Recipe for Marital Breakdown

1. Have children sick for a week at least and add slightly unhealthy feeling to parents.
2. Go to a city where you have been only once before. City MUST be in northern hemisphere (reasons apparent below).
3. Think selves very clever, take clever bus service from outskirts of town parking area to centre of city.
4. First failure - bus drops you about 1/2 mile from where you thought, area NOT covered by map. People in so-called information centre have NO maps, not even that you can buy.
5. Cross town somewhat erratically - meet angel of mercy (wandering tourist ranger!) who gives map and instructions. Meanwhile feeling slightly stressed as to whether will make it on time.
6. Find puppet theatre. Deposit children, run off for supposedly fun quality time, but both too grumpy and cold to enjoy.
7. Need to find way back to bus station. HE proposes we take so-called short cut round back of castle as on map. SHE proposes go back the way we came.
8. Go HIS way. Get to intersection, turn wrong way, SHE refuses to budge and says its THIS way, he says NO, she says YES. She wins and he grumps that its wrong. Eventually she is proved right. (There is a sodding great castle in the middle of the town making it reasonably straightforward).
9. Next intersection, HE says, this way, SHE says, NO THIS way, bit of an arugment, SHE takes map, finds shortcut and arrives at bus station.
10. Thus HUMILIATION for him (apparently - see next entry on blog).Reality is that he navigates N/S/E/W by the SUN, but fails constantly to adapt to Northern hemisphere (we were once similarly lost at noon in Australia when HE got it wrong), whereas SHE navigates by looking at HUGE GREAT CASTLE which tends to give a sense of where one is in the town.

Suffice to say much fun had by all!

Best part of the day however, was the gizmo pictured below which came with the new other gizmos - clearly designed because everyone knows no man ever reads the instructions BEFORE trying to plug all the gizmos in. cos of course they know how it works!!! Definitely highlight of my day.