Sunday, December 21, 2014

Pheasant Shooting in Wales!

Jeff and I were invited to spend the weekend with the Salmon Family in Wales. Imy works with Jeff, Will and Imy invited us down for the weekend for one of the annual pheasant shoots on her family farm. We left Thursday evening after work and got up Friday morning rested and rearing to go shoot some birds!  
The Salmon farm is quite large, so we had the opportunity to go on several different drives. The boys went in pairs for the shoot and I went with the beaters and flaggers. I learned so much about the sport! So Julian, Imy's dad, raises the pheasants on the land every year. For the shoots, there are beaters that go through the woods with dogs to drive out the pheasants. Once the pheasants are out of the woods, the flaggers are at the edge to scare the birds and make sure they fly high enough to be shot. 



We had the perfect day.. it was blue sky and not that windy :) 
 Imy was a pro at the shooting... she got several birds through the day!



 The boys didn't do bad either... 
with a bird or two! 


 I got some hands on guidance from Imy... but didn't end up shooting anything. 
 After the shoot, Imy's mom, Maggie, had a delicious feast ready for us back at the house. It had a proper Thanksgiving feel to it. They also had a beautiful christmas cactus that was in full bloom. It made me think of all of Othermomma's flowers and christmas cactus. Love you! 

After dinner we played the UK version of Apples to Apples. We had no idea the number of references that we would not know.. but we still had a good relaxing and hanging out. 

The next morning we got up and went to the local museum, The Judge's Lodge. They had tape audio recordings for the tour! It was actually a pretty good tour in a historic building. 
Over the weekend we learned quite a bit about Wales. I had no idea that it has its own language (Welsh) .... or that it has one of the highest population of castles due to the border between England. 
        
They had a few props to play with on the trip... 
Of course the guys played a little with them
 After the museum, we went to a great local pub. They had hops hanging around the whole place. Hops are a very popular to grow in this area of Wales. We saw several tall vine looking things on the way in and didn't realize that it was hops. Turns out that Imy's dad grew up picking hops for his summer job. 

After lunch a few people went on a good little hike to the top of the ridge and walked back home. I was feeling more like nap time! But the pictures from the walk look like they had some awesome views!
 Here is one of the sheep on the farm

Later on that evening, we were relaxing by the fire and Will finally introduced us to Settler of Catan! The name does not sound like it would be fun... but you shouldn't judge a book by its cover or name I guess. This is by far my new favorite game! Even though the boys dominated with the wins... I highly recommend it for the next game night... we even went out and got the game for ourselves :) 
Overall it was a great weekend in Wales!
On the way back to London we stopped at the Welcome to Wales sign for our last group photo! Special thanks to Imy for inviting us to your home and sharing this awesome weekend with us!






Thursday, December 18, 2014

Happy Thanksgiving from Nice

Last year we didn't take any time off for Thanksgiving, so we were really looking forward to our weekend away in Nice. Jeff found a great little flat in the city that had some awesome views! 
When we arrived, we wandered around and just relaxed :) Work has been really busy for both of so it was nice just to let the time go by..... 
We found a great little urban park that had a pretty cool little display of water show. Turns out, this urban park was over a river. The river was getting full of trash, so they covered it up and built a beautiful park. 
The flat had pretty good wifi... so we got to speak with everyone back home for thanksgiving! It is always so nice to hear and see their faces. After catching up we headed out to dinner. We went to Oliveria, which was recommended to us by a girl that I work with and it is highly rated on tripadvisor. It did not disappoint either! The owner, Oliveria, told us all about the olive oil and introduced us to some new ways of using olive oil for cooking as well. 
Christmas came a little early for Jeffrey too - Christmas jumper! haha 
I had to give it to him a little early so that he could get some good usage out it in December
The next morning we did a walking food tour by 'The French Way'. Marion was our tour guide. She grew up in Nice, so she new all the ins and outs of the city. She had some really good recommendations for later on the weekend and took us to some places we would never had gone without the tour. 
The first stop was this upscale candy shop. We tried candied clementines and a chocolate covered almond that just melted in your mouth! 
For the next few stops, we wondered through the local market. Here she points out all the different colored tomatoes on display here. No one has just red tomatoes in their salads anymore :) She picked up some candy in the shape of lips, some flowers that had been crystalized with sugar, and a traditional dish that has swiss chard, raisins, in phyllo type pastry.  The lip candy is an old tradition, as it was the shape of the lips of one of the queens. Amazing how it is still around hundreds of years later
Fun fact we learned while walking through the market was that this is where the florist used to come and sell their product for the famous french perfumes. The flowers still smelled lovely, but no on trades here anymore. 
After walking through the market, we stopped in the gourmet chocolate shop and she got us a sample of the fancier, sweeter version of the traditional swiss chard, phyllo pastry for comparison. 
The weather was a little rainy, so we had taken our snacks to go and stopped at this little coffee shop for a drink and to stop and eat.  
The rest of the tour was more savory focused. We tried some traditional onion and anchovy tart, socca (fried chick pea flour) and some other spicy dough balls.  I wasn't to excited about the savory tastes but I really liked it more than I thought I would. 
Our food was nice and hot, so we did take away and went to our last stop of the day. It was at a local olive oil store were we ate our snacks, tried some rose wine and tasted a little some olive oils. 






