Saturday the 7th of March 11:00am and to celebrate my Wife’s birthday a group of us pile off to go on the Tarka Line Rail Ale Trail.

For the un-initiated this involved getting on and off trains at various middle of no-where train stations and then going into pubs to drink booze.

The Tarka Line trail kicks off in Exeter, so we start proceedings in “The Mill on the Exe”, where I select a decent local ale called Tribute. I decide to record the day with a photo of the gang before everyone is too heavily influenced by ale consumption!

Ross knows the way to the next pub, and isn’t afraid to show us.

Another of Ross’ apparently limitless talents is the ability to form intricate designs in the remnants of the head of his pint. This time, it’s a birdy.

Next up we wander down the road to Exeter St Davids station where we catch the train to our second destination.

Stop one is Eggesford, and the Fox and Hounds for a spot of lunch.

I lead off with a pint of Otter Bitter, and follow up with another Tribute. Mmmmm. Ale.

The food at The Fox and Hounds is very good, and is quite good value for money also. The twelve of us put a decent bit of grub in our bellies in anticipation of further ale consumption, although a few of the girls have switched to wine already. Wimps!

Two hours pass very quickly and it’s back to the station to catch another train. We decide to end our outward journey here as we’ve got limited time and have pre-selected a couple of pubs that we don’t want to miss. So it’s on a train to head back towards Exeter.

Next stop, Morchard Road.

Now it’s time for another group photo. Ross shows off his shy side in this one.

Disaster! We find that Morchard Road serves a small collection of buildings which constitutes a couple of houses, a garage that is closed and our target pub, the Devonshire Dumpling. Which is also closed… Worse still, it’s an hour and a half until the next train is due…

A rapid phone call to the pub convinces them to open up just for us and we all pile in. The staff tell us that they are more an eating pub than a drinking pub, and that they don’t open during the afternoon. As this is slightly at odds with the Tarka Line information leaflet, we politely point out they might want to update their entry.

More ale consumption follows.

After our alloted hour and thirty minutes we stumble back to the station to wait for a train.

No.

The next stop is Yeoford station.

Immediately next to the station is a building, we glance through the window and see a guy behind a bar (complete with optics) cleaning glasses. So we can be forgiven for trying to get in, only for the chap to tell us it’s his house, and not a pub! Oops.

Luckily the next pub is only over the bridge, it’s The Mare and Foal.

I’ll confess that the service in The Mare and Foal wasn’t as good as the other pubs we’d visited. It is a lovely pub and does serve some good beer, but we’d come to expect high standards during the day and for me the Mare and Foal didn’t meet those standards.

We did get to have a good few games of pool though.

By now it’s dark out and we’ve got to head back to Exeter for our final stop. The train rolls into the station and we all tumble aboard.

Our final stop is the Great Western Hotel just next to Exeter St. Davids station. We sink another pint and our day on the trail of ale draws to a close.

The verdict – highly recommended, an excellent way to pass an afternoon. I would actually say that it’s better to spend two or more days doing this, and take in more of the stops and pubs available to you. Limited to one afternoon we only managed five of the pubs and it would have been great to fit a few more in!

Knock. Knock.

Who’s there?

A massive dickhead who dropped his new camera.

Oh.

Last weekend we (Laura, Phil, Abby and I) wended our merry way to North Yorkshire for a couple of days. We had a big family get together with food and drink and it was lovely. The drive up there didn’t take too long, about 4 hours, although some gigantic moron forgot to bring half his stuff (cough, me, cough) so we had to stop at a shopping centre so he could buy clothes.

Sitting in the back is for kids, I hate it.

We were put up in a lovely little hotel called the Old Lodge Hotel in Malton, one of the nicest places I’ve stayed.

As it was short visit there was only time to do four things.

1.) Go to Whitby.
2.) Go to York.
3.) Drop my brand new Leica camera.
4.) Eat and drink sick amounts.

Obviously of these things the third one would have been better if it hadn’t happened. Now I throw myself at the mercy of the insurance company in the hopes I can get it replaced.

