A to Z year : April 9th - 22nd : the letter H

I am so late blogging H - we're mere minutes away from the end of I!

I've been having so much fun lately that there hasn't been enough time in between the days of excitement to blog about the days of excitement, iyswim :)

We started the H fortnight with a pleasant, and entirely unexpected, H related treat. Our local ice hockey team, the Swindon Wildcats, where we have season tickets, actually made it to the league playoff finals! Only four teams from a league of 10 get to the finals, and, well, let’s just say that it was a shock to everyone that we found ourselves part of that four :) Especially after how badly the team had been performing for much of the season.

So, Jay went off up to Coventry to support the team along with the other Wildcats faithful:


Unfortunately we didn’t win, but we’re just so proud of the team for getting there at all - go Cats go!!!!

While Jay was up in Coventry, along with our pals M & T, I was left babysitting various hockey orphans – poor little waifs and strays :) So I set out with three young lads to have an H-themed fun day out.

First of all, we went to Horse World in Bristol. I had never even heard of this place, until I started researching things to do beginning with H - another case of the A-Z Year project broadening our horizons and helping us to discover places and pastimes we never would have come across otherwise, thanks Nicole!


Horse World is a rehabilitation centre for working horses who have reach the end of their useful life, and horses who have been victims or neglect or cruelty. The horses are obviously the main draw here, the boys particularly enjoyed the opportunity they were given to groom one of the tamer animals. But HW is also an attraction in its own right, with large indoor and outdoor play areas for the kids, a cool ride where you get pulled along very fast by a madman on a quad, an arts and crafts barn, and various other exhibits and points of interest. The boys had a brilliant time there.

I particularly loved this horse sculpture, made from 5,000 CDs, or was it 50,000? Can't remember.... but however many CDs, it was very cool :)

We also had a very tasty (and healthy) lunch – the most delicious jacket potatoes ever, with salad. OK, maybe the boys didn’t eat much of the salad, but I enjoyed mine :)

After HW, we all went on the hunt for a geocache…..well we could hardly resist, given its name: Herman the Hamster's Houdini Hideaway! Howzat for H fortnight?? :D


This was a really good fun cache, in a lovely large and peaceful park, right in the middle of Bristol. It always surprises me how few people use these gorgeous green spaces – we saw a couple of people walking their dogs, but that was about it. Everyone seems too busy nowadays just to take a moment and go for a nice walk. I’m glad that we have geocaching to encourage us out into the open on a regular basis.

The cache owner requested that all finders should have their picture taken with the toy hamster who lives in the cache, so here are the Chaos Crew, junior division, and Herman:

The next day we went to see How To Train Your Dragon – excellent film! And then had a hearty (and huge, at least mine was) dinner at the local Hungry Horse pub.



The boys had hotdogs, and then what I call “mafia pudding” – a horse’s head made from ice cream – don’t annoy your local ice cream man or you might find this on your pillow :)





During the second week of the fortnight, it was happy birthday to me - yay! And Jay bought me a Hello Kitty cake :) :) :)


Connor made me two fab, and of course H related, pressies for my birthday:

A HAMA bead pendant


and Hoppity the frog

The eagle eyed amongst you will also notice I had a haircut during this week.

And Connor and I went out for a meal, where we spotted hexagonal shelving - result! :)


On my actual birthday, Jay and I went out to do some geocaching - a series by the Hedwig Hawks, that started with a cache called Hagrid's Beard. Lots of Hs there :)

It involved us getting chased by a herd of bullocks:


I was hoping they might be heifers, but according to Wiki, they are girl cows, and these were definitely boys.

(I know they don't look desperately menacing in that photo, but trust me, when there are 20 of them running at you, it's kind of unnerving :))

We also hid a geocache of our own this fortnight - if any of you are in or around Swindon, why not have a try at finding it?

Our final H related activity was, you guessed it, another geocache :) Well, we have to grab a few while the weather's nice....

It was a fantastic one at that - Hock Cliff by the River Severn, near Gloucester

The excellent thing about this cliff by the river, is that it is teeming with Jurassic era fossils - so after finding the cache we went on a fossil hunt - and we found quite a few.


I think that's pretty much everything for the H fortnight - still loving this A-Z adventure.

Next, the letter I, and an excuse for a proper (if short) holiday