2011 - The Year of NEW

If you want to know more about yearly themes, or about my recent yearly themes and how 2011 came to be the year of NEW, check out my recent post about my yearly themes and the links I shared at the end of that post.

Specifically, you might want to check out the post from the beginning of 2011 about my theme for 2011, NEW, how I came to that realisation and the bible verses I was standing on.    If you read that you will see there were certain things I was pretty sure were going to be part of my year but I wasn't yet ready to discuss.  One of those was "teaching".  I had NO IDEA how or why or when, but I knew in my gut it would be part of my year.

If you have followed my blog during this year you will know that I did indeed get to do that.  I travelled to Romania at the very end of the summer to teach craft projects to a group of poor Roma Gypsy women and teens at a project our church has connections with.  These were projects that hopefully will continue and be grown through the people that are still there, and eventually lead to these women having things they can make to sell. It was a hard trip in many ways, but we also had fun.

Other New things,

I have an eldest son at university and a younger son at sixth form college.  That means I no longer have a son at school.

I picked up a new school in my work doing talks in school assemblies.  I also lost one because their schedule can't fit around the other new thing.  I now lead a team of 4 of us women from church plus the head teacher of the school, doing weekly bible story assemblies in our closest school.  It has been a really exciting first term doing that and we have had lots of positive responses.

Do the New things end as 2011 ends?

As in previous years, there is certainly going to be an overflow of the previous year's theme into the new year.

On 1st January, Life Book Starts and I am really excited for a year of online art classes.

And as last year there is another possibility in the wings, waiting to be fleshed out and opened up.  It fits with both the theme for 2011 and the theme for 2012, but at this stage is still only a POSSIBILITY, so I won't be talking about it until I know more.

Later today I will get around to writing a post about my theme for 2012, so check back tomorrow if it's not up there yet!

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Romania Part 2

Yesterday I told you how I ended up going to Romania and shared some photos of the sewing classes that I ran while I was there.  The awesome thing about the classes and craft materials is that the ministry has two long term volunteers with them at the moment and one of them was a seamstress in one of the main opera houses in France before she came to the ministry.  I think the sewing classes will be safe in Clotilde's hands!

Today I want to show you a few photos from the Gypsy quarter and explain conditions a little.
Families in the gypsy quarter do have houses, but they are basic.  Thankfully, the ministry has been able to work with the families over the years they have been there, to build new houses, so they have gone from this:

to this:

or from this:

to this:

You can see the difference this is making.  The houses are basic, do not have running water, there is a communal well in the gypsy quarter and the homes have outdoor latrine pits.  They do have electricity and I was amazed at how nice some of the homes were despite their tough circumstances.

Talmid ministries provide clothes and food packages where necessary as well as providing a sponsorship scheme that allows the children to go to school.  Schooling in Romania is officially free, but the children once they reach secondary school have to travel on the school bus and this has to be paid for by parents.  This help does not stop when the children finish compulsory school age, and there is the opportunity to also sponsor young adults who wish to continue on to university.  The ministry also provides packages of materials for school, without which the children would not be able to complete their classes.

Here are some photos from some of the lighter moments of our trip, from turtle releasing to some delightful tourist spots.

The turtle had been given to the family but was actually a variety of turtle that is native to the waterways of Romania, so once it was healed up from some wounds, we took a trip out to release it.  

The little house where we stayed.

Rifka the husky.  Not at all scary but quite noisy!

One of the churches in Sibiu.  If you ever get the chance to go to Romania as a tourist, you really should go to the art museum in Sibiu, it's INCREDIBLE!

This was on our final day, back in Cluj Napoca.  Another must visit if you go to Romania as a tourist.  The Botanical Gardens.  Such a beautiful site, I could happily spend hours and hours there, with my journal and a pen!

Will I go back?  Maybe not, but I will continue to send craft materials that are needed for the classes.
Did I gain from this trip?  ABSOLUTELY.  I learnt a lot, about myself, about the way I react to situations, about what I can achieve and do that I never thought possible.  I also gained new depth to my relationship with God.  I am glad I went to Romania, and I hope that you have enjoyed hearing about my trip and seeing some of the photos.

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Romania

At the end of August this year I travelled to Romania for 2 1/2 weeks.  There are lots of beautiful places to visit in Romania (and I shall give you tips for a couple to check out if ever you go at the end of this post) but I was not there or a holiday.  Neither was I there on business, although there were business men on our flight.  No I was there to teach and to help.