   We finished off the tour with a group photo! We loved everything about this trip and highly recommend 'The French Way' for anyone going to Paris or Nice in the future. 







After the tour, we walked up to the top of Castle 
Hill.  While there is no longer a castle there, but
 there were some great views!
We had some great opportunities to play with the panaromic pictures :) Jeff's picture is looking over the old town of Nice and my picture is looking out over a little town, Eze, that is a few miles away. 
We could see this waterfall from our flat, and it was even more impressive up close. 
This was the view from the other side of Castle Hill looking over the harbor. Based on what we learned in our tour, the harbor was not built until late in the city's history. It also explained why the food was not really based from the sea, but rather from the mountains. 

There were some pretty interesting mosaics that 
we came across on the way down to the harbour. 
Once in the harbor,we stopped to rest the feet and cheered to white russians and pina coladas! 
The next day we had a nice lie in and ventured out of Nice to the neighboring villages. The first stop was a cute and cozy little town, Eze. It was located on the top of a big hill and had the feel of a castle with high stone walls and little stores everywhere. We were in the non-tourist season, so most of the stores were closed, but it was still a good little stop. 
This was the view looking down one of the side walls.... Not sure why there were so many bronze animals around, but I thought it was cute and worthy of a picture! 
The next stop was Monaco....  This is the entrance to the infamous casino! It was quite impressive on both the outside and inside architecturally. 
We just had to take a picture of the classic red Lamborghini cars parked out front
We weren't suppose to take photos inside... but we snuck one anyways. 
Overall the building was beautiful, but we were a little underwhelmed with the very, very small space for gambling... until we realized there were multiple private rooms toward the back of the buildings... which also explains why there weren't that many people there.

Another fun fact we learned.. Monaco is less than 2K square miles making it the 2nd smallest country but is the most densely populated. Monaco has the highest GDP in the world, no income tax, and residents are not allowed to gamble in the casino.  
The boats in the harbor were HUGE
Maybe one day we will have one... at least it something to keep dreaming for :) 
  After wandering around the city, we ventured over to the aquariumWe took the long route and got to see some of the rocky water edge. Marion mentioned the aquarium was pretty good and that you get to pet sharks... so we decided why not give it a go!


Nemo!                                         
Jeff got to touch the shark and I took the pictures!
(There would be no shark touching for me.)
Monaco at night.. breathtaking!
We rain across this gem on the way home. 
Monaco Grand Prix statue
On our last day we had a flight booked later in the evening, so we had time to fit one more trip in. We went to the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild palace and gardens. While it was a little to cool for the gardens to be in their full glory, we still really enjoyed the visit. 
There about 10 gardens in total with themes from different places, from Spanish, Rose, Exotic, Stone, French, and Japanese.
After wandering through the gardens, you come up with this great view of the house. It was picture perfect! We stayed here for a bit and played with the pictures and views. 
When we got further down the towards the house, music started to play. The water streams and fountains were tuned in with the music. It was the perfect way to end our trip to Nice. 
Here is a view looking back up at the gardens. 
The house is behind us

After playing in the water for a bit, we finished off our visit with a tour through the house. Fun fact we learned... the Rothschild family is known to be one of the richest families in the world. When Beatrice built this house, she had 8 models built before she finally approved of the garden layout. That is one picky woman!
Overall we enjoyed out trip to Nice and the French Riviera! 
(It was also our first trip with the selfie stick -  
I think it provided for some great photos!) 
It was Kiss and Fly time... destination home!