A huge Happy Birthday to Ben today, who is not only celebrating one more candle on the cake, but also that he became a Dad only one week ago!

Baby Ted was born on the 17th of August, tipping the scales at a very healthy 3.75 kg. The whole family is back at home now, and from all reports, they’re adjusting quite well to having one extra member living under the roof.

Happy Birthday Ben! Congratulations to you and ‘Chellsie! And welcome to the world, Ted!

View more photos in the Ted photo gallery on Picasa.

Before Tuesday afternoon, we had never met Julian’s sister Helen – yet when we did, it felt like we’d known her for ages. Probably because we’ve been facebook stalking her for at least two years now. That, and the fact that we lived with Julian (and Shelley, of course) for fifteen glorious months – and when you live with friends, you kind-of adpot their family into yours, even if it means memorising the names, places of residence, which ones have been shot, which ones may have rabies after being bitten by a monkey, etc – for about 20 people on either side.

We took Helen to one of our favourite coffee shops in the city – Brother Espresso, giving due credit to Jason for the original discovery of the store (at least in our direct line of contacts). We had never eaten there previously, but happily, we were all well impressed with our lunchtime delights – not to mention our coffee (though we should have ordered the coffee after lunch, to stop it from going cold while we were eating).

Oh the hours, how they whiled away! Helen was extremely entertaining to talk to (I must admit, she reminded me a lot of Julian, but that’s not a bad thing – we like Julian). To be fair though, I also was extremely entertaining – as you can see here, there were many occasions where the girls erupted into fits of raucous laughter in reaction to my hilarious antics.

Helen is only in Australia until mid September – it’s some sort of undercover, classified mission thing – but we’re hoping we can catch up with her again before she leaves! Only two more Lewis children to meet (Dan and Katherine, we’re talking about you here) and we’ll have the entire clan covered!

View the Helen in the city album on Picasa or Facebook.

Back in June, when my favourite visitors of all – Pearl Jam – were in town, many of our other favourite visitors were in town as well! And yes, I would say that about pretty much anyone that comes to visit – everyone is my favourite!

Anyway – Stacey and Wes came down for the concert and stayed with us for four nights. Stacey also stayed an extra night either side of that as well, as she had to be in London for her job. She’s down here quite often now in her new role, which is great because we get to see her all the time! (Note: I was going to link to the story on her blog here which talks about her new job, but I can’t seem to find it right now…)

Also in town that weekend was none other than John and his girlfriend Tina. We hadn’t seen John since our trip to Dusseldorf for Kirsty’s 30th, and a lot has changed in the meantime – like him moving countries! He’s now living in Texas, and enjoying all the benefits that come from being only a few doors down from Chipotle.

We spent a chunk of Saturday wandering around Covent Garden and SoHo with everyone, including a quick visit to The National Portrait gallery (total snooze-fest – good thing it was free!), and The British Museum (way better!). We also stumbled upon one of those face-in-hole scenes that Julian and Shelley are so fond of, so we all stepped up and had a turn.

Last (but certainly not least!), Uncle Martyn and Jenni were in town to polish off the end of a multi-week trip to Europe! They’d been to Morocco, Portugal, Ireland, and possibly other places before arriving in sunny London. We enjoyed an amazing dinner with them at Benares in Mayfair, followed by ice-cream at Freggo.

I also joined the two of them for lunch one day at Selfridges. My uncle’s favourite thing to eat in all of London is a salt-beef sandwich from the Brass Rail. I was happy to indulge with him, and I won’t lie – it was delicious!

Now we’re frantically tidying the house for some more visitors – the Cookes are coming over for two weeks! Better get back to it!

Yesterday, we joined Aubain in Ingrid in a lovely boat trip along the Thames. We picked up our boat from the boat hire company in Datchet around 11 AM, then set out “uphill” towards Windsor and Maidenhead. It was perfect boating weather, and the temperature by the water was just lovely!

We stopped and enjoyed a delicious champagne picnic for lunch on the grounds of Oakley court. We chose the spot based not only on the lovely scenery, but also on the sign which clearly stated that non-guests were welcome. It was only when we pulled away after lunch we read the other sign which said, “mooring for hotel guests only”. Whoops!

We also had to master the art of “locking”. OK, admittedly it wasn’t exactly difficult to master, but it was still a big part of the experience! We went through three separate locks on our day trip – I wonder how many you’d have to go through until you made it to Manchester?

Here’s a short video of our day on the water. Note that the maximum speed of our boat was a hair-raising 8km/h (or perhaps 9km/h when we were going “downhill”); consequently, parts of the video have been sped up for your viewing pleasure (including the 6 minutes of footage of one of the locks draining!).

View the Boating along the Thames album on Picasa or Facebook.

It’s a good thing that Powderfinger put on such a good show on Saturday night, because prior to rocking up to the concert, Julian, Shelley and I had been enjoying an amazing BBQ at Nick and Suzie’s place! It had absolutely every ingredient for a successful afternoon – loads of delicious food, awesome people, amazing sunshine, an unexpected quiz (including an Australian themed tin-foil sculpture round), awesome people (did I mention that one already?), and most importantly, table football!

