Wednesday, December 14, 2016

Sunday Road Trip: Three Choirs Winery

This road trip was about a month ago. Having visited a cider brewery, we decided we should balance the scales and visit a winery as well. A winery in England? Yep, we were a bit surprised as well, but there are a few. And sparkling wine from England is starting to gain some momentum, we're told. Otherwise, England's not really known for great wine (and this visit didn't change our minds on that front.)

Three Choirs makes sparkling and also a number of whites and a few reds. We had the full tour and tasting, and while not impressed by the wines, we did have a nice day out in the country.

It was a beautiful fall day - a bit rainy and overcast at times, but that's fairly typical. The drive was mostly highway so we did see some colour, but not the great fall leaves until we arrived.

I know, it was a winery, but the only thing we bought was some Whittingtons Brewery beer. And then only because of the cute cat names and artwork on the bottles. Luckily, it's actually pretty good as well as cute!

This is the tasting room, although we didn't actually taste here, but instead along the tour.  No photos allowed, so the tasting room is all you get.

The vineyards were really pretty and along the rolling hills of the area. A nice fall landscape.

They had a groomed trail through the vineyards that you could walk along and even eat the grapes if you found any. We were warned they don't taste very good. Since it was a bit rainy, we decided not to take the walk.

A nice day and we can now add England to our list of countries where we've taken wine tours. I think we're up to around 7 now. US, Australia, New Zealand, England, Italy, South Africa, and France

Sunday, December 11, 2016

O Christmas Tree: I'm sorry about those cats

Tis' the season and time to put up a Christmas tree. Having left our pathetic cheap plastic tree in Abu Dhabi, we were excited to have a real tree again after 6 years. Now I just had to find out where to find one.

I looked online and saw that IKEA sells trees, but somehow, that just didn't seem the right way to go. I was really hoping for a cut your own farm since we used to live down the road from one in the US and really enjoyed cutting our own, but there didn't seem to be anything like that close so we ended up at a large tree lot about 10 minutes away. And I mean large. A collection of tree lots actually all congregated in this same area. Kind of like how car dealerships seems to collect next to one another.

Selection was different from back home. There were 4 different kinds of trees, but all short needles. Fraiser fir, which seems to sell for a premium in the US was one of the cheaper kinds here. We ended up with a 6 ft. Nordmann Fir (locally grown). Into the back of the car and off we went to decorate.

When we moved to UAE, I had left our collection of ornaments behind as I wasn't sure whether it would be okay to celebrate Christmas in a Muslim country. By the time I realised it would be just fine, the ornaments were packed too far back in our storage locker back in the US to dig out. So, one of the best parts of this year's tree was unpacking all of our ornaments from storage.

And what about those cats? Petra (our kitty from Abu Dhabi) is experiencing a real tree for the first time and after a few exploratory walks underneath and a sniff or two, she isn't really that interested. Rogue (WI born), on the other hand, is very familiar with torturing real trees and has been happily getting reacquainted with the practice.
I'm just looking . . . I promise.
The good news is she doesn't climb the tree, just likes to walk under it, sit under it watching the lights, and bat the low hanging ornaments once in a while.

Friday, December 9, 2016

Sunday Road Trip: Christmas Market in Bath

There are lots of new Christmas traditions to explore now that we're living in the UK. Top of our list is the traditional Christmas market found all over Europe, and one of the nicest in nearby Bath. Yep, time for a Sunday road trip!

Bath is already beautiful with all it's history, amazing architecture and water running through the town. Add on a Christmas market and the town is even cuter.
It was the first weekend of the market so very crowded. We were told they bus in from all over to visit the Bath Christmas market as it's considered one of the best in the country.  The photo above is the main square outside the cathedral where they've put up a large tree.

No Christmas market experience is properly started without a mug of mulled wine or in this area of the country, mulled cider (hard cider that is). Keeps you warm and in the shopping mood.

So what is a Christmas market exactly? Basically a collection of small stalls selling everything from handicrafts to food to drinks. It's a craft fair with a Christmas theme. Some of the stalls are independent craftspeople selling their stuff and others are small versions of the larger stores on the square. According to their website, there are over 170 stalls and more than 80% are items from the local area. The photo above are the stalls on the other side of the cathedral. There was also a main set of stalls on the other side, but they were so packed I couldn't get a good photo.

One aisle was really small and close together and there were so many people we couldn't even get through to see what was for sale. And we noticed that there wasn't a proper flow to the traffic - everyone going every direction so it was chaos. Time to get out of the crowds and find some lunch!

Pies are big here. Pies of every kind you can imagine. This one was turkey, stuffing and cranberry. YUM!