My On-Line Journal
Summer 2004

June 22nd, 2004

I'm home! Well, really I've been home for a few days now, but I haven't had a whole lot of time, plus my computer is being a bit stupid and slow.

I had a really bad trip home to be honest, though I got here so I guess i can't really complain. First off I missed my first of three flights through my own stupidity and thinking that I could sit and have breakfast at the B&B I was staying in rather than taking off early in the morning which is what I should have done. But luckily there were a lot of other flights to Heathrow from Edinburgh that morning and I had about five or six hours between flights originally so I didn't have to rush too much, but I was really stressed, understandibly, and not liking paying an extra 200 pounds for a flight.

Heathrow wasn't as bad as I had remembered, but I'm a bit more of a seasoned traveler now I think. I managed to get a few duty free things to take home as well while I was waiting. The flight into Montreal was really really long. It was so nice to hear people speaking french though, and not just any french, Canadian french! I read up on the election since I would be lucky enough to be home to vote early. I read a really bad book and watched Calender Girls which was really good. But of course my legs were falling asleep and my feet were freezing.

We got into Montreal about an hour and a half late, some people missed their connections and had to take different planes. I got fasttracked through Montreal, though I still had to collect my bagage because apparently they're doing construction and can't just put your luggage on the next plane for you right now. I was told by the woman who checked me through that I would have to run to catch my plane. The really great thing was that she saw my last name, pronounced it correctly, something that hasn't happened in ages, and emediately spoke to me in French! Yay! And when I spoke back in French she didn't switch to English so I was happy.

I ran as much as I could, had to wait in line at security, but made it as the last person on my flight. The flight into Halifax was pretty univentful, it was cool to be able to see landmarks I knew, like my house! yup, I was able to identify my house from the plane, or rather, I saw First Lake and was able to guess which house was mine. We finally landed at 10:05pm in Halifax. I had be up since 7am (3am this time zone) I was exhausted and really happy to be home and very close to tears. I was all ready to get off the plane and go home and guess what? There was a security breach at the airport and we had to stay on the plane for another hour!!!!!! So at 11:00 I finally got off and was greeted by my parents, brother and Sarah. Yay!

Everyone was really pleased with the presents I brought home. I went to bed pretty soon after getting home because the next day I left for Kat and Adam's wedding! The whole weekend was wonderful. It was up at the Fall's Lake park and was beautiful. Sarah was really stressed out about it, but we managed to get everything done and the ceremony itself was very beautiful and touching. There were very few dry eyes. The Justice of the Peace did an amazing job and added in quite a bit of really beautiful things about love and marriage. Kelly also did a wonderful job of the handfasting side of the ceremony. Of course a few things went wrong like Adam's sister walking the wrong direction, Michael standing in not quite the North, and the herb boy not throwing his herbs until prompted. All the dresses looked really really great. Kat was absolutely radiant and I don't think I've ever seen Adam happier.

After the ceremony, we had a May (June?) pole on a soccer pitch at the park. It was a little hard to think of songs to sing, we ended up with row row your boat, round about the mullberry bush, we are a circle and then switched to we will rock you and finnished off with we are the champions! I don't know if there has ever been a may pole dance sung to Queen before, but it was very fitting.

The reception was tons of fun. Lots of free really great wine made for lots of drunken revelry and it wasn't really surprizing that not many people showed up for breakfast the next morning, but clean up was efficiant and I think everyone went home happy.

The past two days have mostly been lazy. I got out to vote yesterday and then into Halifax for a little shopping with Sarah. My parents met up with us later and we went out to Point Pleasant Park to see what it looks like now that they've cleared away most of the downed trees. The damage is still really unbelievable. Juan has certainly changed the park and a lot of the downtown area as well. The Public Gardens still aren't open and no one knows when they will be.

Today I'm trying to get a little sorting done and cleaning. I've realized that I have waaaaay too much stuff that I don't need. Living with so little really shows you how much you don't need. It's just such a large job that I'm kind of skiving a bit, hense the really long journal entry. :) Four sleeps till I go back to Scotland.