Over the last few years I have been putting photos of my sewing projects on facebook.  Shopping bags, handbags, microwave wheat bags and so on.  The church that I attend has links with a ministry in Romania that works mainly with the local Roma gypsy population, Talmid.  I have members of that ministry as friends on facebook and one of them suggested in passing that I come over to teach the gypsy women some projects that they would be able to sell.  I wasn't sure if she was serious or not at first, but it turned out she was and so a friend and I launched into a fundraising campaign which finally resulted in our trip, accompanied by a whole case full of craft supplies which we had also bought with the money raised.

YES, I literally filled that case and realised I could not fit that quilting ruler in it.  So I bought a bigger case which enabled me to take all the craft supplies, 3 folders of printed out projects for them to try after we had finished our trip AND some clothes.  Thankfully September in Romania is still quite warm so we needed no thick chunky clothes.

I do however have a CPAP machine due to Sleep apnoea and had to find space for that in my hand luggage.  We were flying with a budget airline so an extra bag would have cost us dearly.

We arrived in Cluj Napoca pretty much on schedule and had an adventurous drive crammed into the back of a car full of laughter and silliness on the way back to Romosel.

The following video is from the first walk around of someone else who visited the same project as us.







We settled in at our little home for 2 1/2 weeks and each day would walk from there to the house that the ministry is based at.  The weather was hot and dry.  I think it only rained once the whole time we were there and we only needed jackets on a handful of evenings.
We soon got to work sorting through the fabric that had been donated in recent shipments that the ministry regularly receive from other European nations.

From that we worked out what we would do in each of the 6 sewing classes we would be doing.  Over the 6 classes, we made various fabric flowers, did some silk painting and made 2 different designs of bags.  We started with hand sewing and finished the 2nd week using 2 of the sewing machines that had also been donated.
Here are a few of my favourite photos from the classes:

The lady in the top photo only came to two of the classes but she was so lovely.  I told her (through our translator) that she could teach me to sew because she obviously knew a lot more than I did and she shrugged and told me no.  I don't believe her!
And that last photo is my favourite.  We were only allowing the girls 13 years or older to come into class once we had the sewing machines out and this girl was pleading with me to let her make something.  The look on my face, does not depict some of the hard moments of this trip but does depict the joy of teaching and being around those girls when they were focused and enjoying what they were doing and creating and learning.  
Come back tomorrow for more photos from the Gypsy quarter and the places we visited while we were in Romania

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Away From the Shire

In about 3 hours I will be leaving the Shire for a few weeks.

I am heading down to Luton airport today because we have an early flight tomorrow morning.
While we're on the subject of Luton Airport, does anyone remember the Campari adverts?  You'll have to excuse the sound quality, it was the best version I could find.

Tomorrow morning we have to be up early and at the airport for 5:45am.  Flight leaves at 7:45am local time.  We will arrive in Romania at 12:35pm local time there.  3 hour flight with a two hour time difference.

I'll be back on Sunday 18th September, again very early.  In fact our morning flight FROM Romania is a 6am flight!!!!!! That means we have to be at the airport for 4am!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Good grief.

You might be wondering why I am not afraid to mention online that I will be away.  You may be worried about security of the house and so on.  That's simple!  The rest of my family is staying at home.  This is a trip I am making without my husband and without my children.  I am going with a friend from church.

I don't know if Romania is considered much of a holiday (vacation) spot these days, although it's coastline certainly was in the past, because I went there with my family as a child.  THAT was a bit of an adventure, but those are stories for another day!


This trip is being made for other reasons than a holiday (vacation).  We are going to visit a family from Belgium who now live in Romania working with the poor Gypsy communities in a fairly rural area.  The ministry is called Talmid and is based in the heart of Transylvania, in the mountain village of Romosel.

They are involved in a lot of different projects with the gypsy community, one of which is a ladies sewing class.  Earlier this year I had been posting photos on Facebook of some of the sewing projects I had been undertaking, and was asked if I would come over and teach the ladies sewing class some projects that they could then sell at local markets.  So that is what we are doing.  My friend is going to be doing some silk painting with them and I am going to be doing some sewing and other fabric projects with them.  Hopefully we will be able to combine the two into some cushions or wall hangings.

