Sunday Snaps 9 - London...from the Thames

It's been a while since my last Sunday Snaps post, so here is the latest in the series.

These photos were all taken 5 years ago during a trip up to London on a VERY cold Sunday in January. We took one of the river boats that travel along the Thames, getting on at Westminster and off at Greenwich.

This first snap is of the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Bridge.

Just opposite Parliament is the London Eye. You can take what they term "flights" in the pods of this massive ferris wheel and get some great views of London. The flights take about half an hour to do a full circle and are well worth trying if you get the chance.

Perhaps the most famous bridge in the country is Tower Bridge, which is named after the nearby Tower of London. It was a little surreal to be sailing underneath this famous landmark.

The last picture for today is of the rebuilt Globe Theatre, the original of which saw many of Shakespeare's original play performances. It is a wonderful project that has constructed a faithful reproduction of the original theatre.

Viewing London from the river is a very interesting way of seeing the city and some of its most notable landmarks, but I would highly recommend not doing so on the coldest day of the year!! :-)  We do have some more pics from this trip so I may share those in another Sunday Snaps someday soon. Stay tuned!

Snow Day!

As Dori mentions in her post today, we have had significant snow here overnight, and it has continued to fall during today too. The weather has been on a cold groove since a little before Christmas, but this week has seen it get even worse. Most nights have seen a very sharp frost that has made everything look like it has been placed in an ice-box. On Monday, which was my first day back at work since Christmas, our car refused to start and I had to call out the breakdown service. The verdict was that the car battery had met its demise and had gone to meet its maker. So, the New Year started with a £70 bill for a new battery, and a late start to my working week which was exacerbated by the fact that the delay meant that I was then driving into the office during the peak of the rush hour. Ho hum, things can only get better.

The snow started late yesterday afternoon, and the forecast was for anything up to 16 inches of snow in some areas of southern England. The reality was that we got about 3 inches or so where we live by the time I woke up this morning, but even that was enough to cause traffic chaos. With the snow still falling heavily, I was fearful that if I did drive into the office then I may not be able to make the return journey later in the day, so I rang to say that I would not be able to make it in – and by the sounds of it I was far from the only one in that situation. So, today is a Snow Day! Yay!!

Dori and I decided to have a walk out to see what the conditions were like around where we live, and to take a couple of pictures to share with you all. The wind was quite icy, and we both had our hats pulled down around our ears, and our scarves pulled up over our mouths. It was like a scene from “Scott of the Antarctic”! :-) I hope that you like the pictures.

The snow continued to fall quite heavily up until lunchtime, so it is now deeper than you see in the photos, and the forecast for tonight is for possibly more snow followed by a very severe frost. So the conditions tomorrow are likely to be even more treacherous than they have been today! I brought some work home with me yesterday, so I will work from home tomorrow if I can. At the moment there is no sign of this cold stretch ending anytime soon, and there may be another heavy snowfall at the weekend.

It may be time to barricade ourselves into the Yellow House and just wait it out until the thaw!!

Yellow House Merchandise

As I mentioned in an earlier post, when we were visiting family and friends over in the States at Thanksgiving we handed out some homemade gifts and cards. You have already seen some pictures of the cards we made, and I thought now would be an appropriate time to share some photos of the gifts too. I say appropriate because the gifts were all calendars, and I am sure that you have all been hanging up new calendars this last week – or wondering when and where you will be getting one for this New Year!

These calendars weren’t entirely homemade as such, but all the photos were our own, as were some of the backgrounds, and we laid out each page of the calendars to our own design too. We then got them printed up by a company in Belgium. We made calendars to two different designs – one as a wall calendar and the other as a desk calendar.

Here are the pictures of the pages of the wall calendar.

And here are the pages of the smaller desk calendar.

                   

        

        

         

The lighting wasn’t the best when we took the photos of the pages and some are a little blurry – but you will get the idea!

We very much enjoyed putting the calendars together and we are hoping to take some more photographs during this coming year that we can use for more calendars for 2011. All being well, those will then be available to buy from our blogs sometime in the autumn. Unfortunately we cannot sell the ones for this year because we don’t have the image rights for some of the places that we have photographed.

Now, I have to go and plan some photographic expeditions with Dori !! .