Love

Jeannie

June 29th, 2004

Hi everyone,

Now that Sarah's here in Scotland at Polmaily as well, I don't really have an excuse to get her to update my journal for me as she has the same slow computer issue that I have, so I've decided to start updating myself and just sending e-mails to let everyone know that I've updated like she does. It makes sense in my head anyway. I hope it's not too much of a hassle for anyone.

Well I'm back in Scotland. Sarah and I made it back in one piece with very little difficulty and few tears this time. We were over the weight limit for our bags for Easy Jet, but we managed to get away with only a "stearn talking to".

We've mostly settled in now. Sarah's getting put right into the thick of things at work, but she's coping really well. Not a whole lot has changed while I was away. The two new girls, Paula and Libo seem really nice, though I haven't had much of a chance to meet them.

I finally bought a laptop, after much searching and tring to find the perfect one at the right price. Unfortunately it has to be shipped from Canada, but it actually worked out as being less expensive to do it that way, especially in the long run with the whole converting electricity and DVD players and everything.

It's good to be back here. I am a little home sick and I do miss everyone, but nothing beats the view and the clean air and even the weather. It may be a bit cooler, but I like how fast it changes and watching the clouds come over the mountains. If I could manage to get everyone from home to come here, that would be really great. I'm really glad to have Sarah here, she helps stave off the homesickness a little.

I'll try to put some more pictures up here soon. I know, I always say that, but it does take a lot of time, and time is one thing I haven't got a whole lot of, but I'll do my best.

I hope everyone is well.

Love

Jeannie

July 11th, 2004

Where is summer? I don't know about how the weather is going at home, but here it feels like we've skipped summer, well we have a few weeks of it before I left, and we went straight into fall now! It's been relatively chilly, high teens, low twenties everyday and very wet and cloudy most days. We've had so much rain that if it wasn't for the fact that our crazy landscaper guy didn't cut the grass so short that he's killing it, the grass would be growing really quickly! As it is, there are lots of brown patches where he's cut it so short the ground shows through.

Staff wise, things are going pretty well. Paula (whose real name is Pavlina) and Libo (whose real name I can't remember) are both really nice and very efficiant and hard workers so it's really nice to have them around. Their English is improving by leaps and bounds, making me think about going to work in France or Quebec for a while. Sarah and I do occasionally speak to each other in French, just so that we know we can and to annoy people at the breakfast table. Lynn had her last day today which is really REALLY sad. She's been working here longer than anyone, 5 years, but her health problems are getting worse so she had to leave. Luckily she lives in the area so we'll still get to see her. In better news, Emma may be coming back in August for a little while! She's been in the UK down in England for a while and now wants to come back up for a few weeks! Yay! Everyone else staff wise is pretty much the same.

Sarah, Trixi and I got the same day off last week, which was great but we just ended up going to Inverness to go shopping with Sonia. I sort of wanted to do something more fun, but since Devina and Virendra's birthdays were this week (Vi's is today! Happy Birthday Vi!) we had to go buy presents and other little things for the hotel. By the end I was feeling a bit off. We celebrated Devina's birthday that night by going out to the Snow Goose and then went to Shrek 2! It was pretty good, but I liked the first one better.

The next day I felt much worse though. I had a bit of a fever and a really sore throat. I was well enough to work though and had a fair amount of time off during the day so I survived. I've feeling much better today, my throat's still a bit swollen and sore, but other than that I'm good.

We're pretty busy now, and will be for the rest of this month and most of next as well. It doesn't feel like we're that busy though because we have so much more staff than we had before. I think since we made it through that insane period with only three front people, we can do anything! Sarah seems to be enjoying herself, especially now that we have more children, and we're working on creating some new children's activities.

That's about all for now. Hope everyone enjoyed Canada Day!