I have put together some files of projects I have found from around the internet.  I have set them out with plenty of photos, and then the English instructions on one side of the page, with plenty of space for a translation into Romanian on the other side of the page.  There are far more projects that we can undertake in the time we have with the ladies, so this will leave them with a whole set of projects that they can then work on after we have come home.

We have raised funds for this trip through sponsorship from our church, Springfield Christian Fellowship, and through other fundraising events, such as cake sales and car boot sales, as well as sales through my Etsy shop, and donations from internet friends.  Those funds are paying for all travel expenses as well as for a whole load of craft materials which we have bought and are taking with us.  And I do mean a LOT!  There is not all that much room in my case for clothes, which is not all that bad, since the weather will be hot while we are there.  Not hot by the standards of some of my friends in America, but hot by our standards here in the UK.  Still, I am glad we avoided going in July or August, because that is exceptionally hot.  A forecast taken a couple of days ago, is below, but you should be able to see a more up to date forecast at the top of this blog, although I am not sure how accurate that forecast is.

There will also be time to take part in other ministries that the family are involved in, and amongst other things we definitely hope to do some baking!  I do hope I have enough time to take lots of photos, particularly of the ladies sewing class, but don't know if I will be too busy actually teaching and helping to remember to take the photos.

I'll write more when I get back, but in the meantime, if you want to read about typical Romanian party food, you should check out this blog that I discovered, just this week.

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SORRY

I know it has been a while since I posted but life has been pretty chaotic.
With our eldest home for the summer I have lost my craft room and so there has been no crafting going on.  With the disruption that comes with having an extra one home I haven't done any photo recipes.  Add to that the fact that we spent a week on vacation (video coming up) and the fact that last week my dad was rushed into hospital and is awaiting more test results this week, but does know there is a part of his spine missing with something else in its place.

 and you have for one non blogger for a while.

So here you are, a few holiday videos First, where we stayed:

the beach:

and the mirror maze at Wookey hole:

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Romania

Yesterday I mentioned that I will be making a mission trip to Romania in September and I promised more details.  Well, here you go . . .

Our church has contacts with a Christian ministry called Talmid in rural Romania.  The following is taken directly from their website.

The communist ideology and dictatorial regimes after the Second World War left their mark on the Eastern part of Europe. Especially Romania changed in less than forty years from a prosperous country into a nation where hunger, sickness and fear dominate. Talmid Ministries was founded to reach out to the material needs of a destitute population, but even more important to bring the Good News of Jesus where it was almost shut out for decades.

The inspirers and co-founders of Talmid Ministries are Dirk and Nicole Weyts. Dirk graduated as an officer of the land-forces. Nicole is a junior-high school language teacher. In 1996, they started organising relief transports to the ravaged Romania. In the year 2000 they moved with their three daughters Shari, Jana and Amy to the heart of Transylvania and live there amongst the local population in the mountain village Romoşel.

Talmid Ministries distributes clothes, food, school supplies and medication to the poorest families. By means of the sponsoring program, widows, families and students are helped financially. The school project provides the bus ticket or the school costs for approx. Hundred students, when their family is too poor to pay for that.

Besides the practical aid, much attention is given to spreading the Good News of Jesus Christ. Seminars, teachings, youth meetings, women's gatherings are provided to the local churches, regardless their denomination.

Talmid Ministries founded the Christian Center Speranţa (hope) in the gipsy area of Romos. Children are helped with their school work, childrens' afternoons are organized and different courses take place such as English, computer, sewing, creative work, etc.

The house of the family Weyts in Romoşel is a refuge and a place of 'shalom' for young people, who stay there for a shorter or longer time, to live together with a Christian family, help in the ministry and get immersed into the reality of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

The objectives of Talmid Ministries can be summarized as follows:

1. Practical help to needing people, especially gypsies
2. Providing spiritual help to the local churches
3. Spreading the Good News of Jesus Christ and disciple believers, by immersing them into the Reality of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit

The motivation for this work we find in the gospel of Matthew:
“Therefore, go and make people from all nations into my disciples, immersing them into the Reality of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.”
(Matt. 28:19, Complete Jewish Bible)

You can see I have highlighted the one word up there.  Sewing!  Nicole has asked me to visit and teach the ladies some projects that they can then sell at the local markets.  This is a very exciting adventure for me.  Right back at the beginning of this year God spoke to me about this year being a year of New Things and I had a gut level feeling that one of those things would be teaching, so when Nicole made a comment on my facebook that maybe I could do this I jumped at the chance.