The point of buying the Leica was that it would in theory deliver images that are close in quality to my Nikon D200. The weekend was a good test of this because I had several opportunities to give the camera a workout. The good news is that I didn’t really miss the D200 too much, certainly not enough to warrant carrying all that weight.

The bad news is as I dropped the Leica it might all be moot.

Whitby Abbey at sunset, a nice place to visit but on the third of January it’s COLD!

Next up was a trip to York to wander the streets and take in the sights. York is officially great and the only problem was we didn’t have another day to spend there. A stroll along the Shambles was nice, a bit like being in a Dickens book only without faeces and piss lining the streets and no-one had rickets or polio.

After that it was off to York Minster to marvel at how on Earth they built stuff like that in the olden days, I can’t even use polyfilla without making a terrible terrible mess. Which basically confirms that men in Medieval times were far more manly and brilliant than me. But HA! I’ve got a whizzy camera so there. Oh wait, I smashed it.

We climbed the 4.2 billion steps to the top of the tower up what I can only describe as a staircase plucked from a nyctophobic claustrophic’s deepest nightmares and had a cold look around York from on high which was nice. And cold.

In summary, there are loads of amazing pubs in that area and ale is the greatest drink in the history of drinks. And that’s pretty much it. Except the M5 was closed on the way home, probably because a small bird died on the carriageway so one of those Highway and Traffic Officers closed the whole motorway in both directions, so we had a long detour to deal with. Sigh.

Did I mention my Sky+ HD still isn’t working? Bigger sigh.

I mentioned in my last entry that I took all my camera gear to London, but then spent the entire time shooting with my Holga. Four rolls of film came back from Peak last week and I started the long process of scanning.

Before I loaded the first film in London, I removed the 6×6 mask from the camera. I wanted to know if it would get me slightly less uniform light fall off at the edges of the image and it did that. It’s also however given me a massive light leak as shown in most of these photos. I’m still undecided on how I feel about that but I think I like it.

Obligatory tourist shots of Trafalgar Square:

Holga

Holga 120cfn
Trafalgar Square, 10th October 2008
Fuji Provia 400

Holga

Holga 120cfn
Trafalgar Square, 10th October 2008
Fuji Provia 400

Holga

Holga 120cfn
Trafalgar Square, 11th October 2008
Fuji Provia 400

On the way to the V&A we got off at South Kensington station, and wandered the rest of the way in the sunshine, after I pressed my face up against the glass of the Lamborghini London showroom!

Holga

Holga 120 CFN
South Kensington, 11th October 2008
Fuji Provia 400

As we walked round the Victoria and Albert museum I had visions of some amazing series of images called “The V&A from the hip” but what happened was virtually every single shot was underexposed to the point of being unusuable. Ho hum.

Still, using a statue as a makeshift tripod (no tripods allowed in the V&A) I managed this one with a manual (approximate) 3 second exposure.

Holga

Holga 120cfn
V&A Museum, 11th October 2008
Fuji Provia 400
Manual 3 second exposure on bulb mode

Outside was a different story, as I shot off a couple of frames in the John Madejski Garden. I then decided I’d try once more at a panoramic shot with the Holga. This failed miserably last time I tried it, but I sat there working it all out first, then had a crack. Click to re-bigulate this.

Holga

Holga 120cfn
John Madejski Garden, V&A Museum, 11th October 2008
Fuji Provia 400

I loaded some colour negative film into the camera for the last roll, to give myself a break from all the E6 slide film I’ve been using recently. I’m not sure what this is supposed to be though.

Holga

Holga 120cfn
South Kensington Tube Station, 11th October 2008
Kodak Portra 400

On the final day in London I had a couple of frames to finish off the film so as we walked to the tube to head back to Paddington I shot off the last few.

Holga

Holga 120cfn
Covent Garden
Kodak Portra 400

The colours from the Kodak Portra just look flat and lifeless after the Provia. As the Provia was about 5 years out of date and the Portra was brand new, it doesn’t say much for the Kodak film. Luckily I still have 20 or so rolls of Fuji E6 film to work my way through.

