A to Z Year : October 22nd - November 18th : letters V and W

And so we reach the last few letters of the alphabet, just XYZ to go after this little update.

What fun this year has been!

I must admit that as the winter months have kicked in, our A-Z activity has withered somewhat – we haven’t had the same opportunities for themed days out etc as we did in the warmer parts of the year. But we have tried to do at least one major activity for each letter.

For the letter V we started with a visit to Avebury Village, to see the very old stone circles.

This was part of our attempt to find various varieties of geocache in one day – including a virtual.

We also had a delicious pub lunch and snapped proof of the kids eating their vegetables:

Later that same evening, we watched our Swindon Wildcats claim a (rare, this season) victory, versus the Bracknell Bees.

And we ate some very expensive, but sadly not as delicious as I thought it would be, Venezuelan chocolate.

The next day we went to see a great movie – Despicable Me – in 3D vision! This was especially chosen for V fortnight, as it is all about super villains, and one of them was called Vector, and he has a big V on his house. Loved this film very very much, so funny.

During this fortnight I also had the rare treat of a Vancouver Canucks game being broadcast during waking hours, as they played over on the East coast (meaning face off at midnight our time instead of the usual 3am) – so I got to see my boys play live for once. I can’t even remember who we were playing now, but I’m pretty sure it was another victory, as I remember going to sleep happy :)

We had one more hockey related V moment when my friend’s nephew’s junior hockey team visited the Link Centre to play the Swindon under-12s, and we went along to see him play. And why is it V related? Because they are from the Isle of Wight of course….known in Roman times as Vectis! ( If anyone accuses me of grabbing at tenuous connections I’ll deny it vehemently :P )

We topped off V fortnight with a fab weekend away in Lincoln, where we spent Halloween. There were plenty of people out in the town in costume, so we saw more than a few vampires.




Onto two weeks of W:

We started with a visit to Coate Water – we had a nice walk around the lake in the cold, and then went on the train – here’s me going “woo wooooo!!” on the choo chooooo :)

And then we tried Waymarking out for size. Waymarking.com is the sister site to geocaching – it is similar in as much as it provides GPS co-ordinates to follow to a place of interest, and when you visit said place, you can log your visit and get a “point” – but there are no actual physical containers to find.

I decided that W fortnight was as good a time as any for us to find our first waymark, so I did a search around the Swindon area only to discover, well, not much of interest really. It seems that, with the exception of the benchmark/trig point category, nobody has set up many waymarks around here.

One did jump out at me though – in the category “Wikipedia Entries” – the Swindon Wildcats! Yes, it turned out we could claim a Waymarking point by going to a Wildcats game :) Not exactly a chore as we are season ticket holders and go every week anyway :) :) :) So that got us a triple W whammy :)

The following Saturday while Connor was at his dad’s, the rest of us donned our walking boots and waterproofs and went for a nice long walk in the wet.

And then on the Sunday, we had our main W-related activity – a day out to Wookey Hole in Wells – sooooo exciting! I haven’t been there since Ethan and Darby were tiny, and I love the place.

It was great to have the alphabet as an excuse to go down there :) Plus I got the tickets for free via Tesco loyalty card points, which saved us having to pay the exorbitant entrance fees – result!

At the caves we of course saw the famous Witch of Wookey Hole, and the wishing well (and the "witches" and "wizards" toilets :) ). And we had a whale of a time!

 I'll be back soon with the very last A-Z Year blog entry.  Sob.