I found a photo of the Sewing class on their website:

So, you can see, they already have some sewing skills, this trip is not about teaching them to sew, but about teaching them to take what they know and make it into saleable projects.  I'm going to take with me a file of projects, far more than we can get through in the 2 1/2 weeks I will be there, that I can leave with them, with clearly set out instructions.  I will lay the pages out with English instructions on one half of the page and leave plenty of space for them to translate into Romanian.  The point about teaching them saleable projects is that it enables them to support themselves and fight their own way out of poverty.

Two of us are making this trip, myself and another lady from my church, who has visited this ministry before.  We have to raise the funds to make the trip.  Travel costs are probably going to come to around £340 for the two of us.  Ideally we want to raise all that and more.  So I have asked all my facebook friends to donate towards the trip.  If everyone I know on facebook donated just £3.50 we would cover those expenses and more!

I have also set up an Etsy shop where I am selling products that I have made, with all profits going towards the trip.  Once we have covered the expenses involved in getting there, any more that we raise will go towards buying craft supplies for the women, as they are incredibly difficult to get hold of where they are.  The name of my Etsy Shop is Aisling Beatha, which is Gaelic for a Vision of Life.  It is properly pronounced Ashling Bey-ha but to be honest I never seem to remember that.

I promise to take lots of photos while I am there and write all about it here on my blog when I return.

If anyone is interested in donating towards this trip, please get in touch.

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Trip to America part 2

So let's see, where did I get up to last week? Ah yes, My friend Pat took me back to Washington Dulles to get the plane to Atlanta. On the way her husband stopped at a gas station to grab a drink. When he came back to the car he handed me two lottery tickets, heeheee. We checked them later in the week and I didn't win, heehee. I probably wouldn't have been able to claim it anyway if I had, something about needing to be a resident of the state because it was a state lottery.

Guess what, we were delayed again. But not for long and pretty soon I was in the air on the final leg of my journey. We landed safely in Atlanta and then came the job of finding my way to where my friends were waiting and the Continental baggage office, because one thing I forgot to mention last week was that Continental had tagged my hold bags all the way through to Atlanta and I had done this 4 day journey with just the supplies in my cabin bag.

I had landed in a different part of the airport than my friends thought I had, so I came into the baggage claim area before i got to them. I passed the Continental baggage office and spotted my case through the window. I went in and pointed at it. The lady was so pleased to see me. She said she had been tracking my flights and leaving messages for me to let me know my bag had made it safely to Atlanta. She said she hoped that my experiences would not put me off coming back to America some day.

Then I manged to sneak up on my friends, who were waiting at the top of the escalators from the air train, but I came up to them from the side. there was lots and lots of hugs and then lunch. Some of my friends had come down to near Atlanta to spend that weekend with me and needed to head home on the Sunday, so I only got to spend the time we had at the airport with them! I was so excited to get to spend even some time with them but so sad not to get to spend more time with them and to have missed out on all the FUN of that weekend together.

One of my friends is a pure romance consultant and she gave me gifties to take home. She said that this way my husband would be so happy he would HAVE TO let me come to America again!

So, some people headed home from the airport, and the rest of us headed back to my friend's house. Me, Dana, Skipper and Sara, and Dana's 3 daughters. We hit LOADS of traffic on the way back so Dana got off the interstate and let the Sat Nav (GPS) work it out! They had set their Sat Nav to a British accent in my honour and Dana's girls were practising their best British accents (learnt from harry Potter of course) all the way home.

I had just the one evening and morning with Skipper and Sara as they both had to head home the following morning. but that one evening was awesome, we laughed and talked and I so HOPE I get to spend more time with them one day. And all of those friends who didn't get to make it and the ones I was supposed to meet but didn't, I LOVE YOU ALL and will see you one day, I promise!

More of my trip next week.

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Thursday 13 - 13 People I Met On My Journey to America

13 people I met on my journey to America

If you haven't yet read the story of WHAT HAPPENED to make the journey so eventful, check out this post.

1. When I got off the plane in Newark, got through immigration and then made my way to the Continental desk so that we could sort out what was going to happen next since the onward flight had been cancelled, there was a lady who was a continental member of staff on the phone. I could hear everything she was saying. Apparently some member of her family had already missed out on some physical therapy sessions and was going to miss out on more unless the person on the other end of the phone could send someone to fetch this person. She was not a happy lady!
   
