Planet Ruby Starrs

Last week we were living a Scottish Georgian dream..  A group of friends renting an amazing stately home just south of Glasgow... Auchinleck House. It is a very large grand affair with a large number of (usually - see later) cosy sitting rooms a very large general living room - well equipped kitchen and posh dining room.  It sleeps 13, there were  actually 10 of us - and Dr Fred and I had an enormous room with a (faux) four poster bed.... It was only faux because the curtains were purely decorative but it was still lovely.  The whole house is stunning.  In keeping with its history, the furniture - while standard Landmark trust is supplemented with nice wooden closets, fancy tables and oil painted portraits pf unidentified often stern looking people.  Externally its a really imposing looking building with glorious carved stone work and at each corner there is a kind of gatehouse which all have fabulous...

I'm punctuating this post with random totally unrelated to the text photos just to share some more pictures.  Some of which might have appeared before...🤣   I never swam once... inspite of buying newcozzie... This is our last cruise for quite a few months, in fact until December.   We've been on the Balmoral which is my favorite boat.  This is sideways on andzwont change.. specimens... Apparently it's going to be decommissioned in 2029 and actually when you look around I'm not surprised, in spite of the refit it is starting to look a little bit tired in places.   Lovely nativity in Sans Sebastian (not as nice as Bishop Auckland Palace one) The cabin we were finally allocated ( no fault of ours ) this time is definitely been the worst we've ever had.  It was extremely noisy,  meaning that we perhaps got three hours of sleep any one time being constantly woken in the night by crashing and ba...

There was another change of plan due to having to avoid the storm across the Bay of Biscay.   Instead of going to Porto we stopped overnight in Lisbon.  We have been to Lisbon many times and while it is a beautiful city we have wandered around it several times and don't feel the need to explore further. In fact last time we came we didn't even get off the boat...  but this time we had enough time and an overnight stop so we went on the train to Sintra.  We met up with some people we had made friends with and the four of us set off for an adventure in Portugaul.  Sintra is a small town about 30 minutes away by train.  It is the home to the National Palace of Pena plus a couple of other really interesting buildings.  We didn't pick the right day - not that we had any choice..  as we sat off uptown to the station ( its a beautiful art deco station) it absolutely chucked it down and we got wet, very wet!  ...

There are no signposts in the sea.” – Vita Sackville-West If there were signposts in the sea they would to record the roughest points so the ''I've known it worse'' competion could be mapped 🤣🤣. We are not really interested in who won but its a very (tedious)serious game of one upmanship out on the Atlantic ocean. It was a moderately rough crossing...  We did, however get a gloriously warm clear night for the first star gazing session up on deck 11. The crowd gathered and when the ships lights were finally turned off it revealed an excellent view of the vast night sky. Its quite amazing the difference when the lights go off and everyone gets dark adapted. I see people being really surprised at the extent of the difference.  Sadly they wont turn the bar lights off which shine out onto the deck (but later in the week they did turn them down ) and of course they always have the chiminey light on...  Dr Fred did his stuff - shone ...

After another broken nights sleep.. which I think was worse because we had somehow had a goodnights sleep the night before.. we docked very early and very loudly at the last port in the Canaries...Arrecife, Lanzerote.  Dr Fred and I came to Lanzerote some years ago - not to this bit, we did some wet and windy walking on a volcanic mound somewhere inland.. Arrecife is a pleasant enough town, full of blue and white buildings sprawling across a fairly - compared with previous isles) landscape.  There was a shuttle bus to the edge of town driving past some interesting, possibley old terracing and stone walling. This is how to keep the land fertile and damp, but there was no evidence of planting.  We continued past the Castel de Jose which house an art gallery thinking we might visit later.   A mile or so on the bus parked up and we walked into town through the main shopping area.  We were heading to the promenade on the other side of th...