Love

Jeannie

July 29th, 2004

Sorry it took so long for me to update but we've been really busy at the hotel and with everyone else wanting to check there e-mails at times that just happened to be the times I wanted to be on here, well, let's just say I hadn't been on here for about 10 days and my inbox exploded! I have tons of news though so this may be a long entry.

Last week Trixi and I went off to Landmark, a forest theme park in Aviemore, with Andrew, Neil and John. We had a ton of fun and went on pretty much all the rides with the boys. The flume type "water coasters" were fun, though really short, especially if you consider the length of the line up! We also went through a maze in which I actually managed to get lost! And up a wooden tower with over 100 steps (we counted). Much fun was had by all. After, we took the boys out to Pizza Hut and then to their sports thing, kind of like track practice in the summer I used to do at Chebucto ages and ages ago.

We did a little shopping as well and Trix and I both bought new blue dresses on sale and I bought some hair dye. Yup, I dyed my hair again. A little more extreme this time, it was called "dark auburn" and it looks really nice. Most people didn't notice it at all and I had to point it out, which is probably a good thing, but when I'm outside you can really tell because it gets really nice red highlights. It is a lot darker though and I'm still getting used to it.

Things have been going pretty well around the hotel. We're REALLY full but we keep getting people calling looking for rooms. I'm not used to turning away so many people! Even though we're full, it's not too bad. There aren't as many kids as there were at Hogmanay and lots of families tend to go out most days so we're pretty quiet during the day. Luckily, we do have some families doing kids activities though! Last week Sarah and I were going crazy because we had all these children running around but they all went out during the day so we ended up mostly bored!

Yesterday I decided I didn't want to go out to Inverness or anything by myself (Sarah and I had different days off again. Hopefully when Emma comes on Sunday we'll be able to get the same day off!) so I went for a bike ride. I went up the forestry trail I did before, but this time I stuck to the main path rather than getting lost. It was up hill most of the way and very tiring. I had to stop a few times for water and a breather, but I was determined not to walk the bike at all, and I didn't. I saw Loch Ness from way up high, it was really pretty, but eventually I felt it was getting a bit late so I stoped for a snack on a convenient rock and started back. I found some Chamomile on the road back and have added it to our collection of drying herbs. Going home was frightening but fun. The road is really rocky and I wasn't exactly on the best bike so I was vibrating so bad I thought my arms were going to fall out and my teeth were going to knock out of my head! I'm pretty sore today, but mostly through my back and shoulders and a little saddle sore as well, my legs are fine. I would like to eventually go further on that trail and see where it leads.

In other news, my laptop has finally arrived after much anticipation! It's great to be able to look at my pictures and play music and DVD's etc. Unfortunately, my MP3 CD's don't work in it. They work in my desktop at home, but they've never worked in my parents computer or in my laptop. It says the disk is "corrupt". Any ideas anyone? Next time I go out shopping I need to get some writable CD's so I can transfer some pictures that I've resized and touched up onto my website! I did a panorama on photoshop today finally and it looks really cool!

I think that's just about it. Please send me e-mails and let me know how things are at home.

Love

Jeannie

August 10th, 2004

Hi everyone,

Wow, have we ever been busy! It's insanity! Some days it's fine. Some days all the guests decide to go out for the day leaving us in peace and quiet for a few hours, and some days we get some crazy guests who do nothing but drink all day and very late into the night and want things all day long! So yeah, it's been a bit crazy the past weeks and we're going to be full for a few weeks yet. But since we have more staff, and our staff is pretty great, we're not that baddly off.

But there are days, like Sunday for example. Sunday I for some reason was working the breakfast shift, something I rarely do, and we had about 40 odd people for breakfast. We had no one on dishes until 11:00 and we had to do some quick table changes to accomodate everyone. Things were going okay, we were dealing, I messed up a few things, but nothing major, and then room 1 sprung a leak. So Dennis was off dealing with that, Sarah came in from the office to help me out because that was when everyone decided suddenly to come down to breakfast. Emma came in for a bit to help out with the dishes (cuz she's awesome that way) and it was just mass chaos for a few hours. Everyone wanted something (as usual) and by the end of breakfast I really felt like I'd been through the wringer backwards. Luckily, lunch was really quiet so we managed to get some work done and get a head of the game for the evening.

