Just quickly – I went back to Stevie Vann’s website and found that she has put a few numbers online to listen to… glorious! Check out Remember My name, but also have a listen to the SAS Band version of ‘I just wanna make love to you’. Very well done, Stevie! Let’s have some more, please!
Leisure
Hand Car Wash
My mate Matt has a very dirty car. In fact,he took it for a service and got told off by the main dealer for the state it was in… my guess is that they didn’t like the rodents they found in the back!
However, Matt is resourceful, and on finding that he would have had to spend a very long time indeed with a chamois leather, he took it to a nearby hand car wash, staffed by some energentic Europeans.
Now, I am a BIG fan of these places, and seldom do you see a team of folk working so hard for their money. Plus, the job is a good one – the car is inevitably going to be much cleaner than before, and since they also do the inside (all for less than a tenner), it’s got to be worth while if your car is like Matt’s.
There is a similar carwash near me – I love it! It’s got to be better than doing this on your own driveway, and they certainly do a far better job than I would do anyway.
So, well done Matt… now don’t leave it another two years before the next time! I note from the picture that you had a double helping of car hands to do your car… 🙂
LateRooms.com, booking a last minute hotel room
I recently went to Rome for three days and unbelievably didn’t book a hotel room until about five hours before the flight. Normally I am fairly good at sorting things like this out well in advance, but on this occasion it just wasn’t possible.
So I was recommended a visit to http://www.laterooms.com which turns out to be a gold mine of information (thanks Matt)! As a visitor to the site you simply put in the country and area you wish to visit – I entered ‘Trevi, Rome’ and got a long, long list of al the available rooms I could book. Narrowing all this down took a while, not because the site’s filters are no good, but because I didn’t really know where I wanted to stay or at what kind of hotel. I managed to get it to about five choices, and then went simply for location.
Not ever having stayed in Rome before I wasn’t sure what to expect from the area I had selected – it was within walking distance of the Trevi Fountain, Pantheon, Colosseum and many more sights, and had a metro stop very close by as well for those trips further afield.
It turned out to be a very good choice! The Hotel St, Moritz is certainly not going to win awards for splendour or sophistication, but you couldn’t want for a more friendly staff (all spoke good English) and the accommodation was perfectly good enough. The hotel itself is located on Vai Nazionale – a fairly main road in Central Rome, and to find the hotel means going through a set of solid wooden doors, ascending two flights of stairs and going through a door… all a bit different to any other hotel I have ever stayed at.
Nonetheless, despite not having a luxurious bar or dining room, this hotel was ideally located and gave us exactly what we needed – a base to explore from. On the last day in Rome we were not due to fly out until 9pm, which would normally mean checking out of the hotel and wandering around with luggage for hours on end. However, the hotel were able to look after our bags for us until we returned at about 6pm, whereupon they kindly booked us a taxi to the airport. This kind of personal service is probably available from lots of places, but it was unexpected and we were very pleased to be offered it.
So, would I use the hotel again? On balance, it was well located, had friendly staff, the rooms were clean and tidy, it was peaceful and had good service. The breakfasts were basic and there were no real facilities to mention, but yes – it is worth going back to if you want to explore Rome. If you want a luxury hotel with bars and restaurants, etc, then don’t look here – but *do* spend some time on the laterooms.com web site!
As a sample of what Rome contains, here is a web gallery of a few images I took whilst there. Note the weather on the first two days was really, really good – hot enough for T-shirts, certainly! In fact, I almost got sunburn whilst sitting at a cafe outside the Pantheon. Day three was a different matter, a lot wetter, but no less fun all the same!
Underground signs, Subway signs
OK – this has got to be blogged. I saw this on a recent tube journey and not for the first time wondered who agreed that it was a good sign to put up in a tube train. I mean, if you saw the stuff going on and left the train to call for help, the train would have gone by the time you got back from the phone… and who has a mobile that works in the tunnels? I mean, for goodness sake – they might as well ask you to post a letter about it for the good it would do…
So let’s say it *is* an emergency. Have you ever tried ringing 999 from the underground?
Let it snow, Let it snow, Let it snow!
What a journey in to work today! Four or five inches of snow and skidding all over the road was actually quite fun – at 20mph tops! I have always enjoyed the snow fall when it happens, but I remember as a child getting tired of it pretty quickly when it started to turn to slush and then freeze into large blocks of hard ice… I hope it stays white and fluffy until it disappears 🙂
So, here is what I saw when I got to work:
And by lunchtime the car park had begun to turn to slush with all of the traffic… and school children making snowmen (nearly every school has been closed due to the weather today):
Quite a sight for a warming globe 😉