White Wedding

Paul & Lisa's big day has arrived, and whilst Martin & Jilly took off to cram in some skiing, we were told to assemble in the bar for eleven to toast the groom.

Many drinks later the most of the rest of the party assembled and we were treated to our first look at the bridesmaids dresses and their amazing "wedding-tons"

Suzie also managed to once more display her impeccable sense of style...

The venue for the wedding was Kaprum castle. I have no idea of it's history, but it looked like a brilliant place for a wedding, and what a backdrop!

Lisa, being an ex wedding planner, had an amazing eye for detail, she had literally thought of everything, from hand made flower confetti bags, to decorating all of the chairs, wrapping them in silk bows, everything looked amazing

The lovely ceremony, Lisa placing the ring

The happy couple

Lots of time during the photos to mingle and take silly pictures. Disapproving look from Paul at breaking the camera

Simon rehearsing his speech in his head

Sleigh ride through Kaprum

'Cutting the heart' race, the lovely wedding breakfast, Simons speech on behalf of Terry, then Paul B's great best man speech and videos!

Mr & Mrs Saint's first dance (Metallica, Nothing Else Matters)

Scrabble and photo booth

Getting very drunk

Carving up Kitzsteinhorn!

Yesterday (Monday) we decided to head up to a good blue run that Paul thought would suit us as a group, so we suited up and jumped on the bus, heading for the 'glacier' on Kitzsteinhorn.

We jumped straight onto the first of two cable cars to take us up to the top of the mountain, and were immediately rewarded with a view from above the clouds

What a view!

The mountains in the bright morning sunshine were simply amazing, but lots of other boarders / skiiers thought so too :-)

The run was way more steep than the nursery slope that we learnt on, but Paul, Lisa and Simon guided us down the run to start with, so we knew the layout and where the tricky parts were

We all jumps straight into it after that, and sped down the slopes as fast as we could getting in everyone's way an generally having a blast. We stopped half way through at the midpoint of the run for a cheeky hot chocolate with rum before carrying on and after a couple of hours we were knackered but smiling, even if Georgia couldn't stay upright!

Once we made it back down to Terra firma, a plan was hatched for getting everyone to the Pavilion, a nice cheesy bar in town for drinks to celebrate the forthcoming nuptials, and even though it's the day before the wedding, too much beer was consumed!

Oh my God that hurts!

Today (Sunday), and whist Paul, Lisa and a few other hardy fools went up the mountain to hurl themselves down again, Suz and I along with the rest of the gang here who hadn't skiid before or for a long time got a lesson with the lovely Petra. We started off from scratch but it wasn't long before we were snow ploughing and turning happily

After lunch though we progressed from the baby slope to a real slope with button lifts and everything. Here we managed to to get up some real speed, so we were turning on a sixpence and screaming down the slopes with abandon - great fun!

Right now though, my legs hurt, so I'm looking forward to getting onto a real blue run with the rest of the gang, even if they are all boarders.

Blog trotting again!

Well Suzie and I are off galavanting about the globe once more, this time to lovely Austria where our friends Paul & Lisa are going to get hitched in a lovely castle, but of course, being Austria in February means that there will be plenty of snow to zoom about on too, so we're taking the camera and will try not to break anything (like limbs!) whilst we're over there. More snowy posts to follow...!

Egga

Great names for dives around here! Shortly after the Muli Out dive, we headed back inside the atoll and headed to another pinnacle, this one surrounded by soft coral and pretty coloured fish, though not in such vast quantities.

As we spiralled around the pinnacle, we were signalled into a hollow in the side of the pinnacle, as apparently there was a lobster hiding inside:

Such beautiful colours, but damned hard to capture!

Swimming over this reef though had a totally different feel to it – not so many fish, but often standing out from the background more because of it. We had no surge here at all, so it really was just buoyancy control and then gently fin around.

Some of the corals themselves were beautiful too, with ledges and fans as well as huge groups of multi-coloured ones all sat together

and all throughout the dive, we had very obliging clown fish who simply won’t leave their anemone unattended, so meant you could hang in the water by them until they appeared to give you your photo:

after nearly 45 minutes of circling  the pinnacle, we were ready to ascend (the top being only 4 or so metres down), when Paul spotted something under an overhang on a rock:

a gorgeous scorpion fish! Amazing!

Muli Out

I’ve got no idea why the reef I dived is called this, it’s a reef on the outside of the atoll with the current washing in towards the centre, and is apparently great for viewing huge fish, if they are obliging!

We jumped in and checked the current and the surge, as this was fun washing into and then away from the reef face, something to get to grips with whilst I snapped away a million photos!

Paul, my Glaswegian dive buddy, pointed to a large bit of brown reef, and whilst I was wondering what he was pointing to, it moved:

a really nice big octopus that was a bit paparazzi shy, so shortly after I took this, it crawled into a cranny, no bigger that your fist, amazing!

The whole of the reef was covered in all sorts of different flavours of fish though, and some of the trigger fish weren’t shy about coming up to you to see what you were about:

As we drifted along the reef our guide pointed out into the blue, and there in the distance we could see a couple of eagle rays effortlessly flying past, but they didn’t get too close. Shortly after out of the gloom a black tip shark came by, but again at a distance.

Back on the reef though, we soon found our next attraction:

quietly munching away on the coral, totally oblivious to us sailing by like this:

Lion-oh!

This morning when we woke up, Suzie checked the floor of the bungalow (as you do).

The tide first thing this morning was really low, and as calm as a millpond, so directly under the bungalow Suzie snapped these photos though the glass floor!

How cool is that to wake up to? A big lion fish! And auspicious for my two dives that I’m doing this morning!