Madeira – weekend away with Nik & Gaz

These are notes from the weekend away – I didn’t update the diary well enough

Delay flying – gate wouldn’t let us through, flight cancelled because of weather so we got drunk in Crawley town centre – great day and night!

One of the most dangerous airports in the world – often gets cancellations

Ronaldo’s home/bust

Casino – travelling around, meals and drinking

Jeep journey

Fennel

Peppercorn

Citronella

Bay leaves

Off road road block

Cold summit

£5 drink stop

£10 lunch stop. Lovely

1 mike walk along water channel

Other stop first r strong drink

Charlotte’s JR Placement follow-up

Charlotte sent a WhatsApp message message to the Dark Dickheads family group today saying that she was so embarrassed! Her tutor put an email on the main projector in her lecture from the JR Hospital saying how fantastic Charlotte was during her placement in the last four weeks and commending her attitude, work ethic and interaction. Absolutely glowing it was and everyone involved in the course from her Uni are delighted with her, it’s been sent to the course manager and even higher up than that, Charlotte cringed but some of her friends on the course actually clapped her!

It made us very proud indeed of her, that is such a great achievement and like the Uni people said, they tend to only get emails and letters when something goes wrong – not when something goes so right!

So a huge well done to Charlotte, very proud of her

Early Mothers Day & another one of my 50 Things ticked off

We took Mum and Grandma to the Cotswold Lodge this afternoon as an early Mother’s Day present as we are away in Madeira this weekend and it’s a nice easy thing to manage. Grandma had slipped on the way in just before we got there so she was complaining that her skirt was wet the whole time but otherwise she was fine.

We had an afternoon tea menu which meant sandwiches, scones, cakes and tea/coffee. It was lovely and we were in the tearoom on our own so shouting at grandma to be heard wasn’t embarrassing or an issue! Completely full up and too much coffee but it was such nice food. We paid for it all which was appreciated of course.

It was lovely to spend time with them both and it was a good catch up.

As mentioned in the title of this post, this is something that was on my list of things to do so this is another one that we’re able to tick off as done!

Tucks over for the week

Andrew, Alison and the two girls (Grace & Olivia) were over in the UK this week, Tucks was in Cardiff the whole time and we only got to see them on Saturday evening. Jack stayed home and babysat the girls and we then went over to Jacob’s Inn, had a nice meal and a good catch up with them which was really nice. Jack had a girl from Kidlington come over called Hannah, bit random and out of the blue but it was nice for him to have some company.

They’re doing really well and Tucks has a new hobby now which means buying cars! Nice hobby to be able to have…fair play to him though, he’s enjoying it. When all done we went back and Jack & Hannah were in control and it was nice to spend some time with the girls – they look identical, it’s uncanny.

Not sure when we’ll see them all again next but they’re looking forward to us coming over in October, hopefully we will catch up before then.

Alison gave Jack £20.00 which was very generous and he gave Hannah half of it which she didn’t expect at all but was pleased to get that of course.

So a nice evening all told, nice and calm and great to see them

Mortgage done and dusted!

What a weight off our shoulders and a sense of achievement!

On 1st March we were able to transfer all the money over to the Nationwide and call them to say our mortgage is paid! They were pleased for us and asked how we’d celebrate, strange feeling. We didn’t really do much as a celebration but both felt pleased with ourselves having paid this off 4 years early and now have that money to spend. Well, for the first year we will be saving like mad to build up the car money we delved into so as to make up the balance, but that won’t take long to do.

We intend to review how best to deal with our finances now and will have a think about the best savings options. There is always the temptation to get another mortgage and buy a second home, I really don’t know if that’s something we will seriously consider, we shall have to wait and see I guess.

So that’s it – no more mortgage…for now!