The evening brought new problems with it, mainly that lights in room 1 were now no longer working (they would have to take the ceiling down AGAIN to fix them) and suddenly every child we had wanted to come to Monster Club and we just didn't have enough staff for that. So in the end, Sarah ended up with 12 children, one baby included, one family had room service and one family is inexplicably getting Monster Club for free. I was in the bar that night and ended up having a pretty good night. I had one couple eating in the bar so I got to practice my serving skills in a less formal setting, and not a whole lot of people wanted drinks so I was pretty much okay.

Luckily, Sarah and I both had the day off yesterday. Yay! A day off together! So we went off to Cawdor Castle. It was so amazing and really funny! The man who wrote all the write ups in the room lived in the castle and had a great sense of humour. Sarah and I were wondering around giggling like mad but a lot of the other people at the castle were not English and I don't think they got the jokes. Oh well. People still live in the castle and it's much better maintained than any other castle I've been in yet. (i.e. Urquhart and the one in Fort William) We wandered around the gardens, very pleased with our ability to name all kinds of flowers and herbs that we saw, and we went on a really neat forest walk even though Sarah didn't want to go.

After we had a bit of time left in Inverness so off to the mall! The sale at Monsoon was still going on so we finally got to go in and tried on a million and one things and bought one or two pieces each. Standard stuff. But the mall was closing :( so home again home again jiggity jig.

That's pretty much it for this week. Stay tuned for some picture updates coming soon to a computer near you!

Jeannie

August 18th, 2004

I'm going to warn you before hand, this may be a really long entry as I have a lot to write about. It's pouring as I write as it has been on and off for the past few days, making up for the beautiful weather we were having the past few weeks I guess. This of course means that less guests are going out for the day and that the cats (mainly Spider) and the dogs (mainly Puddles) are trying to get in every few minutes. While most of the guests just sort of laugh it off, there are a few who get a little... touchy shall we say. We have a few rather demading Americans right now. But they're leaving soon, thank goodness.

We are starting to slow down now which is really good because all the staff are walking around with a similar pale, exhausted, warn out look. We all groan when the phone or front desk bell goes and all that have a definit leaving date are counting down the days. Libi even knows the number of hours! High season has been very rough on all of us. Luckily, the trend of having 12-14 children for Monster Club seems to have stopped (knock on wood) so my night time stress level has gone down considerably.

The only major problem right now is that everyone is leaving. This puts Sonia in a really bad situation. Paula and Libi are going on the 5th, Emma's leaving on the 2nd, Devina and Virendra are leaving the middle of October and Sarah and I want to leave around the 21st of September or so. She's trying really really hard to convince us, me especially, to stay, but neither of us want to. To be honest, if I hadn't said I'd stay till after this wedding we have in September, I'd be gone sooner. But she's laying on the guilt pretty thick, and I do see her point of view. She's going to be really short staffed for October, but I really want to leave. I'm getting really tired of not being able to go anywhere except on day trips and of not being able to do any cultural things. There is so much going on, the Edinburgh Festival, Highland games all over, theatre events, concerts etc. and I'm missing it all. Plus I'm getting a bit burnt out and need a change really badly. Luckily, Sarah can stand up to Sonia a lot better than I can. I'm lible to fold under pressure simply because I hate conflict and I hate disappointing people. I'm going to get on the phone to BUNAC and see if I can find some replacements, maybe then she'll be more likly to let me go without a fight. The other thing is I want to get a good reference when I go so I don't want to burn any bridges.

