. Maui is pictured just above the big island and the location of our resort is marked on the map in the north west of the island.

We're flying to USA on 27th June, returning on 11th August, 2018, with the week in Maui the 5th of our 6 weeks away.

With that in the bag, I decided it was time to finalise our plans for Australia. We're going out again with Emirates from Glasgow to Dubai and then, for a change, flying from there to Melbourne. After a couple of nights in the city, we're trying out a little adventure by hiring a Motorhome and driving east along Great Ocean Road to Adelaide, with stops planned at Apollo Bay, Port Fairy and Robe along the way. Here's the rough route:

We'll be travelling in something that looks approximately like this:

When we get to Adelaide, we'll no longer be able to stay with Kelly and Chris as their new home is too small to accommodate us, so we've rented a place in Seacliff:

I think the photographer has done a good job - we expect the reality to be a little different!

We leave for Oz on 31st January and return home on 14th March.