When the invite said “come round at 2 PM” I had thought it would have given us loads of time to enjoy the afternoon with everyone, but before I knew it, it was 8 PM and time to leave! I could have more than happily stayed there until the wee small hours with everyone; I’m wondering what time the tequila and jenga would have inevitably come out?

Anyway – a massive thanks to Nick and Suzie for their awesome hosting skills; it was such a great afternoon, and it really felt like the start of summer. Fingers crossed for more weekends like that!

View the BBQ at Nick and Suzie’s gallery on Picasa or Facebook.

For the second long weekend in May, our personal travel planner – Suzie – organised an extended long weekend in Lake Garda. We took the early flight from Gatwick to Milan on Friday morning (which meant waking up at 3:45 AM, w00t!), then drove for 2.5 hours or so, up to Riva Del Garda where we checked in to the Parc Hotel Flora for four nights.

Driving in Italy is not always the greatest fun. Italian drivers are rude, arrogant, love to speed, and they tailgate like nothing I’ve ever seen before. We tried to take a photo of how close they drive – this is the best one that we got. Bare in mind that at this point we were driving at around 130km/h (which is the speed limit on Italian highways):

On the plus side, it’s always a bit of a laugh to drive a left-hand-drive manual – changing gears with your right hand is downright weird when you’re not used to it!

As usual, the food in Italy was overall quite lovely, but our stand-out favourite place to eat – especially for Nick – was a restaurant called Al Volt. The concierge at our hotel had recommended it to us on our first evening, and it was so good that we ended up eating there again on our final evening. The food was deliciously prepared, the staff were friendly, but most impressive of all were the red wine glasses – each one was almost the size of a human head.

On Saturday morning, we rode the Mount Baldo cableway up to an altitude of 1,800m, and had a walk around the peaks. Unfortunately it was too overcast to get a view of the lake, but we did get a decent view of the start of the alps.

We also grabbed a cache while we were there, dropping off a travel bug that I’ve been holding on to for a few weeks. Suzie was the one who spotted it and dug it out from under the rocks – her first cache!

Nick, Suzie and I signed up for some downhill mountain biking on Sunday morning, but when we got to the rental store, we discovered that the other three people that were supposed to be joining us had piked due to the inclement weather. Usually they wouldn’t go up less than four starters but upon seeing how keen we were, they decided to make an exception. Originally we had signed up for a tour called The Skull but since it was our first time, and it was raining pretty heavily, our guide decided to take us on a slightly easier route.

It was so, so awesome! I was amazed at how much easier it is going over huge, rocky, staircase-like drops when the bike does absorbs most of the shock for you. I was well impressed by how solid they, and yet our guide told us that we were only riding the “cheap ones”, retailing for only $3,000! “Only”!

Lately, our luck with travel seems to be working against us, as wherever we go it rains! And for the first three days of our stay, this was exactly what we got – drizzly rain in the mornings, followed by overcast afternoons, then cool evenings. But our luck finally changed on Monday – the sun came out, the skies were a beautiful clear blue, and it was as warm as a freshly baked brownie!

We made the most of the sunshine by driving down to another town called Limone, where we rented a speed boat for four hours and did ourselves some touring. I can’t emphasis enough how much of a difference the sunshine made – it was like being in a totally different place! Of course, being sunsmart Australians, we did our very best to stay out of the direct sunlight.

We all had a go at driving the boat, and it was awesome fun. At full lock (and full speed of course), the boat turned so tightly that we almost thought it would tip! But try as we might (and of course, some of us tried harder than others… no names mentioned…), the boat stayed upright, which on reflection was probably a good thing.

Nick and I jumped overboard for a swim at one point, and it was freezing cold – we didn’t stay in for more than a minute! Not one to miss out, Suzie braved the water as well, but Kristy decided to give it a miss – she was the wisest of us all, I think!

Usually our vacations are non-stop from start to finish, as we try to cram in as much as we can into every day – so it was great to escape to Lake Garda and have Nick and Suzie show us how to holiday a somewhat more relaxed pace.

View the Lake Garda photo album on Picasa or Facebook.

Checking out a new city is always better when you’re there with an expert. With this in mind, we jumped at the chance when our Swedish friend Oscar (who I used to work with at CQS) offered us a tour of Stockholm. Aubain and Ingrid were on the same wavelength, so we all jetted off on Friday night after work to spend a weekend in the the capital of Scandinavia.

Stockholm is an absolutely beautiful city – so fresh and so clean! It’s actually composed of hundreds of little islands (well – 14 islands), so it’s hard to pick a photo that shows the “centre of the city”, mainly because I never really worked out where it was. Instead, here’s a photo of some water, buildings, and a park. The street on the right is Strandvägen, which according to Oscar is one of the most expensive places to live in the world.