All that said, this past Monday Sarah and I decided we wanted to go somewhere by train, so off we went to Aberdeen. It was a two hour train ride each way so we didn't get to actually spend much time in the city, but the train was nice, if squashed and they didn't have a dinning car much to our disappointment, and we got to see a little of the country-side and sleep and read. Aberdeen was really nice. It has a very interesting layout, lots of curvy streets and interesting archetecture. It's built mostly out of granite and it's a harbour town so it reminded us a great deal of Halifax. Even some of the buildings looked similar! We found a few really nice shops, one that I had a hard time getting Sarah out of, and bought a few things, but before you know it we were back on the train heading home. I have a few really nice pictures from the day, including a really beautiful rainbow that greeted us in Drum. Sarah fell in love with Aberdeen, and although I've convinced her to see a few other cities in Scotland, she really wants to find a flat and a place to work there. I agree that it is very beautiful, and great because it has a wonderful arts community, two or three theatres, free art galleries and museums, great public transport and a lot of green spaces. Apparently it was barred from the "Britain in Bloom" competitions because it kept winning every year! But I want to travel around before settling again. I've done quite enough of settling for a while.

Well, I have to go and plan this treasure hunt for my children's activity this afternoon. It'll have to be indoors since it's raining, and I have to make it without words because the four I have are all five and under. Should be fun!

Love

Jeannie

August 29th, 2004

Hi everyone! Three more weeks at Polmaily. Pretty hard to believe. When I leave I will have been here 10 months. The longest full time job I've ever had by far. Isn't that strange. Before everyone starts asking, no, we don't know exactly where we're going yet. We have quite a few places we'd like to visit and then we'll find somewhere to work and live on a slightly more permenant basis. We're looking at going to live in a city, maybe Aberdeen or Edinburgh, maybe Glasgow though everyone keeps telling us it's a very tough city.

Sarah and I had the same day off on Tuesday and neither of us worked till noon on Wednesday so on Monday night at around 1 in the morning we decided we should go somewhere over night and decided on Fort William. We didn't book any tickets or a place to stay or anything, just grabbed our tourist books and off we went. It took us a while to find a place to stay, lots of places were either full, too expensive, or didn't have a twin room. Finally we found a really nice B&B with a twin that wouldn't break our budget. It was really really nice, though I didn't really like the bathroom. Sarah didn't mind it, but the planter in the bidet and the bath mat in the middle of the floor made it look to me like it came straight out of the Sims!

Fort William isn't all that exciting unless you're a walker, which Sarah isn't and I need new sneakers before I can do any heavey walking. We did some shopping and visited the museum and saw the waterfront, but mostly it was just nice to be out. We ate at a lovely restaurant and ordered a bottle of wine and mostly tried to feel like real grown ups. The food was excellent, as was the wine, but the service was incredibly slow. Waiting 20 minutes to get a dessert menu just isn't something you want to have happen. After dinner we were kind of at a loss. We tried a few different things, we wanted kareoke but that didn't happen, so we ended up back at the room for some tea and then out to a bar for a beer. Unimaginative and we were in bed before 12:00, but at least we went out. Breakfast the next morning was wonderful. They had this simple but great idea of putting the room numbers on the tables so everyone knew where to sit and we had ordered the night before so it all went very smoothly. Then it was back on the bus to get back to work. It's not easy working after a short sleep and a day of traveling, but I managed it. We have two new people here starting work now. Chris and Phillipa, they're from Austrailia and New Zealand respectively. They're both really nice. Chris is very tall. he may have a problem getting used to all the low ceilings and doorways. That's one of the few reasons I'm glad to be the height I am. Emma's leaving on Thursday and Libo shortly after that, but for the next few days we have 15 staff!!!!! That's almost as many staff as there are guests! Chris will be working in the kitchen to eventually take over for Vi when he leaves in October and Phillipa will be working out front. We also have two new South African girls coming the week before Sarah and I leave to take over our jobs plus some housekeeping. I've been doing a lot of work trying to write out what I do on the office since I'm the first staff member to really do that job. Before it was John and then Roz with the occasional substitute. And Sarah and I are giving the playroom a good cleaning and throwing out a lot of "broken" toys (all of the toys with guns ar "broken") and we've started (about two months ago really) to put up art work that the children did. The walls look much better now, though we're starting to run out of room!

