On Holiday in the UK

Slept way too late this morning again, getting up at 11:30. Breakfast was croissants and jam in the conservatory with Dave and John, Dave's roommate.

John is 85 years old, and still pretty healthy. He moves about with a lot more ease than most folks his age. He's a great storyteller and I love to just sit and listen to him. This afternoon, he told a story from World War Two. He was a British Tank Commander in the war, and during a battle with the Germans in France (near Normandy), his tank took a direct hit. All three of the tank crew survived, but there was a mad scramble to get out the hatch and John was nearly trapped inside. It was a very fascinating story, I gotta say.

Dave and I are swapping iTunes libraries while I'm here. I've got over 8,000 songs, which takes up a little over 40GB of space. Dave's got nearly 60,000 songs he's giving me. There's so much stuff in his library that I had to edit it down to about 215GB so it'll fit on the portable hard drive I brought over with me. But we can't do shit until we drive over to Salisbury, about 30 minutes away, to buy a USB 2.0 cable, cuz I seem to have neglected to bring mine and he doesn't have one.

Did a little grocery shopping while we were in Salisbury, and I bought some good old Budweiser in the can. Whoopee!

Took a walk down the lane during the afternoon to see some of the local farm animals. I'd never seen an alpaca before. Pretty cool animals:








The alpaca would get close enough for you to pet them, but they would jump if you did. This guy got really close:




The sheep really liked getting their heads scratched:

A steam-powered tractor suddenly came around the bend ahead of us. It was pretty cool:




Came across a huge wall of blackberry bushes and spent a few minutes enjoying their sweet goodness. There were also lots and lots of cobnut (hazelnut) trees, and sloe bushes. I never knew that sloe gin was simply gin to which sloe berries had been added. Guess I don't get out much, huh? The sloes are bitter if you eat them off the vine, which seemed odd, as sloe gin is almost sickeningly sweet. Dave has a couple of bottles of homemade sloe gin, but I didn't get around to trying any of it.

And there was a massive apple tree that bore so much fruit that one of its limbs had broken under the weight. Just look at those babies:

My greatest triumph of the day was avoiding stepping into any stinging nettles. I hate those damn things.

Dave and I sat up talking and drinking until about 4:30am or so…