Beautiful weather, fantastic snow, great off piste runs and some jumping into bags.  What more could you want from a day skiing?  Courtesy of the fabulous Garmin Edge 705 the entire day is recorded for posterity.  97km and 9347m of descent.  That’s equivalent to skiing from the top of Everest to sea level.  And 133km/h top speed!

Here’s some pictures of us doing jumps with the Matterhorn in the background.  Sorry about the annoying Fotofast © watermark.  We couldn’t get the pictures digitally and so they had to be scraped from a website.

Izzy first showing us all how to do it right.

Hannah

Trish

Ewan

Naturally, I can’t talk about day four with out talking about the night  of day three.  And what a night it was.  While I was writing the last blog post and having a shower, Lee, Terry and JJ were ensconced in the lounge drinking a lot of wine so when I turned up everybody was pretty merry already.  Kandi (and I have to point out that I had done Kandi a deep disservice by spelling her name as Candy which isn’t nearly as germanic as “Kandi”) took us to our table and we proceeded to have a riotously funny meal.  Terry told very very funny stories, we butted in with stupid comments and we all laughed and laughed. 

The food was um germanic.  Erhardt is certainly a “master of german cuisine” (with all the baggage that comes with that title).  The wines were generally good and certainly copious.  The desert wine was not good but by that point we were so busy laughing that we really didn’t care.  Erhardt redeemed himself by bringing his “Fennel Tea”.  This was rocket fuel.  We found out later that it’s Bacardi 151 with some fennel seeds in it.  For those of you who don’t know, Bacardi 151 is 75% proof alcohol and it’s also the only drink that the manufacturer fits a “flame retarder” to  the bottle. 

Finally we retired outside so I could have a cigarette.   No one else was smoking.  Just me.  We put a dent in a bottle of Glenmorangie which I had been carrying around and drank and laughed under the stars.  How fun it was.

The following morning was a bit less fun.  You’d think that a group of successful, intelligent men who had combined experience of over 200 years on this planet could work out that truly excessive drinking and energetic sports don’t really mix.  We’d started out with the intention of doing the Mt Washington part of the route.  This involved a fair bit of climbing and a fair bit of apprehension from the team.  I got a bit confused since we were actually going up Mt Everett to get to Mount Washington which isn’t actually a mountain but is a little tiny town.  Mt Everett is the highest mountain in the Taconic Mountains.  Or something.  However, it’s a long and gruelling climb especially with a head ache and (in my case) a rather sore knee.  We made it and then did the nice descent to the Bash Bish Falls.  There’s a great view over the falls into Connecticut.   It was also an opportunity for us to laugh at JJ’s sunglasses.  They’re Oakley "Thump glasses.  Sunglasses with an MP3 player built in.  Sunglasses with an USB port.  Sunglasses so stupid that they’re already being offered at half price on eBay.  The sound quality is reasonable but as Samuel Johnson said about women preaching “it’s like a dog walking on its hind legs. It’s not done well but one is surprised to discover it done at all.”. 

Then we did a few long rolling roads and a quite a long way on the train tracks which have been converted into bike paths.  It’s a great idea.  Trains can’t do very steep hills so the grades are easy and there’s no traffic.  However, there are some other cyclists which one has to be careful about.  JJ ran a 6 year old cyclist off the road but it was only fair because he wasn’t going very fast and his bike didn’t have a carbon frame.  I mean, what does the kid expect?

Ultimately we ended up in Kent which is a small CT town with a great Pizza place where we ate Pizza and drank beer and reviewed the day.

Now I’m in the Virgin Lounge at JFK thinking back over the trip.  There are lots of observations I guess:  cycling in the US (or at least where we were) is good.  The roads are generally quiet and the drivers are generally very careful passing cyclists.  Most of the roads we cycled on were well paved and well signed.  People in general are very friendly as usual.  The foliage at this time of the year is stunningly beautiful.   The food portions are huge and it’s impossible to go into a calorie deficit no matter how much exercise you do.

Surprises?  Apart from the overwhelming saltiness of Erhardt’s sausage stuffed veal for me anyway (and maybe for JJ) it was just how amazingly rural the US can be.  We were no more than 2 hours from New York or Boston at any time but there were huge tracts of primary forest.  Remote hamlets, houses on their own.  Very low population density I guess.  As a consequence of the low population density, the mobile phone coverage is absolutely crap.  Just nothing.

Finally, a huge thanks from me to Lee, Terry and JJ.  Lee for arranging all the logistics.  Hotels, restaurants and, of course the fabulous Carlos who drove the car were all down to Lee and it worked perfectly.  Terry for doing the routes which is about the most important thing in a bike trip.  The routes were judged perfectly and allowed us to really enjoy the days.  JJ for flying all the way from the UK to even up the numbers between the UK and the US contingent and also for sharing his deep knowledge of the life and times of W H Auden with us on a number of occasions. 

But of course the main thanks just goes to all of them for making the trip so much fun.  I honestly don’t think I’ve laughed as much for a long time.  To spend four days with three  smart, quick witted, informed, funny and rude guys was a real joy.  Thanks.

Photo Album as usual.

View Full Album

In November, Trish went to Rumphi in Malawi.  We’re funding a branch of the microloan bank that the wonderful Microloan Foundation is setting up in Rumphi and this was Trish’s first opportunity to see how the initial set up had gone.  We were really pleased that loans are already being made and the team on the ground in Rumphi (and everybody involved with the MLF that Trish met) are superb. 

We’ve uploaded a photograph album of all the photos that Trish took.

Rumphi is in northern Malawi.   Here’s a satellite picture.

Here’s a great picture of the sossusvlei area and the dunes surrounding it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Finally here is the last photograph album from the africa trip (posted from Windhoek airport).

Read the rest of this entry »