2. Another not happy lady was the Continental member of staff who arrived at this point and sat at the desk next to the one I ended up at. She was seriously in a bad mood. She moaned to one of the other staff members "I don't know why they send these people when they know the weather is like this." Hopefully she wasn't grumpy with any customers, cuz you know, OK her day sucked a bit, but I reckon ours sucked more!
   
3. While trying to sort out where I was going to stay for the night I needed to get change for the phone so went to one of the news stand to buy a kitkat. The lady was very nice and kind, and was obviously new, because a more senior member of staff was showing her how to work the register.
   
4. The Howard Johnson mini bus driver was awesome! I was cold wet, fed up and he smiled and took my bags and was just so friendly that it cheered me up. He drove carefully and got us safely to the hotel! And was just as cheerful at 4am the following morning.
   
5. When we were all sat around waiting to see if our flight would be leaving, there was a man who was working at the little kiosk there, selling overpriced dried fruit and stuff like that. We were right opposite one of the banks of departure arrival monitors. As more and more flights began to be cancelled and turned red on the board, he would occasionally talk to those of us who were waiting and when eventually they decided that no flights were leaving until 2pm he said that he had NEVER seen THAT MUCH RED on the board, EVER!
   
6. One of the guys who should have been on my flight was trying to get somewhere to watch his son play basketball with his school team. His son was then to separate from the team and travel somewhere else with his dad, this guy. He was making phone call after phone call, trying to find out what the team was doing and trying to convince his son that staying there and waiting for his dad really was NOT a good idea, because it looked like he was going nowhere. I think, that in the end he managed to convince him and changed his flight plans to just head home and his son would head home with the team.
   
7. There was another guy, obviously well educated, well paid, etc travelling with his son who must have been around 12 years old or something like that. When our afternoon replacement flights got cancelled as well he was messing around on his laptop and just decided that he would spend another $800 and go get flights with Delta instead! Oh to be able to make decisions like that.
   
8. There was a lady with a Kindle, at the waiting area by the time we got to the afternoon. She was happily passing it around to other people who had never held one to give them an idea of the weight and what it feels like to use one. Apparently this was her 2nd Kindle because she had trodden on her first one and bust it!
   
9. The lady who had helped us in the morning at the desk at the gate turned out to be the same person who helped me up at the main continental desk when the afternoon flights got cancelled. She was so nice, so kind, and friendly with it, and she managed to work out that she could get me on a flight to Cleveland and then from there onto Atlanta that day. She was a bright spot in that day, really.
   
10. I felt so sorry for the young lady who was our flight attendant on the flight to Cleveland. I was right in the back seat by the galley on this smaller plane and heard every interaction she had with the ground crew who were bringing stuff on through that back door. She realised we had got no sugar and asked the ground crew to pass her some, this turned into a major hoo ha and they wouldn't let us go without it, she was desperately trying to tell them it was OK, that we would manage, but they insisted. THEN they realised we didn't have a container for the waste bag to sit in. She tried to insist it was fine that she was perfectly capable of using a waste bag without a container to stand it in! She was trying so hard to get us to leave.
    
    
11. On my way to the Holiday Inn at Cleveland airport I met a lady who was going to be speaking at a training session in one of the ballrooms at the Holiday Inn the following day. It was a session for home daycare providers. She was pregnant and hoping she would get enough sleep, but aware that she still needed to check out the ballroom etc before she could head to bed.
    
12. When I got to Washington, I knew I was having another overnight layover and I knew that that was OK because one of my friends was coming to get me and take me back to her house. Oh Pat, it was so good to see a friendly face and you were SUCH a blessing to me! We talked and talked, well, until I fell asleep on the recliner!
    
13. Finally, 4 days after leaving home I got to Atlanta airport! On my way to find my friends, I passed the Continental baggage office and spotted my case. Yes, my case had made it there without me, as it had been tagged through to my final destination and I had done those 4 days with JUST my cabin baggage office was so friendly, she said she had been tracking my journey knew all the places i had been and had been leaving messages for me all over the place to say that my bag was safe and in Atlanta! She was so sorry for all I'd been through and hoped it wouldn't put me off coming back to America!
    

If you want to read more Thursday 13 posts, head on over to Thursday 13 by clicking on that banner at the top of this post!

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Trip to America

I've been out of the loop with the company girls for almost a month now. There were the two weeks I was in America and with getting ready the week before and recovering the week after, I'm just getting back in the loop today.

