The Colby Coalition: April 2011 2nd Half with Video

Ohmygoodnesstheroyalweddingisthisweek!!

NOT.

We took outta here like a bat out of....a cave? You get the idea though. We decided to take the week ish off and get out of London before it got too crazy. Don't you worry though, we got some recap footage in the hotel bar (where we ended up having DINNER for all of you about ready to freak out on us).

On Wednesday the 27th we drove down to the Exeter/Devon area, which is in SW England. We first visited the Quince Honey Farms, whic supposedly is the biggest honey/bee farm in the UK....pretty skeptical about that though.

After that we headed to a place called Watermouth Castle. Yea. It's a castle alright, but not in the 'really-old-crap' style. In the "I-turned-this-cool-castle-into-a-freaky-antique-museum/carnival-thing". It was a huge disappointment, hence the two pictures :) The rest are from this little alcove down on the 'beach' right by the castle that was very pretty to look out of.

After that (we left like, as fast as we could get through it all) we headed over to the zoo. It was ok-not very full (since we got there pretty late in the day). Justin fed a monkey who was trying really hard to eat a weed outside his cage, and they had some roosters and peacocks just walking around the zoo.

These meerkats were totally posing for my camera. I'm not even kidding.

On Thursday we went to Powderham Castle. This one was a lot cooler. We only got to see parts of the inside because people actually were still living in this one. The Earl of Devon, or some thing like that :) And we weren't allowed to take photos inside, hence only the outside photos.

After we toured the castle, they had a little 'petting' zoo (I use that term loosely, but it wasn't super caged in like a real zoo) and playground thing that we went and hung out at for a while.

This is Berry Pomeroy Castle. After we left Powderham we drove over here and got in right before the last admission cut off time. It is a ruin and pretty compact compared to the one we just came from. We didn't get any good pictures of the front because it's pretty circular and so you couldn't really see much from the front.

The next day we drove over to Babbacombe Model Village. It was huge (well, maybe it wasn't, but it seemed like it to me) and pretty cool. They had letters of the alphabet hidden as characters (the K was a King, etc) all around the places.

Inside one of the buildings was all about movies-along with all these figurines they had little displays for stuff like Jurassic Park, The Matrix and Lord of the Rings. It was hard to get good pictures of the stuff though because the light was terrible and they were all in glass boxes.

They also had Where's Waldo-or as they call it in the UK-Where's Wally. You can see his evil twin Odlaw in the top middle photo there. Wally is in the bottom left, Wanda is in the bottom middle behind the K for Kign, and Woof (?) the dog in the bottom right. It was fun for Amaia to find them since she'd been looking through some Waldo books in the house trying to find him.

Then we went and visited Dartmouth Castle. It was quite a drive, and then we had to drive our car onto a ferry (see top left pic) to get across the river/bay (not sure what it was, really) to get to where we continue to drive to the castle.

On Friday, we went to Canonteign Falls, apparently the tallest waterfall in the UK. It was quite the hike, so we took the Amaia in the toddler hiking backpack and Solia in the Bjorn and hiked all the way up. It was pretty cool, but as it usually seems, the view from the top isn't as cool as the view from below...

After that we went to Castle Drogo. This castle was built over like 30 years, but it was completed after WWI so it's fairly modern as far as castles go. Some millionaire decided he wanted a castle and had it built. It's not a phone (an old one) and a pretty sweet shower, and other stuff more modern, but it's still old and still a castle. It was pretty cool though.

Here are some photos I took while Justin was driving. No kidding, like 90% of the roads around where we were visitng looked like the top left photo-huge hedges on both sides of the road that you could barely see over. It was pretty intense. And in some places, the trees were so thick like in the other pictures, that it was almost all the way dark. It was sooo pretty though.

Here are some other pictures from NOT our vacation:

The sawn, and some of the ducks (cormorants, I think they are really called) with thier *first* set of baby ducks, and a goose eating dandilions.

The Girls:

Amaia:

*If I ask Amaia where something is, she'll say "I put it somewhere you can't find it"

*Amaia will nurse her toys, and then she'll come show me and say "I'm a good mom!"

*Justin and Amaia like to play "Amaia Stuck"-the only way to get out is for her to say "I love you so much daddy!"

*When Amaia is mad, she makes this gutteral 'gulck' noise, or she says "grrrr"

*Every time Amaia sees two of something: two people in a picture, two cats walking down the street, two apples in a bowl, etc it's always "look-it's a mommy apple and a daddy apple!"

*When I start to talk to her about something she's doing, that she knows she's not supposed to do, she'll say "don't yell at me..."

*Apparently, the only reason she drinks during dinner is "to get all the crumbs outta my mouth"

*We started doing Amaia's potty training again. She'd been in diapers and we've gone back to underwear-it only took her two days to go accident free after we started again'

*If you ask her anything (yes or no) she'll say "Ya sure!"