Oxford

We have been over to Oxford to see Mark and Shona and their kids over the weekend. They are off to the south of france - near Perpignan for the last week before school goes back. Big M and little M went to a beautiful village to wander about while Tegan went trail riding (some pony club event). Little M had a short ride on Tegans pony. I took J and Callum out on a hire boat on the Thames while that went on. Boys had a great time - up through the lock, stopped to gorge on blackberries overhanging the river (they are all perfectly ripe just now). Joined the girls for lunch which was a bit interesting - my phone ran out of power so we had no idea which of the several pubs we had discussed they were going to be at, plus there are several pubs in some of the quite small villages they could have been in so did a tour of pub car parks until we saw Shona's car.
Saturday morning we found spot which hired pedal boats and all went out for an hour after lunch before heading back to Abingdon.
We took the guitars over and Mark and I had a great time jamming. Mark is a fair bit better than I am, but we tortured our wives with a short performance (which M videoed and posted on youtube so our shame lives on). Kids got in on the act for a while too but we only had 3 guitars - once we tried to include recorder and clarinet it all got too hard and we had to chuck them out to play!
On the way home we visited Woburn Safari Park. This is the Duke of Bedfords estate, mistake to go on bank holiday weekend though. The roads were all really clear of traffic, so we paid to be in a traffic jam...