A weekend jaunt to London town saw me carry all £3000 odd of my camera gear around for 2 days, yet the only time I used my Nikon D200 was when I was at the train station on the way home (more on that later). The rest of the time my £30 Holga was in use. I shot a total of 4 films, and I’m currently waiting with baited breath for the return post from Peak Imaging.

Following our horrorshow attempt to visit Venice earlier this year, I thought we’d seen the last of our travel woes. I was wrong.

Paddington station, 13:00 Sunday afternoon, our train is on the board showing “on time” to leave at 14:03. Then right before my eyes….

Approximately 20 trains all get cancelled at once, and some station announcer clown mumblingly slurs out an incomprehensible sequence of gibberish of which the only bit I could understand was “wait for furhter information”. What I want to know is, what is so special about Birmingham Snow Hill station? ANSWER ME!

I wont mention the mad as a box of frogs lady who cornered me and talked to me for 10 minutes about the voices in her head. Oh wait I just did.

Eventually a train to Taunton leaves, and we scurry down platform 3 only to find we are joined by three quarters of the entire number of passengers waiting to leave Paddington, so the train is packed to bursting point. Cue an hour spent crushed on the floor of the carriage entrance next to a toilet.

Did I mention Sunday was my birthday? Happy Birthday Ben!

London was great though, pictures to follow when I get my films back.

What?

In the last of the “what I did on my holiday” series, I’m going to break from tradition and actually not say anything bad. We were lucky enough to go to Bristol Zoo on one of the three days this summer where the sun came out. So it was a nice day.

Granted it rained at about four in the afternoon but we were already in the car on the way home then.

Bristol Zoo isn’t a bad day out really, although photo opportunities are limited to shooting through glass or long lens stuff. These are all shot with an 80-400 VR lens.

I’ve run out of stuff to say. Until next time, bye!

I mentioned in my Wookie Hole post that we’d been to various attractions during our week off work – one of these attractions was Longleat.    Longleat is actually a pretty good place to visit, there is a lot to do, in fact we didn’t get to see even half the stuff so we are going back to see the rest!

The only problem with Longleat is that it’s full of shuffling cretins. Normally this particular species of human can be easily avoided or ignored but at Longleat you are continually smashed in the face by acts of sheer moronity (a new word I invented).

Take for example the drooling gibbon lady who stopped her battered old Peugeot 406 to look at the Tigers. Ahh, pretty stripy tigers. BUT YOU ARE BLOCKING TWO LANES OF TRAFFIC YOU UTTER UTTER GOON. So now something like 30 cars have to sit and wait. And wait…. And wait…….

Until the mouth breather and her brood have crushed their faces up against the car windows for long enough and having had their fill of tigers they move on, only to block the entire two lanes a short distance later, ohhhhh… Look at the Wolfies…. droooooooool…

Still the tigers didn’t seem that bothered.

Acts of stupidity such as stopping in doorways and blocking pathways are the norm at Longleat. Luckily I am a calm and balanced person so I wait until I get home then write sarcastic things on the internet because actually saying something to someone just wouldn’t be the correct behaviour for an Englishman.

The best bit of the Safari driving experience has to be the fallow deer – you buy a cup of food, then you feed them and they eat right out of your hand. Look!

As I was taking this photo of a particularly cute deer eating out of my wife’s hand, another impatient chap had his head right in the car trying to find some delicious deer munchies:

Second highlight of the trip was watching a car who felt that the massive queue waiting to see the monkeys didn’t apply to him. Fortunately one cheeky little chappy had a sense of justice and so ripped a couple of trim pieces off that particular car.

Throughout the safari I attached my Nikkor 80-400VR lens to my camera to see what photos of the animals I could get but there ended up being a number of problems, such as focusing through wet glass or through my front windscreen which has a heating element in it. As a result almost all the photos were consigned to the big delete bin in the sky.

The deer photos were taken with a Sigma 10-20mm, the Tiger photo with a Nikkor 80-400VR.

A special mention to the chap with a back seat full of kids who shouted the “C” word out of his car window at another driver. That kind of high quality parenting gives me hope for the future of our country, I salute you sir.