What a holiday!

We had the most incredible holiday in Egypt and Jordan, with too many highlights to count including the Dead Sea, Petra, swimming in the Nile (and sailing up it in a felucca), the Egyptian museum in Cairo, the Valley of the Kings, Abu Simbel, snorkelling in the Red Sea... 

And of course, walking up Mt Sinai and seeing the sunrise - and getting engaged!  Very exciting indeed. 

We've got literally hundreds and hundreds of photos, so we're ploughing our way through them to make sure we only pick out the absolute highlights to bore you all with!  As a teaser, here are two from Petra:

Me in Petra, looking at the mosaic floor

Overlooking the Treasury in Petra - an amazing hike up to this stunning view

 It was just so great to finally be in the sunshine again and to be able to do lots of swimming.  Incredibly as well I didn't get sick which was so great and meant that we could enjoy everything to the full.  We took these biobalance pills which have lots of probiotics in them and I would highly recommend them!

So stay tuned for the photos and more stories.  There's a low of 3 degrees today in London and the wind is biting, so it's a bit of a change being back, but more incentive to stay inside and do my reading!

Busy, busy, busy

I just looked at the blog and realised that I hadn't done a single entry for the whole of September - terrible!  But it has seriously been a rather busy month for us, as I've been working nearly full time on Growth Week, which has meant that most other stuff (including my PhD) has taken a bit of a back seat.

However, now that's over, it's back to two days/week work, and I've officially designated November as 'No Fun November' so that I can make sure I'm keeping on track with my PhD due date!

Some other fun things have happened in September though - I'm now President of the Beekeeping Society (although hopefully only temporarily as it's probably too much work for me to keep doing in the long term), and I had a lovely two week stay up in Islington cat-sitting, which meant lots of tummy scratching and purring to keep me company.

We also got to go to the Olympics and Paralympics, both of which were amazing.  I must say though, I did enjoy the Paralympics more - we got a day pass to the Excel Centre and saw table tennis (below), sitting volleyball, powerlifting and boccia, as well as tickets to the final night of the athletics at the stadium.  I had bought those tickets literally months and months ago and really had no idea what we were going to see, and realising that we were going to see the 400m final with Oscar Pistorus was pretty cool!  I really liked the blind runners running with their guides as well as the high-jump - those guys were pretty inspiring.

And keeping on the sport theme, Adrian also just ran the Berlin marathon in an amazing time of 2:58:11.  How fast is that??  Good inspiration for me as I've signed up for my first triathlon, the Blenheim triathlon in June next year.  Lots of training to come!

We're off to Egypt and Jordan this weekend, which I am really looking forward to - especially the weather.  Check out the temperatures for Cairo while we're there - absolutely perfect!