What a lazy day today!! This morning we read by the pool and this afternoon we went for a dip in the Mediterranean Sea before showering and changing for dinner. Goodness it is hard work being on holidays! [View Full Entry]

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We had to get going about an hour earlier this morning to make sure that we were at the bus stop in time to purchase our tour to Montserrat. We arrived at the bus stop at about 9.10am and the bus selling the tickets for tours to Montserrat and Barcelona arrived at about 9.20am. After we bought our tickets there was a considerable amount of radioing and telephoning as the Plana staff worked out how many people they had going on tours today. Eventually there were three busses for Montserrat, but it was an absolute shemozzle getting everyone boarded. The staff [View Full Entry]

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Bernie decided that he had better get his test out of the way this morning so he went down to the foyer to buy some more wi-fi access and find a spot to sit where he could receive a signal on the lap top. By the time that he had read the instructions and configured the lap top as stipulated in those instructions he had used up quite a bit of the hour of access that he had purchased. Unfortunately the area where wi-fi access is possible is very busy as all of the travel company reps operate from there and [View Full Entry]

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Rosemary rang at 6.00am this morning to let Bernie know that the email has now been sent???!! We thought that was what she rang to tell us at about 4.00am on Tuesday morning?! Anyway, when Bernie logged on he found that he does now have the link. Now he just has to make the time to do the test before the end of the week. It is a nuisance really as it would have suited us for him to do the test yesterday morning while we were killing time waiting for the welcome session! Ah well, c’est la vie, I am [View Full Entry]

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Well, our mobile phones kept ringing overnight which was a bit of a pain. Mine rang first, but I missed the call fumbling around for the phone in the dark! It rang again almost immediately, but there was no-one there when I answered. Bernie’s was next to go off and I thought that whoever had tried me had decided to try Bernie. But no, it was someone involved in the Centrelink selection exercise ringing to let Bernie know that a link for the psychometric testing part of the assessment centre was being emailed to him!! Then, just when we were dozing [View Full Entry]

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Groan!! After two very lazy days we had a pre-dawn start this morning to catch our flight to Spain at 6.15am! We were supposed to check in three hours before an international flight, but Kath and Albert decided that 3.45am would be early enough. It had been decided a couple of weeks ago that four of us and four bags were not going to fit in the Ford Focus for the trip to the airport so Kath and Albert arranged for Colin to take them to the airport. We left about half an hour ahead of them to allow time to [View Full Entry]

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Today we went into Manchester and caught the 11.15am screening of Terminator Salvation. Going to the early screening ended up being a real bargain with all tickets before midday being just £4.00 each! When we were buying our tickets at about 11.25am we asked if the movie would have started yet. The guy on the ticket counter assured us that we would be fine to catch the start of the movie. As it turned out we had heaps of time. We still saw four previews before the movie finally started at about 11.40am. In the end I think all we missed [View Full Entry]

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This morning I headed down to the beauty salon that is located at the gym at the football ground at the end of the road. I had an 8.45am appointment so left Bernie lying in bed to walk down in the drizzle in my open-toed sandals for my leg wax and pedicure in preparation for Spain. When I arrived there was no-one there, the gym wasn’t even open so I sent a text to Kath to make sure that I was in the right place. A couple of minutes later someone arrived to open the gym so he let me in [View Full Entry]

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It was raining when we woke up this morning at about 6.00am. It was still raining by 8.00am so we decided that slogging around a field in the mud with the warden looking for a herd of white cows seemed pretty undesirable so we abandoned that idea. With the house at Cragside not opening until 1.00pm we could have wandered around the gardens for a couple of hours, but that seemed like a pretty horrible idea too with the temperature only about 7°C and wet. We interrogated Edna about points of interest and tourist destinations in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, York and Leeds, but [View Full Entry]

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Today we had planned to go down to Cragside at Rothbury, described in the NT Handbook as an extraordinary Victorian house, gardens and estate - the wonder of its age! Well, that was the plan until Albert announced that what he really wanted to do while they were up in this area was visit Hadrian’s Wall and that it would work out best if they were to do that today and then drive home to Stalybridge so that Kath could get a good night’s sleep as the rather hard beds here have been troubling her back. Bernie and I said that [View Full Entry]

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