Skip to main content

England Part 1: The Whites


There are just too many great photos from our trip to England!
I thought I'd give you the Toby ones first, so here we go: Toby with Graham's family.


With Grandma. He got lots of cuddles with Grandma.

With Grandad. I just realised Toby doesn't look overly impressed in either of these photos, but he really did get on with his grandparents very well!

I like this chair! (He also liked watching TV, so much so that we worried we might have to wean him off Coronation Street at the end of the visit.)


With Auntie Colette. He was fascinated by her - if Colette was in the room Toby couldn't take his eyes off her!


I'm sure I can reach those chocolate fingers if I just stretch a li-i-i-ttle further!


Group shot: Toby, me, Colette, Maddy, Anthony and Karl. In a pub. Was it me or did we spend a lot of time in a pub?


What, me?


Helping Mum play Uno.


No, I didn't see any writing saying, "Keep away from children". And look, it makes such a nice noise!



Gorgeous one of Graham and Toby on St Anne's beach. We had perfect weather for our day out to the seaside.



We also had a day out in Skipton, which is a nice town but absolutely freezing! Still, we strolled around the town and along the canal, peeked at the castle, and had lunch in a little bakery-cafe selling very traditional goodies like meat pies and currant slice.


Say aaaahhh!




New toys. The jeans were new too; at the start of the trip we were rolling them up and by the end we didn't need to!


Mmmm, that looks good, Grandma!
Three generations of Whites on St Annes beach.


Enjoying a well-deserved nap in his Moses basket.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Looking forward to future instalments. Dad
Susan Ewing said…
Martha--what a cutie! So glad he got to meet his other grandparents and, of course, they loved him!

xx sue

Popular posts from this blog

Mr White Watson of Bakewell

Once upon a time, back in 1795 or so, lived a man who was always asking questions.  The kind of questions like, "Why is glass transparent?" or "Why do fruit trees grow better in that place than in this place?" or "What does the earth look like underneath the surface?"  This last question was one that he was particularly interested in, and he went so far as to work out what the rock layers looked like where he lived, and draw little pictures of them.  Now he was a marble sculptor by trade (as well as fossil hunter, mineral seller, and a few other things) so he thought it would be even better to make his little pictures in stone.  That way he could represent the layers using the actual rocks they were composed of.  Over the course of his lifetime he made almost 100 of these tablets, as he called them. Then he died.  And no one else was quite as interested in all those rocks and minerals as he was.  His collection was sold off, bit by bit, and the table...

Laid-back Lille and Bustling Brussels

After a night in a tiny AirBnB in Canterbury , where there were chocolates on the table and artwork on every inch of the walls, we boarded a ferry with an absolute minimum of fuss, enjoyed a smooth crossing of the channel, and were deposited in the decidedly unscenic surroundings of the port of Dunkirk two hours later. Once we got past the cranes and shipping containers, though, the countryside was flat but pleasant. We stopped at a small town called Cassel, reached by cobbled roads winding up a hill. On the summit was an old windmill and a topograph telling you the distances to various improbable places; St Omer may have been visible in the haze, but Manchester was surely over the horizon.  In Lille, we found our apartment, unpacked the luggage (one rucksack apiece), and set out to find food. Our first choice was fully booked, so we embarked on that kind of aimless wandering where everyone is hungry and no one wants to actually choose a restaurant. We reached a Lebanese place call...

Canterbury Cathedral

We were booking a trip to France, and I persuaded the family that it was madness to drive four hours to Dover and get straight on the ferry. "We should definitely stay overnight somewhere," I said. "Oh look, Canterbury is very handy - just twenty minutes from Dover." Of course, my suggestion was not influenced in the slightest by the fact that Canterbury contains England's most famous cathedral. On the way down, we stretched our legs on Dunstable Downs, an area of chalk grassland owned by the National Trust. I was pleased to spot a scarlet pimpernel for my 100 Plants Challenge . We also enjoyed watching gliders ascending and descending. We turned onto the M25 and made our way through busy traffic to the Dartford Crossing. This is one of those mythical points on the UK road network, like Scotch Corner and Watford Gap: the name familiar from traffic reports on the radio; the reality - for someone who grew up west of London - a hazy blur of imagination. It turns ou...