I hope everyone's enjoying the Olympics at home. I am totally fed up with the BBC's coverage. It's almost as bad as NBC! Yes, they focus on the Brits and that's understandable, but for the most part the commentators don't seem really knowledgeble about the sport they're commentating, one of the interviewers for the swimming was really rude to the atheletes, and they do horrible things like during a medal ceremony, say if the Brits won silver, they skip the bronze presentation, and cut before the gold is presented! They're also really bad for not showing where all the athelets place in races. I've been mostly just looking at the CBC web site to get updates on how Canada and the rest of the world is doing.

Yesterday, Emma, Devina, Virendra, Paula and Libo all went out the Highland Games in Drumnadrochit! Yup, I've now been to a Highland Games.... in the Highlands! Imagine that! It was great fun. They had a few fair rides, lots of food, stalls selling various things, games, and of course athletic competitions. I doubt any of the athelets are on their way to the olympics, but it was really nice to see nonetheless. There were little girls and one little boy doing Highland dancing, some running, jumping and of course the "heavy athelets" i.e. the shot put, hammer throwing, caber toss and this weird thing where they had to toss a big heavy weight backwards over their heads over a pole vault type bar to have it land about two feet behind them on a crash mat. That was strange and looked really dangerous. And of course there were lots of men in kilts. A few times we did see what was under the kilts and I'm sorry to say that they were all wearing shorts, but that's probably for the best. :) Sarah didn't get to go because she was working which is really too bad, but I'm sure we'll see them in Antigonish some year if not here at some later date.

That's about all for now. Keep me updated on what's happening at home please!

Love

Jeannie

September 12th, 2004

So much to write, so little time. Things have been going quite well around here. We got a bit of a late summer... kind of like an Indian Summer, but not at the right time of year and we hadn't had any frost. We have way too many staff because of this little change-over time and not many guests, so I've spent a lot of my past two weeks in the garden. It's nice, especially when there were a few of us out there in the sun getting really muddy or covered in wood stain at the stables. I've managed to get a bit more of a tan amazingly enough. I've also spent just about every free moment outside enjoying the sunshine and avoiding thinking about what Sarah and I are doing next week.

Yup, we only have one week left here and quite frankly, I'm terrified. I'm glad to be going. I have lots of reasons to be happy about leaving, but at the same time, it's kind of like when I came to Scotland in the first place. We don't know where we're going other than some vague plans about visiting the Orkneys and finding jobs in a city, we're not sure which one, and attempting to find somewhere to celebrate Mabon if we can. Beyond that, we are footloose and fancy free.... and not really sure what we're doing. (Since writing that, Sarah came into the computer room and we now have tentative plans of going to the Orkney's for a few days and then going to Edinburgh to look for work.)

But enough about that, on to the stuff I've been up to the past few weeks. Two weeks ago Sarah and I decided that, since we wanted to save some money but still wanted to go somewhere, we wanted to go to Glen Afric on our day off. I'd been there before but was deffinitly up for a second visit. We also kinda didn't want to go with the bus because it doesn't go very often at all and it is relatively expensive as well, so what did we do, we planned on hitch-hiking! Yes Kat, sometimes hitch-hiking is a plan!

So after breakfast we packed up a picnic lunch and found a good place to stand on the road. It only took about 20 minutes, though in the Highlands, that's a fairly long time. The guy who picked us up was an older, English man, same as the two previous people who picked me up. I was going for some sort of record or something. He was really nice, had a neighbour who played in a Celtic band and went to some festival in Nova Scotia, and he drove us right to the road leading into Glen Afric. The park itself, when we eventually got there (the road into the park is two miles long) was as beautiful if not more than I remembered. I don't think we spent as much time in as I did before and we took a shorter route but it was deffinitly great to have company and FOOD!!!

