Car Shopping

We have spent the past two days doing the rounds of car dealers looking for a car - or maybe two. We don't know yet if we'll manage with one car or whether realistically we'll need one each. I have to say... I HATE CAR SHOPPING!! I cannot imagine anything more dull than sitting in a dealership talking about bhp, mpg, emissions, insurance groups, engine size...aaarrrgghhhhhhhh!!

There have been a couple of amusing moments....there was a really nicely spec'd Saab we saw yesterday. Nice car. Comfortable. Great price. Had all the bells and whistles you could ever want. But it was green. Not a deep green. Not a nice green. It was the green of a milk-fed baby's scooty-poopy nappy. I put my foot down - we were not taking than one!

The other amusing moment (well to the bystanders anyway) was the full-scale marital that a couple had in the Audi garage this afternoon. Mrs CarBuyer was less than impressed by the figures she was being presented with and Mr CarBuyer was well and truly tongue lashed when he tried to argue with her. There was a lot of stomping and striding out afterwards. It was hysterical, but we were all doing the British thing of not looking directly at the incident and pretending not to listen, when in fact we were all avidly following every word!!

Fashion Faux Pas

I'm sitting here laughing....

I've spent many hours bemoaning what happened to my fashion sense whilst I was in the US and my subsequent love of golfing jumpers well.....I've just seen a newspaper headline about Michelle Obama (who is in the UK for the G20 summit) which read "First Lady's Fashion Sense Falters - does Colin Montgomery know she is wearing one of his golfing cardies?"

She (and I) would be the height of fashion in the US and yet here we are derided for our love of argyle pattern!! I wore mine today, but perhaps its time to retire it....

Our final DC day - at the Cherry Blossom Festival

Cherry Blossom at the Tidal Basin

The Jefferson Memorial

At the Washington Monument

On the Mall looking towards the Capitol

The Tidal Basin surrounded by blossoming cherry trees

Stephen forgot that the point is to get the Jefferson with blossom in the foreground!
The only bare branches for miles...

Ah, thats better...I see blossom!

At the World War II memorial

Strolling down the Mall towards the Washington

Old Town - our final walkabout

Old Town in blossom

Town Houses amongst the blossom

So very pretty

The Pier into the Potomac

Enjoying the sunshine at the marina

Our favourite ice cream store

Looking along N Lee St

A busy King Street

The Scottish shop

Carlyle House flying the flag - in our honour?

The Scots are on the bevvy

Propping up the bar in O'Connells with Morag & Simon

It was late on Sunday evening when this was taken - only us left! Profits will be down...

Our final day in DC

We spent Tuesday morning (our final morning) in DC at the Cherry Blossom festival. Just us and several thousand other folk. The blossom was beautiful and it was a gorgeous day with clear blue skies. We, of course, took LOADS of photos so I'll post some when we've got them downloaded.

From there we headed back to the hotel via the office, loaded up the car with the mountain of luggage and headed off to the airport. We detoured via Tysons in the hope of finding somewhere where we could eat and still keep an eye on the car, but all we could find was MaccyD's and that was not the last meal that I wanted in the US! We just headed off to the airport (starving). Stephen dumped me curbside with two trolleys of luggage whilst he headed off to return the rental car. The flight was really quiet and they didn't even bother weighing the luggage - which is probably just as well. Even the hand luggage weighed a ton! Security was fun as we had 4 laptops to decant as well as other bags and a guitar!

The flight was fine (except for someone near us letting off some seriously stinky farts) and we both managed to get a decent sleep (probably due to asphyxiation). Heathrow T3 was really quiet - where were all the flights? We met up with the driver and had a fun 10 minutes trying to fit the mountain of luggage into the car. Just as well it was an estate car! I had e-mailed a couple of times saying a saloon car won't do - we have 5 cases, a guitar and loads of hand luggage. Obviously they didn't realise I wasn't joking!!

So we're now back in Leigh Sinton. We've had the first bacon butty...heaven. Now we just need to sleep or wake up - I'm not sure what I should do at the moment! I've woken up dead beat every day for the past week and feel I could sleep for a week, but I know I need to get UK sleep patterns introduced pronto and sleeping all afternoon won't help that.

Valet chaos

In my nutshell rendition of what we did I mentioned the valet parking chaos at the hotel. It was hilarious to watch - and we had plenty of time standing around with which to do so!

There was a large function on in the hotel. Everywhere you looked there were women in gorgeous evening dresses and men in tuxedos getting out of cars. This was causing a slight backlog in moving the cars are there are only about 5 guys doing the parking. After about 10 minutes it obviously became the case that if you could drive, you were parking cars! I know a few of the staff there and I saw the banqueting manager sprinting up and down to cars in 3 inch heels and driving them off at high speed. A few minutes after this there was complete chaos when one of the valet guys came running round the corner saying that the garage was completely full and grid locked. We kind of gave up expecting to see our car at that point, but it did eventually turn up!

When we drove off there were cars abandoned with the engines running waiting to be parked in a queue which stretched back about 200 yards!!