Returning Home

The Internet at the holiday place in Cromwell was a bit expensive considering that it’s not particularly fast, so I didn't upload any more of the notes I made. Now back at home, and catching up.

It was very difficult to sleep at night in Cromwell: the bed was okay, but it was so hot and stuffy during the night, that you couldn’t decide whether you wanted to be covered or not. It was very hot and blowy on Friday, but Saturday was just plain hot, with that kind of blazingly blue sky Central is famous for. We went to Wanaka, because my daughter, who'd come to stay with us, wanted to take her five-year-old to Puzzle World. Quite a successful trip overall, and we spent a fair amount of time there. Even went through the maze, something none of us had done before. Didn’t quite make it round all four towers - the last one eluded us somehow - but did pretty well in general, and mostly only gave up because of the heat.
We were going to stay down by the lake for a while, but it was very crowded and finally we decided to come back to Cromwell so the others could go for a swim at the pool.

We considered coming back via the Lindis Pass today; it’s a different route from the one we come home normally on, pleasant enough to drive and there’s a lot less twisting and turning than there is on the usual route through Alex and Lawrence and Roxburgh. Don’t think it takes a great deal longer - if it’s longer at all.
However, in the end we did the usual route, partly because we knew that an old friend of ours had bought a cafe in Clyde, and we thought we'd look her up. Surprisingly, since we had no idea where her cafe was, we found her by asking at the first place we went into: the cafe was two doors further down! As always she was greatly pleased to see us, and we had cappuccinos on the house. Unfortunately she was so busy that she didn't have much time to stop and chat - the place wasn't rushed off its feet, but was certainly too busy to take time out.
Anyway, it was good to talk to her albeit briefly: her husband had prostate cancer a few years back, and so she sympathised greatly with my current situation!

Picture of the Clyde Bridge courtesy of the Promote Dunstan site.

A long post divided into more than one section`

Today was a wandering day. We left our current abode and moved on, as we’re now babysitting a house near Wymondham. Celia wanted to go along the coast past Sheringham to look at some of the other seaside towns, so that’s what we did, spending the better part of the day at the job.
I’ve think I’ve lost track of most of them already, but we passed through Salthouse, Cley-Next-The-Sea, Blakeney, Morston, Stiffkey and Wells-Next-The-Sea, and later on went to Walsingham. I’ve now lost track of where the three bookshops were that we visited, although there was one where Celia bought a book on Norfolk dialect called Crab Books; another that sold a lot of original paintings and prints, had at least four rooms and also managed to fit in a café and lots of bric-a-brac. And then there was another which had rooms scattered around what might originally have been a house, including a chunk of books out in a shed out the back (a very tidy shed, that is) and which also had pottery for sale.
I watched a potter making a pot another place, and we discovered what appeared to be a small town that had a very large church, in very good condition, and full of interesting wood carvings. There was another church – in much worse condition, in Salthouse- where their annual art exhibition was going on. The few paintings and ‘works’ that were worth looking at had been snapped up early, and the rest of the stuff was being ignored (rightly so in my opinion). Someone had written in the visitors’ book: not as good as last year, and someone else had written: positively gloomy.
The bookshops were all worth visiting, each in their own way. Apart from the peculiarities of the one with the café (some shelves of books were around the sides of the café, but it was difficult to interrupt the people eating their meals), it had a great stock of stuff, including tons of sheet music, much of it for horn. I picked up a Bach piece that I can probably still play, and an autobiography of Eric Ambler.
Crab Books was very clean and tidy, to the extent I thought it was a new books shop at first. But there were no category headings anywhere, so that you had to work them out for yourself, and the books weren’t in any order within the categories. But the books themselves were a great mix.
The other bookshop was more typical of secondhand bookshops: books crammed into every available corner, and wonky shelves. But! Everything was categorised, and all the books throughout were in author order. What a difference that makes. They also had quantities of books by various authors such as Wodehouse, Kipling, Leslie Charteris, and dozens of others. I found a book of short stories by Dorothy Sayers which I don’t think I already have.