A fine thatched roof...

One of my favorite things to look at here are the houses with a thatched roof. It is amazing the detail the thatchers can make with what looks likes a big bunch of straw. There are thatched roofs in nearly every village I ride through on my bike. Someone told me that the thatchers have their own design that they make at one end of the house kind of like a signature. He said that you often seen pictures of animals. Now, I always look for the signature when I ride by a house.

Thatched roofs last 50-60 years! In East Anglia (where we live), they use water reed to thatch houses. They also use long straw. There is a definite art to thatching and I guess that it is very expensive to have your house rethatched. Also, against common thought, thatched roofs don't absorb water and due to the traditional steep pitch of thatched roofs they shed water more quickly than traditional roofs.

Overall, it is pretty efficient and definitely looks interesting.

Snow...

The kids woke me this morning, shaking me awake with their excited voices. "It's snow, Mom!" The volume of their voices alone made me sit up instantly. I looked out my window to see our back yard covered with a thin layer of snow. It was truly inviting. The minute we stepped outside to start our walk to school, the kids were excitedly throwing snowballs at each other. They were squealing with delight as they dodged each other's snowballs, frantically trying to make snowballs before getting hit with one. On the way to school their footprints covered as much new snow as they could find. When we arrived at the school yard, it was complete chaos. There was no safe place to stand if you wanted to avoid getting hit with a snowball. Usually, the school yard is a quiet place in the mornings. Apart from a few kids stalling off the start of school as long as possible, most kids walk straight to their classroom doors occasionally offering a wave to their parents as they go. Today, no one wanted to go inside. The kids were racing around the playground scooping up snowball remnants on the run. Even the parents were found smiling about the snow. The teachers finally had to dig out a whistle to get the kids to go inside. When the kids heard the whistle, they paused wondering what the sound meant. School was the farthest idea from their minds. As I walked back from the school, I had to laugh. It isn't like the weather is much different today than yesterday. It is just frozen rain. However, I think that sometimes we all need a tiny change in our day to make it feel different. Routine can get a little stale and sometimes all we need is a little something to make the routine look a little more sparkly. (Picture: Our back yard this morning)

Turn, Turn, up, down,2nd exit out of the Roundabout

Dale does a club run on Saturdays and I go on Sundays. I have ridden with two different clubs, St. Ives Cycling Club and the Cambridge Cycling Club. Both clubs run a different route each week. The St. Ives club boasts over 28 different routes. I get a detailed route sheet from the St. Ives club every Thursday describing the club run for that Sunday. The Cambridge Club publishes the place where they will have their tea stop on their website. All clubs have tea stops a little more than halfway through the ride. We stop and people have tea and cakes, rolls, beans on toast, or coffee and scones. Then everyone climbs back on their bikes and rides as hard as they can home. The tea stops make the bike outing a long one. Usually we will leave the house before 9:00am and return after 2:00pm depending on how many punctures there were within the group.

For each route I study the possible routes. I look at Google Earth. I look at maps. I look at road names and town names. I keep thinking that one day I am going to know where I am once we depart for our ride. I never do. Once I clip in and have been pedaling for five minutes, we have usually made at LEAST three turns and gone through one roundabout.

The roads are not in a grid here. You have to go north to go south. The roundabouts usually have three possible exits, but I have seen as many as five. Every village has several roundabouts. You go through a lot of little villages and they all have a pub, a church that looks like it is over 100 years old, and a pond. The roads we ride on are sometimes the width of a narrow driveway. They are usually covered with a thin coat of mud and all the considerate participants have mud guards on their bikes. It made me pause the first time I saw mud guards (fenders) on a Colnago, but it became instantly clear within the first mile.

The club runs are divided up into several smaller groups based on speed and distance. The groups range from 8 to 15 riders. The reason for this is you cannot squeeze many more riders through some of the streets. Very often the groups have to squeeze down to single file due to cars rushing at you at high speed. The rides so far have been between 55 and 75 miles. I usually am ready to dismount around the 50 mile mark, but since I am usually lost I have no choice but to hang on. Nothing like a little incentive to finish the ride and hang with the group.

How many stone do you weigh?

When I first arrive in England, my first objective was to find a gym. I knew that it was going to take a while to get our bikes, so I needed a gym to get some exercise. I found one about three miles from our house (yippee) so the fact that I had no car during the day did not matter. I could ride my borrowed bike to the gym!

On my first visit, I immediately noticed weight conversion tables on all the walls next to the machines that asked for your weight. The machines measured in pounds, so it was easy for me, but England measured weight in kilograms and stone. The chart read 1 stone = 6.35 kilograms = 14 pounds. The chart went on to show what various weight equalled in stone and kilograms so that people could punch in their appropriate weight into the machine. I decided that kilograms were the way to go. The number you had to look at was not very high and it did not bring visions of large stone tablets stacked on one side of a scale.

Since I have been optimistically guessing my weight since we arrived, I bought a scale a few days ago. I had a feeling that my lack of careful eating was going to be shown in the numbers, but I still had hope as I stepped on the scale that my intuition was wrong. My optimism hovered as I looked down at the number. It, of course, showed my weight in kilograms. The number looked OK as I tried to do the math in my head. "Is it 2.1 kilograms to the pound?" My disappointment sank in when I made the conversion on my computer. However, my optimism made one last appeal tossing out the thought that maybe the scale was wrong.

As I looked back on my first few months here in England, I feel like I can hardly be blamed for my weight gain. The English are not renowned for featuring fresh, vegetables in their prepared meals. What they do well at is comfort food. This is understandable considering the days are usually gray, wet and cool. This is a perfect environment for bangers and mash, fish and chips (fries), steak and chips, and steak and kidney pie. All of it served with beer. I am only trying to adapt to my surroundings and not look like a foreigner. This mentality has, unfortunately, brought me to my current spot on the scale. "No more mash! No more chips! No more beer!" Visions of Stonehenge dance in my head. It is time to get the chisel out and start chipping away at those "stones".

The Flag of England

Did you know that the flag of England is the St. George's Cross, not the Union Jack? I just learned yesterday that the Union Jack flag represents the United Kingdom. According to my one minute of research, the UK flag consists of three elements: the cross of St. George (red on white) for England, the cross of St. Andrew (white diagonal on blue) for Scotland, and the so-called cross of St. Patrick (red diagonal on white) for Ireland. The original Union Jack/Union Flag adopted in 1606 was symmetrical: the red cross of St. George outlined in white overlaid on top of a St. Andrew's flag, which was blue with a white. If you go to London, England today, it is the Union Jack flag that you will see flying and plastered on all the souvenirs. Public buildings are suppose to fly the Union Jack flag and can only fly the St. George's Cross if they have more than one flagpole.

Christmas crackers

The Christmas cracker is a nifty British tradition totally unknown to any of us before we got here. It's a gift-wrapped little tube that snaps like a capgun when it's opened. Ours contained a paper crown, a prize like you might find in a cracker-jack box and a joke on a little slip of paper like in a fortune cookie. Nathan, looking very sharp in his school uniform, shows one moments before we popped it open. The next photo shows the contents on display.

-Dale

Oh the wind...

First thing, I would like to thank everyone for the all the postive comments that I received regarding my first attempt at my blog. I was not sure about posting ALL my feeling about my startup woes here and considered sugar coating things to make things look a bit better. However, I decided that I have to be honest with myself and admit that I was not able to plough on as if nothing happened in my life. That said, I want everyone to know that I am definitely on the upswing. I am becoming familiar with my surroundings and accepting the way things are going to work here.

The wind, however, is something else! As a cyclist, wind has never been much of a friend unless it is behind you. I have learned which way to ride from my house to enable me to have a tailwind on my return journey. The only problem is that I have to face the headwind from the moment I leave the house. That makes getting on my bike a bit more daunting. Yesterday, we had "gales". In the US I think that houses and telephone poles would have been scattered across the state! Here it is just another day. Dale and I were wondering how the double decker buses drive in this weather. It seems that the wind would knock them right over!

Today the wind is less than remarkable which doesn't mean it is calm, but it just means that it is everyday speed. I have posted a picture of our weather for all those to see in the states. I must admit that I am always looking and intrigued with the weather. Perhaps that is because I spend a lot of time outside on my bike. Perhaps I would have been like this regardless. One thing that I find very interesting about the weather here is that it is so WARM considering the UK's position on the globe. The England is on the same latitude as Newfoundland. If you go south to Spain, you have hit the same latitude as Boston. Despite being so far north, England gets little to no snow and the temperature does not flucuate much during day and night. At least we don't have to endure freezing cold here! One small victory! :)

New blog

OK. I have finally started my blog as promised. I know I have been a little quiet since my arrival in England. With this blog, I hope to share with you my everyday experiences of living abroad. I started to keep a journal of our stay here, but I stopped creating entries for a while. This was during my really hard adjustment period when weather always seemed bleak and I had no one to talk to. I am happy to say that I have managed to make it over that hill and I am feeling much more adjusted now. I now truly appreciate what I left behind, but my New Year's resolution is to look forward, not back. I also hope to take a more positive approach to life in general.

Living in England is substantially different than a visit or even compared to my extended stay in France during college. There is no built in structure. There is no person available to tell you what to do, where to go or how to do things. I never sought out that kind of instruction, but that it was there gave me a feeling of stability. I am living in a country where everyone speaks English but half the time I am struggling to figure out the meaning behind the words people say.

Words are different here. British use less words when they say things. They don't expand on any statement unless prodded. They describe things differently using words we rarely use for fear of being thought of as condescending or full of self importance. The British seem much more withdrawn and quiet. I guess that is why it seemed so lonely here at first. I moved from a boisterous, noisy world of friends and people to a place where people are much more stoic and reserved. Everyone is perfectly friendly, but I can tell that it is going to take a long time before I feel a connection between myself and any new friends here.