YES, I went to America! And I saw far more of it than I had ever intended to.

The plan was to fly from Birmingham England to Newark and then after a 4 hour layover, fly on to Atlanta! We had seen the weather reports, we knew there was some snow, so I was expecting to have SOME delays. I was not expecting what then happened! We knew when we got off the plane that a lot of flights had been cancelled and sure enough after going through immigration had it confirmed that the flight was not going.

The ladies at the Continental desk were helpful but not particularly friendly. Said she could get me on the flight the following morning at 6:25am. She asked if I had anywhere to stay and when I said no she just said "Oh well, you'll have to stay in the airport then". Basically if your delays are due to weather the airline has zero responsibility to house or feed you. BUT the following day during further delays I clearly heard other people being given at least the information on where to go to organise yourself a room! I didn't even get that. Through sending text messages to my husband back in England and my friends who were expecting me in Atlanta I got the phone number for a hotel near the airport and booked myself a room.

Howard Johnson at Newark airport. The rooms are fine, great, but the communal areas left a little to be desired. They did appear to be doing a lot of work on those communal areas, but still, I wasn't too impressed with that part of it. But a room is a room and since I have sleep apnoea I absolutely needed somewhere to sleep safely and plug in my CPAP machine.

Because the flight was due to leave at 6:25, I needed to be at the airport by 4:30ish. YES, in the morning! Yuck, I was awake and unable to sleep any longer at 3am! I looked outside the window and there had clearly been at least 4 or more inches of snow overnight! So, with a heavy heart I headed back to the airport!

Sure enough my flight got cancelled, in fact, so did pretty much EVERY OTHER flight until 2pm, although we did begin to see flights leaving from around 1pm but only a handful! There was a kind of camaraderie building up in groups of people who were sitting near each other and we would watch each others stuff while someone went to the Continental desk to find out the latest, or went to get food, or whatever.

The snow was incredible, I have NEVER seen anything like it. I found out later they had over 20 inches in 2 days! It wasn't the snow on the ground that was the problem for the planes, it was the blizzard conditions with which it was coming down, they literally could NOT see to take off! If you have ever been in terminal C at Newark airports and looked out from one of the arms of terminal C across to one of the other arms, you will understand how bad it was when I say that you could ONLY JUST see the other arms from the windows of the middle one! Seriously!

When it had become clear that the 6:25am was going NOWHERE, I had been put on standby for a 3:50pm flight to Atlanta and confirmed on the 6:30pm flight.
HA! Neither of them went anywhere! We knew by about 3pm that that was going to be the case, but not because anyone on staff had told us, no, we had to find out from each other and other passengers. Having said that the ladies on the Continental desk this day could not have been more helpful and kind and were just fantastic. The lady who helped me in the afternoon said there was no space on any flights to Atlanta now until the Monday (this was Friday!) but there was a flight to Cleveland leaving in an hour or two and she could get me on that with a connecting flight to Atlanta that evening. Cool, we knew a flight had already successfully gone to Cleveland, so that was good.

Off I went onto a plane to Cleveland. oh my word, delay after delay, some of them for stupid things like we had no sugar. The cabin assistant wanted to leave without it as it is only a short flight but the ground crew wouldn't allow it! For crying out loud, SUGAR! And sure enough we landed in Cleveland too late to get the connecting flight to Atlanta! Apparently they were taxiing as we landed! I learnt later that the snow started falling again just after we left Newark and that the whole place closed down again as far as outward flights were concerned.

So, another queue, another Continental help desk and another kind, helpful lady! By now I was on the phone with my friend who was supposed to meet me in Atlanta going through a list of other airports to see if they could get me there, but nothing, and again no spaces on flights to Atlanta until Monday! BUT I have a friend who lives close enough to Washington to come get me if I could get there! So they managed to book me on a flight into Washington Dulles on Saturday with a flight from Washington to Atlanta on the Sunday!

This time, although there was no obligation to provide accommodation or food, they did at least give me a hotel discount voucher and so I headed off to the Holiday Inn at Cleveland airport. Gorgeous hotel, fantastic facilities, apparently the bar is one of THE places to be seen in the area because it was PACKED! Thankfully my room was up on the 5th floor so I didn't hear a thing! The floor in the foyer is a bit slippy in the wet weather, but I managed to stay upright! The restaurant was fantastic and I ate my first proper meal in 3 days! I had a gorgeous room!
At some point during my time there someone suggested that if I got stuck the following day as well I should head on out to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I asked if that was all there was to do in Cleveland and she said "pretty much, yes!"

