On Sunday we went down to Chartwell, former home of Sir Winston Churchill and his wife, Clementine.

It’s a National Trust property, and we’re both members of the National Trust so it only cost us the travel. The house was closed (even though the sign at the gate said it was open), but we’d only gone down there for a walk in the grounds anyway.

There are formal gardens around the house which we walked round when we visited last year, so this time we headed down to the lake, past the statue of the Churchill’s by Oscar Nemon and up the hill along the edge of the wood.

The ground was badly churned up for quite a lot of way which made the walk a bit slippery, but we got some good views of the house and lake.

I’ve uploaded some of the photos I took onto my Flickr album of Chartwell.

We had some food at the restaurant, which like most National Trust properties was pretty good, with some nice home-made cakes.

There are a few other National Trust properties near to Chartwell, so we might venture down that way again.

On Sunday we had a wander along the river at Greenwich. Although we’ve lived in Docklands for a year now, we’ve not been down there for a walk since we moved. It was chilly but not too cold to enjoy a walk. I took the camera along so there are a few photos from the walk on my Flickr site.

After walking eastwards along by the river, we visited the National Maritime Museum which I don’t think I’ve ever been to before. We attended a talk about the Princess Alice disaster of 1878. More than 600 people were killed when a coal-freighter cut a passenger steamer in half just by Beckton Gas Works. We had heard about the accident when we visited the Museum in Docklands last year so it was interesting to learn more.

We recently found out that our landlord has sold the flat we’re living in. This happened in the last place, up in West Ham, too, so it’s becoming a bit of a regular event.

We’re not sure what effect this is going to have at the moment, though I suspect the new owner will want to hike up the rent. I wonder if they’ll be as keen on fixing the numerous problems with the flat, given that they bought the place without seeing it?

We had a pleasant afternoon out in Maldon on the Essex coast today. It was pretty nippy as we walked by the River Blackwater, but we warmed up after a while. Maldon was nice, lots of boats moored on the river and quite an old-style town centre.

Apparently, the first Tesco supermarket opened in Maldon, but that’s now an Iceland store.

A few days after we got back from Miami, I bought myself a Sony Playstation 3. Reading the forums on the internet, it looks like I bought it just in time as the 60GB version which plays Playstation 2 games is now pretty scarce, having been pretty much replaced by the 40GB version. I’ve only got three games for the new machine, but it plays my old PS2 games too.

I’ve connected the PS3 up to the wireless network at home and, after installing TVersity on my Windows PC, can watch any video files and listen to any of my MP3s stored on the PC through the surround sound system and LCD TV in the living room. Oh, and it plays DVDs and Blu-Ray discs too. Which is nice.

It’s the KCOM Xmas party this week, so I’m off up to Hull on Thursday for the “Black and Red Ball”. Red and black are the new company colours hence the theme of the party. I’ve not been to Hull in years so it’ll be a change of scene, and with any luck the party will be worth the trip.

… but expensive.

We went over to Miami for a few days for my birthday, flew out on the Wednesday and back on the following Monday night/Tuesday morning.

When we landed in Miami we were horrified to see that it was pouring with rain and quite windy. Tropical Storm “Noel” was just passing the east coast of Florida after devastating several parts of the Caribbean and the Bahamas, and we were assured that the weather would improve when the storm had gone.

Taxis from the airport are charged at a flat rate, which is a great idea, so we were soon winging our way to South Beach clutching our bit of paper with the hotel address on it; the taxi driver hadn’t heard of the place we had booked, but we knew that it only been open a short time.

We found the hotel, The Anglers Boutique Resort pretty easily, as it’s on Washington Ave, two blocks from the beach.

The hotel was really nice; recently modernised, so recently in fact that they had to take the masking tape off the room number when we were shown to the room.

The room was spacious, with a very comfortable bed, large sofa and armchairs, and two small balconies looking over the hotel’s courtyard pool.

There was also a large plasma TV with cable, DVD player and an iPod dock which could all be controlled from a single controller.

On Wednesday evening we had food from the recently-opened hotel restaurant, which was excellent.

Thursday morning brought more cloud and rain, so we decided to get some of the shopping out of the way and caught a cab to the Aventura Mall which is between South Beach and Fort Lauderdale.

We spent the rest of the day in the mall, buying lots of stuff, mostly clothing which was so much cheaper than in the UK. I did browse round the Apple Store, but couldn’t convince myself I needed a new iPod or an iPhone so left there empty-handed. We ate at The Cheesecake Factory, one of our favourite US food chains where the food was plentiful, excellent value and very good.

Friday and Saturday saw us venturing to the beach and catching some sun, as the weather had perked up. We could only stand a couple of hours or so in the sun, so then wandered around Ocean Drive, Collins Avenue, and Washington Avenue, trying various places to eat for breakfast and lunch.

Our favourites were probably The News Cafe, The Big Pink and the 11th Street Diner.

We ate at a couple of more “upscale” restaurants, “The Tuscan Steak” and “Smith and Wollensky’s”, both of which were pretty good for quality of food but were quite expensive even by UK standards. We particularly enjoyed watching the rich folks at the bar in the latter venue.

All in all, we enjoyed the holiday, but spent quite a bit more money than we’d originally intended. South Beach is probably the priciest part of Miami, if not the whole of Florida, and it’s plays host to some of the ultra-wealthy residents and visitors who moor their yachts nearby.

A couple of weekends ago we went up to Cleethorpes again, to celebrate my parents 50th Wedding Anniversary.
It was the biggest family gathering I’ve been to in a long time, possibly ever.

There was a party held at Cleethorpes Cricket Club and it was great to see so many of my parents friends and family coming together to celebrate their Golden Wedding Anniversary.

I’ve got two sets of photos online, one set of the party itself, and another of photos taken during the rest of the weekend.