Daily Ada: 21 November 13

Cornwall.

Last weekend to celebrate our birthdays we went down to Sennen Cove, Cornwall, which is down at the very south west corner of England, near Land's End. It was wet and windy most of the time but we had a nice trip. Ada seemed to enjoy it, too; she liked splashing in puddles, which there were plenty of. She mostly wanted to watch 101 Dalmatians on the iPad on repeat.

At Land's End

Ada's first kite

Crazy waves crashing OVER the cliff - see the video below

Here's some video from our time there - some of it is Ada but mostly it's the waves, which were particularly impressive:

Catching up: Weston-Super-Mare Carnival (also known as Danielle's birth day).

At the exact moment Danielle was entering the world, Mark and I were with his parents at the Weston-Super-Mare carnival.

It is an annual parade (with lit-up floats) which tours around the county at several towns on different nights, all around Guy Fawkes Day. It's unique to this area of the region, and it's a competition, so clubs spend the year building floats to enter them into each parade to compete for nightly and then overall prizes.

There are other people involved to raise money for charity, like these firefighters:



But mostly it's the competitors, on floats, or performing as they walk, and more than anything, it's BRIGHT:



This is Mark, completely lit up by a passing float - this is at night, with no flash at all:


The floats are themed, and fall into different categories, and they all have music, so it's loud, too. It's pretty much like Las Vegas on wheels, in Somerset.





They go all out within the group's chosen theme, including the people who drive the floats:


And so you can get a bit more of the full experience, here's a video of one of them. This is actually of the joint-overall winner of the competition. Just a warning - at one point I flip the camera on its side (I forgot I was videoing and the problems it would cause. We could edit it around, but it's way too much trouble for such a short clip!). But I think you'll get the idea of what it's like - though watching it on video doesn't quite give you the full smack of light and sound of the passing floats!




We imagine Danielle's arrival must have been much the same, just without the fire.

Catching up...part two...Westonbirt.

A couple of weekends ago, we visited Westonbirt, the National Arboretum. It's located outside of Cirencester, about 45 minutes away from us. A friend of mine is a member because she lives not too far from it and she visits it a lot. She and her husband were going to be away for the weekend, so she gave us their membership cards to get in for free. I think the last time I had been to an arboretum was for Jenny & Jeff's wedding, so I was interested to see if there was anything new happening with arboretums (arboreta?) these days. Plus, it's a good time of year to look at trees, of course.

It's a pretty big place, and we spent most of our time in the new bit. They allow dogs in that section, and it really was Dog City. All you needed were little name tags on each of the dogs like the trees had and you would pretty much have a Dogeretum.

Anyway, here are some nice pictures of trees (and people - no dogs, sorry!):



This is a beech:



I think you all know this one:




(This is the only picture we have of me, so I'm throwing it in - I'm actually standing with one of the redwoods):



A Japanese maple:



A really impressive cedar tree (hold your nose, Mom):


A 2,000 year old lime coppice:



A festive holly:




And speaking of festive, we thought this one looks like it's straight out of Who-ville!: