Phew, I've just returned from a work trip to Istanbul. 

Things have been quiet here at Bakercourt, but with good reason: we were in Paris.

Paris!


Our long-awaited first trip was fabulous. Even though it was cold. Even though I lost my passport just before we left (and found it again down the side of my desk). Even though we had to catch a night bus at 3am to get to the train station. Fabulous.

I'm going to give you ample warning: there are going to be a lot of photos in this post. Just so you know. You might need a cup of tea before you carry on scrolling. This is the highlights tour.


We walked a lot. From one end of the Sienne to the other, from top to bottom, around markets, and up and down Butte Montmarte.


We walked past the many stalls along the Sienne selling vintage Playboy Magazines, past the postcard sellers, and through the pretty narrow streets.


We happened upon the padlock bridge. The story goes that you lock in your love as you secure your padlock to the bridge, and it'll stay there - sealed and safe. Nearby vendors were selling tiny "love locks" for a whopping €5. I was happy enough with the photo.


We went up the Eiffel Tower. Determined to add to our growing collection of self-portrait photographs, we took every opportunity to capture ourselves in front of important monuments and in great locations. That's a teeny bit of the Eiffel Tower's second platform you can see there. We'll know that in case anyone asks if we're in a factory.


The weather was cold but clear, except for one night where it started to pour down with rain as the sun was setting. We took shelter under a bridge on the Sienne where we drank €3 coffee (we were given only half a cup!) and tried to decide on the most sheltered route to the nearest metro. It was a sign: go back to your hotel and enjoy a night off.


We visited the Notre Dame Cathedral too. It's dark and magical inside, and light and beautiful outside. They're rebuilding the bells for next year so that the sound is authentic when they ring them - that would be amazing to hear!

We were exceptionally fortunate for our entire trip: the queues weren't very long, and the tour groups were completely manageable if you got in front of them. We were in a lot of tourist photos, but that's okay. Sometimes you just have to let go.


... and sometimes you have to join them.


Visiting the Louvre was like walking in a dream. I spent much of my school years with my nose buried in art history books - and this week (this week!) I went to the Louvre. And, I saw the artworks I had previously read about, written about, composed essays about, been marked on.


The experience was all quite surreal. One minute you're walking through the streets of Paris with a very real, very "now" concern of being quite cold and a bit a tired, and the next minute you're walking through the vast marble halls of the Louvre and being transported back hundreds of years to a time and place where your real concerns aren't that important anymore.


It's a place where everything is so much more beautiful than you had imagined it could be.


After three hours of zooming up stairs, down lifts, and trying to figure out where I wanted to go - we agreed on a truce: coffee, and a return trip at a later date dedicated specifically to art appreciation at the Louvre.


There's something very satisfying about having a pâtisserie on every street. There's nothing quite like the smell of warm croissants in the morning as you walk about. I think most people think that - the croissants were always sold out well before 10am.



There's always a sweet treat at the end of a long walk in Paris. And, oh! The colours.


We stayed in Montmarte, and used the spires of the Sacre-Coeur to navigate our way to and from the hotel. Convenient.


It just so happened to be one of the nicest parts of town, too.


Also, it has a train. That's just in case you can't face the bazillion steps that lead up and down Butte Montmarte. I was tempted, but we carried on walking and exploring.


Where else could you find a square filled with artists? Many of them were wearing berets, too. Ha.


We walked around a few food markets all around Paris. They were amazing. The produce was fresh, the fruit was delicious, and the locals were perfectly happy to communicate in hand signals with us as we carefully chose apples and oranges for lunch. We came up against some grumpy French people in other shops (who absolutely refused to listen to us in English), but generally the people who spoke no English were more than happy to communicate using broken French and hand signals.


And so. Our whirlwind trip was over almost as soon as it began. Here we are at Gare du Nord train station, ready to head back on the Eurostar with all of the other English folk. They were grouping around the coffee shops and buying baguettes en masse.


The one thing that I absolutely loved was this: a giant clacker-board of notifications. Forget about digital; this sign was all about clickity-clacking its way through the letters to make up the right displays. The noise was incredible. Every few minutes you'd hear a whir, and then the clackers would wake up and start spinning, making their way down the board to update the departure times. I tried to take a photo of it in action - you can see the turning letters about half way down (where some of them are red). Proof. We'll always have Paris.

Devon was lovely.

Granted, it rained non-stop. But that didn't put me off it one bit.

The roads are really narrow, and driving along them is terrifying.

But: there is no place like home, and Devon feels like Home. There are harbours everywhere, plenty of sea, rivers, and pretty colourful houses.

















Oh, how I love rows of beautiful colourful houses - like beach huts, all lined up neatly. We saw some beach huts in Torquay which were amazing but it was raining an awful lot and my little camera doesn't like the wet that much.
















We camped in a tent. It rained and poured, and the tent was just fine. We stayed at the Dartmouth Camp Site right next to a field of sheep who merrily baa-d the entire trip. I half expected a sheep to come and snuggle up with us out of the rain, but they kept to their side of the fence.






















Dartmouth itself is a beautiful little town filled with plenty of coffee shops, restaurant and arty places to explore. There were lots of home stores (selling hand-made things) and lots of sweet shops. We bought super sour sherbet bombs (!) and Fizz Wizz popping candy, just for the fun of it.

















It did rain for almost the entire trip so our planned hiking was postponed. That being said, the rain let up for us just enough to explore the coastline and to see have a little walk around many of the neighbouring towns and villages.

















We caught a lot of boats and ferries! It was so much fun to go out on the river (and here you can see my in my incredibly red rain jacket - all prepared. At least you wouldn't lose me in a crowd) - that was definitely my favourite part.

















This looks less like England and more like a tropical island paradise! I can imagine that it must be such a hot spot in the rain-free bits of summer.






















This is a sight we're more used to seeing at home in South Africa, so it was quite a treat to see a bold splash of colour on an otherwise dreary day! Devon is full of colourful surprises, though, and just when you thought that the locals couldn't get any wetter, they held a craft market and antiques fair in the middle of the harbour.



Also, there was some creative gardening in celebration of the Queen's Jubilee!

... and what is a birthday without cake? We visited Anne of Cleves Tea Rooms in Totnes on my birthday proper (after a little browse - and buy - in Creative Crafts and Needlework just up the high street!) and sat down to a proper afternoon tea of Devonshire Scones with Cornish Clotted Cream.
On the way out we also walked past Roly's Fudge and bought some delicious clotted cream fudge which was incredible. I'd go back to Devon, even if it was just for the fudge.

I suppose the best thing about the break wasn't that we experienced a wonderful new corner of England, or that we ate out at Devonshire eateries and made new friends with some of the locals, or even that we walked about, went on boat trips and almost came home with a Boston Terrier. Oh no. The best thing about our trip was that we were away for a short break, together, and that we enjoyed the adventure of a rainy seaside holiday with lots of reading, plenty of chatting, and absolutely no computer.

Today is the end of our week-long holiday. Going back to work is not something I think of with fondness, there's an awful lot of hullaballoo that's going to happen in the next few weeks, but I'm happily looking back on our little sojourn. The universe was conspiring as we were planning it: work happened, our plans to go to Italy fell through because of financial constraints, we still have wedding invitations to make and send out... but we were okay. We hired a car, packed a bag, and headed to Oxfordshire.

I've got so many anecdotes to share with you that I'll have to split them up into bite-sized posts. I'll start with Bath and Sally Lunn's Bath Buns.

If the name isn't enough to sell it to you, we ventured to the beautiful city of Bath on a whim. G's grandparents hadn't yet had the opportunity to see the Bath empire, so it was the perfect day trip - and we were a mere forty-five minutes from the spa resort, established, as Wikipedia tells us, in the wee early days of AD 43.

















There is much to see and do in Bath, but we were there for a few hours and we had a distinct plan of action: have a look at the general architecture, visit Kitchens and Lakeland, walk around the shopping district, see the Royal Crescent, and have tea at Sally Lunn's.

















Sally Lunn's is a rather famous tea house. The last time we were here we dined at Jane Austen's Regency Tea Rooms so G and I thought we'd try out something else. This eatery has a lot of history, a Baked Bun legacy and a secret recipe that is passed down from generation to generation with the deed of the house.

Sally, a French refugee, arrived in Bath in 1680. She found work at what is now Bath's Oldest House, and today her baking legacy lives on in the form of her baked buns - which you can still purchase from her old kitchen gift shop for £1.60, or from the tea shop above her kitchen for around £4. You can see the building in the scanned postcard above; I bought it from the Sally Lunn gift shop, down in the basement of the building amongst the ancient, exposed foundations.

Sally Lunn's is very narrow. The roof is low, the wooden beams of the building are exposed underneath the thickly-applied white paint, and the deep red, maroons and yellows of the Sally Lunn legacy are plastered across the interior decor. There are framed maps and drawings haphazardly hung on the walls, and the tables (of which there are many) are squeezed into Tetris shapes surrounded by (mostly) comfortable chairs.

The buns are rather surprising baked goods. I had expected something like a currant scone, but what I got was something altogether different. You can see from the postcard above that they're more akin to oversized hamburger buns.

















You get half a bun (horizontally sliced) when you order from the menu. There are a lot of different options - sweet and savoury - that vary from clotted cream with strawberry jam to the one I chose: cinnamon butter with clotted cream.






















They heap the topping on to the bun, and top it with a slice of orange. The bun itself might look like a hamburger roll from Woolies, but it had a denser texture that was heavier and sweeter than the ones you might eat for lunch. The cinnamon butter was a bit overpowering, but I scraped some of it off to suit my personal tastes and it was quite enjoyable. My tea companions each opted for scones instead:

















That's clotted cream in the top left, not butter. Clotted cream, as I may have mentioned before in a previous post, is a deliciously butter-thick cream (think: marscapone without the cheese) which you get with scones or other baked goods from tea shops, but which you can quite easily pick up from a supermarket. They really should export this stuff to South Africa, it would do brilliantly.






















This is a flyer I picked up from the gift shop. I'm surprised that they advertise it as 'award winning' - - the service wasn't particularly good (we were served cold coffee by unfriendly women), the atmosphere was quaint and cosy (which is a nice way to say that it was a bit cramped) and we were rushed out because there was a long queue outside. That being said, it was still a good 'Bath Experience', something I'd recommend to anyone who is interested in history (or anyone who is interested in baking, at least!) - just try to go early in the morning or mid-afternoon to avoid the lunch rush. Do pop downstairs and have a quick look around the museum: you can see the exposed foundations which record the various phases of history and Sally Lunn's bricked oven. You can also buy jars of their butters - Maple and Pecan, Cinnamon, Ginger, Chocolate and others - as well as their tasty jams and take-home buns.

Happy New Year! We're currently suffering from severe internetlessness after having moved house (yes, more on that later! I promise to post pictures of home once we've cleaned up nicely and we have sufficient bandwidth to upload an image or two), so my apologies for only sending out bloggy New Year wishes now.

We got to celebrate New Year's Day with a seven-hour drive up to the Land of the Haggis to meet Richard and Aaron who have been a-visiting from Sunny South Africa. The drive was heaps of fun, complete with many stops at 'services' (what we'd call 'rest stops'), hunting around for travel pillows, and hilariously awkward vending machines that indicate the particular nuances of the various areas we stopped in. We ate awful burgers, drank take-away coffee in the car and laughed hysterically at the ridiculous town names we passed by. There was a terrifying moment when I realised that we were out of mobile signal range for about two hours but I think I can be forgiven for my reliance on technology at that moment because we were winding our way along country roads with no lights in the middle of the pitch-blackness of nightfall!

Edinburgh was rather different from what we were expecting. It was dark, grimy and layered. The buildings were montaged to form a giant structure that rose and fell out of the earth in various shades of brown and grey, and the cars were constantly streaming around the oddly circular roads.

















And just when you weren't expecting it, the world turned topsy turvy and in the middle of a busy intersection, a little stone house rose out of the greens and looked like it had grown out of a seed:





















I wanted to have this little abode, but it wasn't very accessible nor would it easily fit into our car boot, methinks.

Aaron and I discovered the most fantastic vending machine in the world which certainly deserves a mention: a Ben & Jerry's vending machine in the hotel lobby. Yes - ice-cream. It involved a  vacuum suction cup on the end of a robotic arm, a freezer, and tiny tubs of Ben & Jerry's goodness dispensed in the flavour of your choice. The novelty cost a whopping £3.00.

We did the sightseeing and touristy things in Edinburgh, like walking along Princes Street and visiting all the kilt-makers along the way. Here's Richard trying on some fun Scottish merchandise:






















We also hunted down the best place to eat Scottish Food which happened to be the highly-recommended Monster Mash. Their speciality is sausages and mash. The décor was a bit uncomfortable with black and white contrasts, but it had a nice diner feel about it and the food was delicious! Here's Richard's giant Scottish pie:


... and Graeme's McSween Haggis!


Haggis, Turnips and Mash.

How Very Scottish.

We even made our way into the Edinburgh Castle which is atop a giant hill that requires much huffing and puffing. Here's the Castle from way down below where you can see it perched on its vantage point:






















See? There it is... all the way up there.... and you have to walk there. Anyway, we got there nice and early, got our tickets without much fuss, and happily wondered around the castle buildings enjoying the history, the sights, the Scottish Crown Jewels and the Book and Whisky Shop. I thought it was particularly funny to have a shop in the castle dedicated to such apparently opposite products, but no! It was quite the norm inside, with patrons purchasing trinkets, tokens, whiskies and tour books.

Here's Graeme walking alongside the turrets of the castle. It's so very high that you get quite a sense of the sublime when you're standing at the top overlooking the expanse of the city.