In the early hours of the following morning I got a message from my husband to say that our bank had stopped my card because of an "unusual spending pattern"! OK, so they were doing their job and trying to protect me, so that is good, but it really was the final straw when I could not get through to them on the phone number they had given my husband! OH MY WORD! I just broke down and cried for a while. Eventually I phoned my husband and got him to get them to phone me in my room! They did and it got sorted, but it was another night with as not as much sleep as I needed!

Another day, another airport, and another time to go through security, hey, by now I was getting used to it!
The flight to Washington went fine and my friend came to pick me up! The relief at seeing a friendly face was immense! It felt so good. They took me home to their house, we ate and talked a lot and then I went to bed after I fell asleep in the recliner more than once! I do need to ask her about that mattress because I had the most awesome nights sleep I have had in months and months!

Sunday morning she drove me back to the airport and I headed on to Atlanta!

This post is mega long already, so I think I will save the stories of my trip and the return journey for next week!

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Thursday 13 - 13 pools I'd love to swim in one day

13 pools I'd like to swim in one day

1. OK so I don't do the whole Casino thing, but the pool at the golden Nugget in Las Vegas is AMAZING! A HUGE shark and marine life tank sits along one side of the pool and their new waterslide takes you in a tube right through the tank! AWESOME!
   
   
2. The Blue Lagoon Natural hot Spa in Iceland.
   
   
3. The incredibly HUGE pool at San Alfonso del Mar in Chile. It holds the current Guinness record as the world’s largest crystalline water pool, with an extension of more than one kilometre in length, eight hectares and 250 million litres of water. Hard to imagine? We are talking about nothing less than the equivalent to 6,000 familiar 8-meters-long pools.
   
4. Any of the pools at the Atlantis in the Bahamas.
   
   
5. which includes another water slide through a shark tank
   
   
6. as well as smaller, private pools
   
   
7. I'm not sure how I feel about infinity pools, I reckon they freak me out a little bit, but some of them are just amazing, because of the views and I reckon that given the opportunity I would have to just get over any fears and go for it.
   
8. The pool at the Hilton in Auckland even has a window on the end.
   
9. And WOW, what about the pool at the Quincy in Singapore. YES, that is the pool!
   
10. Then there's the Al-Bustan Palace in Muscat
    
    
11. If I ever get into scuba diving I reckon I would just HAVE to try out this pool at the Nemo diving centre in Brussels.
    
    
12. A bit closer to home is the Sanctuary Spa in London with their famous swing over the pool.
    
13. And for 13, well, I couldn't find another dream pool, so why don't you suggest one. What's your favourite pool?
    
    

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Frugal Friday

Oooh it’s Frugal Friday!

I am going to tell you about something that saves me an awful lot of money at the moment, that most of you will not be able to use! But I can, so I will tell you about it anyway!

I have a car. I also have sleep apnoea! That means that at the end of last year, the driver licensing organisation revoked my driving license temporarily on medical grounds. So my car now sits in our garage, officially off roaded. My husband runs the engine for 5 minutes or so each week to keep it from seizing up.

But in the meantime how do I get around?

THANKFULLY when you have your driving license revoked for medical reasons (i.e. rather than for criminal ones), your local council has a legal responsibility to provide you with a replacement local bus pass. They don’t tell you about this, no one at the hospital or DVLA tells you, it’s up to you to find this out!

So I filled in my forms and sent them off.
And in return I was given a bus pass that allows me free travel on buses in the WHOLE OF ENGLAND! That is what the local pensioners get, and it would cost the council too much money to organise a separate system for medical revocations, so we get the same as the pensioners.

I can use it between 9:30am and 11pm, and in certain areas outside that. For instance in our location we can use them from 9am.

A trip into the local town centre is £1.10 each way, I do that at least 3 times a week. A trip to the hospital for one of my appointments (3 times in the last 2 weeks) means buying a day rider ticket at £3.50 for the day.
This is money we don’t have! So having this bus pass is making a real difference to our lives!

Last weekend I sent off the forms to reapply for my driving license. BUT my bus pass does not run out until 2012, so I may well continue to use it for short journeys even after I get my license back. Longer journeys just don’t make sense once I am driving again, since by bus I have to leave over an hour before my appointment time, a journey I can do in just 20 minutes in the car!

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