Tag: photos

Tour de France

Our weekend revolved around the Tour de France. On Saturday we headed into London for the Prologue. We arrived at Victoria and wandered along to Hyde Park with the intention of soaking up the atmosphere, watching some of the time trials and investigating the People’s village.

Prologue - Warm up in front of a large audience

Our first observation was just how busy it was. The cyclists were out warming up around the route, and so as we walked along South Carriage Drive we watched the cyclists whoosh past. The last cycle race I saw was when I was a child and the milk race came to Hull. My memories from that day were just how fast the cyclists were, but I imagined I’d overestimated this in my memory. Not so, admittedly this was a time trial, but it was amazingly fast. We spent 2 or 3 hours in the park before heading back to Brighton, just in time to watch Fabian Cancellara’s winning ride.

On Sunday we headed off with friends into Kent to Iden Green and found ourselves a spot near the road by The Peacock. We arrived really early and watched more and more people arrive to watch both the caravane and the race later. The riders were amazing to watch (albeit briefly). The breakway group of 5 were followed by at least 10 vehicles, possibly more like 15. The main group came along 4 or 5 minutes later.

Stage One - Caravane

A great couple of days, and quite a spectacle. Looking forward to it coming back to the UK again soon but in the meantime I’ll have to make do with the ITV4 coverage and the ITV and BikeRadar podcasts. More photos

Geek Wine Thing


Checking the colour
Originally uploaded by Jane Dallaway.

Last night we attended the first Geek Wine Thing organised by Danny and held at the Regency Town House.

Henry Butler from the Butlers wine cellar led the tasting, and for the cost of a tenner we tasted 8 different Spanish and Portugese wines. As a total novice in the wine tasting world, it was interesting to learn more about how to smell, look at and taste wine. Henry was an excellent and enthusiastic teacher.

The tasting started off very quiet and subdued, but before too many glasses had been consumed we got noisier and noisier.

The wines we tasted were:

Whites
Pares Balta Blanc de Pacs 2006 – Spain
Soalheiro Alvarinho 2005 – Portugal
Castello D’Alba 2005 – Portugal
Navajas Crianza 2003 – Spain

Reds
Monte Real Reserva 2000 – Spain
Clos Le Fites 2002 – Spain
Quinta de la Rosa Tinto 2004 – Portugal
Niepoort Redoma 1994 – Portugal

The white wines were split into unoaked (the first 2) and oaked (the second 2) with one each from Spain and Portugal. As usual I preferred the unoaked – so another nail in the coffin of oaked wines for me.

Next time, and I hope there will be a next time, I’ll try and remember to bring a pen to make some notes, as somewhat unsurprisingly I don’t remember too much beyond the first couple of glasses 🙂

As usual, my photos from the evening are all on flickr.

Brighton Festival

Well, it is festival time again here in Brighton, and so today I headed off in search of the Streets of Brighton, open houses and more of the 41 places installations.

Despite having lived in Brighton for 5 festivals, I’d never ventured into an open house until today – and I’m converted. I visited 3 and found them all to be of a really high standard. The first was Rod Clark.

Rod Clark's Open House

The second and third were both down Tidy Street. They were Shadow Box and SQ1.

The Shadow Box Artists Open House

I will be visiting more of them.

I managed to catch a few different street performances, the Deep Sea Jivers performed by Swervy World and Eco Pirates performed by Desperate Men.

Desperate Men

Fabrica: Beneath the Strides of Giants


See no evil
Originally uploaded by Jane Dallaway.

We popped into Fabrica yesterday to see what was on display at the moment and found Beneath the Stride of Giants by Brian Griffiths. It is a wooden boat, made from other people’s junk.

Fabrica is such a lovely place to stop, it’s always peaceful and cool and its often hard to remember it is in such a busy location.

Bouldering in Hove Park


Bouldering in Hove Park
Originally uploaded by Jane Dallaway.

Since Jim broke his wrist, I haven’t been to the climbing wall, and I’ve missed it. A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across information that there is a boulder park in Hove Park, and so today we went for a cycle ride to take a look.

It is about 3 metres high and probably about 12 metres long with areas ranging from scramble, to slight overhangs. We spent half an hour there climbing, traversing and doing the odd scramble. I am really impressed to have something like this so close, and available for free. I’m hoping to start visiting on a weekly basis to have a play.

Sierra Nevada snowboarding

We spent a very pleasant long weekend in Spain, managing 2 happy days snowboarding at the Sierra Nevada. A lack of snow lower down the mountain, but good fun none the less. The Sierra Nevada resort is excellent for beginners and intermediates, but lacks (at least at this time of the year) any really challenging terrain for us.

And whilst on the subject of snowboarding, this is an excellent video clip on how to ride a chair lift.