Friday, September 15, 2006

Rolling down the hill

Just this weekend Mark turned 30, as was covered in the previous blog. No he did not sprout two heads on Saturday morning, but he did have a uncontrollable urge to roll down a hill in a blow up ball. Maybe to rekindle some weird childhood thing, who knows.


So off down to Dorset we went to go Zorbing!! For those of you not familiar with Zorbing it was on the Amazing Race (which I am devastated that they do not show on TV over here).
It was invented in NZ and is basically a blow up ball about 8ft across with a smaller ball suspended inside it. You run up and dive into the small ball via a very small hole (there is a knack to this which neither of us managed) and this clearly would have been a sight especially me half in with legs flailing everywhere!!

We did the Hydro Zorb so our trip down the hillside in the ball was with 2 buckets of warm water. It is just like being tossed around in a washing machine - not that I have tried that - but is much fun.



Well that was about 10 minutes of our weekend, so for the rest of it (since we had hired a car from Gatwick and driven all the way down to Dorchester) we did some country sight seeing. The weather was sunny and warm, so we were making the most of it.

We stayed in a tiny little hamlet called Cerne Abbas (after ringing around about 10 different B&B's), where the man is carved right onto the chalk hillside. The Abbey there is quite lovely. Our B&B was nothing special, but the family were nice enough and had lots of adorable rabbits - we do miss Jasper at home lots. We visited a little town called Stratton, where I think, my family on my granddad's side possibly would have come from originally.

Portland Castle, the Tank museum (snore) and Lulworth Castle (by accident as I had forgotten about it) were our destinations. We also saw the man on the horse carved into the hillside in chalk. Though I have no proof of this as my SLR camera is currently on strike!!

Our visiting involved driving around on little B roads and lanes (only having to reverse back for another car once). Though Mark soon got fed up with this, only to find our way back to A roads and backed up traffic!!

The traffic on the way back to London (well Gatwick but the road was towards London) was quite horrendous and not for any reason either, it was weird we'd just crawl along and then all of a sudden the traffic was free flowing and you could do 70 mile an hour, then without warning we came to another grinding halt. It was especially bad along the journey across from the A31 back to the M3 - 6km in 20 minutes is not my idea of country touring! After that we switched to another A road and zoomed along after that.

Was a nice weekend but alas yet again Monday came and we had to drag our butts out of bed to go to work again. :-)

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