London & Oxford

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Wow...two posts in one night!! 
Here are some photos from London and Oxford from this past weekend. 
Houses of Parliament

Big Ben

More Houses of Parliament

National Portrait Gallery

Giant ship in a bottle on the 4th plinth. Soon to be replaced by a giant blue rooster.

S started small with ducks. He's since graduated on to swans. 

Apparently this doesn't hurt.

Swan

Who says swans have to be graceful all the time? 
Drying off after the belly flop.

On K's birthday, we walked to South Parks. 

South Parks and the 'dreaming spires' in the background

Wintertime 2010-2011

It's been a while since we've posted - sorry about that. We were enjoying all 6in of snow that fell, which also happened to bring the country to a standstill. 

Frosted Berries in the Park

Fun Frosted Leaves

Even the Spiderwebs got frosted. Turns out spiderwebs are everywhere - notice them a lot more when they are highlighted. 

More fun spiderwebs

Frosted Berries after a second frozen fog night...which meant K needed to retake all the pictures from the previous trip around the park. 

Clearly the frost was fun. 

Then the snow came...

S on a very vacant street. 

The streets stayed this way until it melted. Snow plows apparently do not exist in England. S saw one, but we never saw where it plowed. The streets were filled with fluffy white snow, then gross brown slush, which froze every night turning the city into an ice skating rink.
(Even typing this, K's computer, which is on English spelling, does not recognize the word plow!)

S's snowman - with broccoli for eyes!

The river near the park froze over. Turned the world into a black and white photo

More fun frozen reflections

Since we're old married folks now, we feed ducks. Well, we have left over bread which we feed to the ducks. Anyways, we fed the said left over bread to the ducks, who are not equipped for snow. They all just sat around us with frozen beaks. 

More River...

...Reflection pictures

Fun frozen ice blades....K wishes she had a macro lens at this point in time

Some normally uninteresting plant, made more interesting by the snow

S is proud of his snowman. Rightly so, it was the last thing to melt. And our neighbors (from New Zealand) had to use structural supports (in the shape of bowls, pans, etc) to build theirs. 

Icicles hanging off of our back porch

Feeding ducks leads to epic battles for a piece of bread. The gulls are evil.

Action shot of the duck trying to escape the gull.

Which Mr. Duck wins...

We've named this guy blue, yes we've even named ducks...but look closely at his beak. 

Ice makes for slipper landings.

On Christmas Day we went to walk the Port Meadows. (See previous posts for info on this)

Boats were frozen in place

Cross Country Tracks

Our Flaming Christmas Pudding!