The people who live there seem to be a bit of an enigma; clearly they want society to think the best of them for living in such a prestigious location, yet I saw at least two or three of the oldies sitting on their balconies and enjoying the sunshine – completely naked! Well, you know what they say about Europeans and nudity…

One of the great things about Stockholm is that all the streets are named after the most successful pieces of Ikea furniture. Take this sign for example, which not only points the way towards the Vasa Museum – but also towards Gälarvarvet street, named after their most successful ever line of dwarfish steak knives.

We chose the path towards the museum, and enjoyed learning about the “most badass warship of its time” (as described by Oscar), which, in 1628, sailed about 150 meters out of port before sinking to the bottom of the harbour. But, as Aubain put it so well – trust the Swedes to turn failure into success, by rescuing the ship in 1961, painstakingly restoring it and housing it in a purpose built museum, and then charging the public 110 SEK (about £11) to visit! It was well worth it!

When we told people we were going to Stockholm, the phrase we heard most often was, “ohh, it’s expensive”. Some people used even more “h’s” on their “ohh”, like, “ohhhhhhh”. And oh my, were they were right – for lunch on Saturday, we had two salads and a bottle of sparkle sparkle (that’s water, by the way) for the princely sum of 502 SEK (around £50). Ouch! So with that in mind, we were pleasantly surprised when in the Old Town, we stumbled upon a little hole in the wall called Caffellini Bar, and I found myself drawn inside. I did my best to try to blend in with the locals; as opposed to Aubain and Ingrid, who did their best to not look like the locals.

For 10 SEK (around £1), I wasn’t expecting too much from my macchiato, and yet it was exceptional! I would recommend the Caffellini Bar as the first port of call for any visitor to Stockholm!

We had enjoyed amazing weather on Saturday – perfect for exploring the town, grabbing some caches, and getting a bit of colour in our pasty white skin. As much as I’d like to say this continued on Sunday, it was actually the complete opposite – in fact, every time we went outside, it started pouring down, and every time we went inside, it stopped again! We were cursed! Thankfully, Stockholm is home to the largest photography museum in the world, so we had plenty of things to keep us busy. But we still got wet.

(That’s my photo by the way. The museum has approached me to feature it, but I’ve so far declined to comment.)

A huge thanks to Aubain, Ingrid, and Oscar for a great weekend away!

On Tuesday night after work, I headed up to Camden with Lea and Dean to see Birds of Tokyo play at Barfly (for only £6.50 a ticket!). We grabbed a few Red Stripes (or cider in Lea’s case) before heading upstairs to see the second warm-up band – Mujeres de Barcelona. They were an absolutely crazy Japanese three piece, with the tiniest female bass player that I’ve ever seen (as opposed to the gigantic female bassists in most of the other bands I see?). She can’t have been more than 5 foot high, and the bass guitar looked massive in her hands!

(Apologies for the photo quality; I only had my phone camera with me, and it doesn’t do a great job in low light.)

Credit where credit’s due; she was great, lead guitarist/vocalist was freaking amazing – though I had no idea if he was “singing” in English or Japanese. It was such a weird experience.

Birds came on around 10 PM (!!), which unfortunately meant they only played for an hour and a bit. They didn’t play my favourite song (The Baker’s Son), but their overall setlists was quite solid, and included at least four tracks from their forthcoming album. It sounds like it’s going to be their best album to date; I’ll be buying it as soon as I can get hold of it! Unsurprisingly, most of the crowd were Australians, and most people seemed quite chuffed with the band’s performance.

Barfly was a great venue too – it was a little bit too loud for such a tiny room, but there can’t have been more than two metres between me and the main stage, then Andrew Goddard walked straight past us after coming off stage! Cool!

As you may remember, we spent our Easter long weekend with Racey and Wes in The Lake District. As usual, we took a decent chunk of video footage, and I finally had a chance on the weekend to put it all together.

I have to say upfront, this is not my best video ever. The footage was all a bit choppy and random. Actually, there was a fault with the camera, and this was the last time we used it before sending it in to get fixed. So hopefully the next video is a bit more cohesive.

Still, it is what it is, and it brings back some memories. Enjoy!

Time – 5:04, Size: 36 MB

Music
Biffy Clyro – Mountains
The Goo Goo Dolls – Give a Little Bit

London is about to lose another Aussie, and whilst the BNP may believe this is a good thing, we’re certainly not on board with their thinking.

We first met T-Pants on our crazy jaunt to Paris, and it’s amazing how good a friend you can become with someone simply by being stuck next to them in a car for 30 hours. At the very least, we knew he wasn’t a psychopath, and that’s always the first criteria we use for selecting friends!

Todd and I share a very similar taste in music, was always great when bands that either of us liked were touring, as it meant that we always had someone to go see them with! Unfortunately – and due mainly to his addiction to travel – Todd has missed more concerts than he has bought tickets for than anyone I know. In fact, I’d guess that he has probably seen less than half the concerts that he had tickets for – and he’s probably missing one right now, as I type!

Anyway, we’ve had an awesome time getting to know Todd over the last three years, and we’re very sad to see him going. We look forward to catching up again with him when we’re all living happily back in the Great Southern Land. Happy travels, dude!