Periodically while walking we could hear a piper though we didn't see anyone. I was joking about ghost pipers in the glen, but when we came up towards the car park we were suddenly in the middle of a very Scottish wedding! We were told to hurry up and get out of the way of the pictures, a bit difficult seeing as they were covering the whole bridge we had to cross. They all looked really great, all the men including the little boys were in kilts, but the women looked really cold. It was raining a bit by that point and the bridesmaids, when they finally came out of the car, were slowly turning blue. Remind you of anyone elses wedding?

After that we walked back to Cannich, another three or four miles, and had dinner, much to the chagrin of the employees, at the Slaters Arms. The only restaurant in Cannich where the wedding party had just had their reception. The food was once again great, thought the service still gets a thumbs down. But what to do next? The last bus back to Drum left at 4 and it was now near on to six. So what did we do? We hitched! Well, first we did a little sight seeing in Cannich, there's not much to see except the old church in the middle of the woods which we visited and saw a nun in full habbit and everything working. We eventually meandered up to the "highway" and we were picked up by the second car that passed us. This one broke my record of only getting picked up by older English men in that he was a younger Scottish man. I think he may have been a bit younger than us. Very shy, he barely said two words to us the whole time and was a bit of a speed demon, but he drove us right up to the hotel and was very nice, Sarah says very nice looking too, but I was mostly just looking at the road and trying to think of something to say and failing. So that was our trip to Glen Afric.

Last week, since we were so quiet and there are soooooo many staff at the hotel with this whole change-over thing, Trixi and Jacky both worked Monday and had the rest of the week off and Sarah, Kris, Phillipa and I all had Tuesday off so we decided to all go off together somewhere. No hitch-hiking though. First we wanted to go to Ullapool and take a boat ride to the Summer Isles. Something Sarah and I desparately wanted to do, but the bus schedule just wasn't feasable. So we decided on Elgin instead.

We had a beautiful day, couldn't have asked for better weather. We were up at the crack of dawn, much to Sarah's chagrin, and went to Inverness for some breakfast at the lovely French Patiserie that I love, then back on the bus to Elgin where we quickly got on another bus to Lossimouth to go to the beach. The beach was beautiful. Lovely soft sand, hardly any rocks, and not too busy either. We all got ice creams and went out to veg for a while. Surprisinly, no one was swimming, but of course Sarah and I rolled up our pants and found the water wasn't that cold, certainly no colder than at Queensland or any other beach at home. Eventually we convinced the others to come wade with us too and we had a blast. I took a tone of pictures! After a bit more surf and sun, we shook as much sand out of us as possible and headed back to Elgin to have some lunch then a visit to the museum... not the best I've ever been in to be sure. The organization was a bit sparatic at times, and the hand held commentary we got to carry around with us didn't always match up with what we were seeing. Considering how small it was though, very good. We wanted to go to the Cathedrelle after that but we didn't have a whole lot of time left and didn't want to spend another three pounds for a fifteen minute whirlwind tour, so we settled for walking around it. You could see most of it from the outside anyway. It was mostly destroyed about a hundred years ago and looks amazing. I didn't take many pictures though because I have all the ones that Paula took when she visited it.

Then it was time to go back home, but we decided to prolong the day and eat out at the local (the pub) in Drum and have a few drinks. I really like the pub in Drum. It's got a new pinball machine and that plus the pool table and the really great jukebox make it a lot of fun. Not much dancing, but fun nevertheless. Unfortunately, both cabs in Drum took the night off so we had to get Hannah to take us home, it was either that or walk, but she was okay with coming to get us. The "few drinks" we went in for turned into a few too many drinks and we ended up being the loudest group there, but we all enjoyed ourselves and it was a really good chance to get to know Kris and Phillipa (who wants us to call her Pip though I keep forgetting) better. Before that they were pretty quiet but they've opened up a bit more since then.

So that's about all of my news for now. I'm not sure when I'll be updating next and where I'll be updating from, but I'll try to keep in touch as much as possible.

Love,

Jeannie

E-mail me [email protected]

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