Weekend in Devon

Last weekend we went over to north Devon to visit our friend Richard. On our way over to the West Country on Friday night our headlights caught a hare in the road. It was a narrow country road with high banks so there was nowhere for the hare to run but down the road. It was an amazing experience to follow behind it as it tried to out run us. It must have been running at about 25 mph! Mark tried to encourage it to one side of the road so that we could pass the poor thing but it carried on straight down the middle. After a while there was a road off to the left and the hare turned down it and went haring off into the night!

Mark taught the 6 Jo Awase at an Aiki Jo workshop arranged by Richard in Bideford on Saturday afternoon. Prior to the workshop Richard took us to see Bucks Mills which is a few miles east of Clovelly. It's a very scenic spot and the boys decided that it would be a good venue to shoot some film of them doing aiki jo. So a plan was hatched to return the following morning around low tide with yours truly acting as camera woman.

While the workshop was on I spent an hour or so wandering around Bideford visiting the pannier market and some interesting little shops. I found Mark's birthday present in one. I had a very pleasant time in the shop and because of my interest the proprietor fetched something special from the back of the shop but I can't tell you what it was without spoiling the birthday surprise!

In the same shop I bought a book for Mum and her familiars called Feng Shui for You and Your Cat. I browsed through it in "Velvet and Vanilla" over a pot of tea and it looks really interesting so I will have to borrow it back sometime for a proper read. In the cafe I bought some rocky road cake to keep us going until supper. It was a bit gluttonous as we had had a pub lunch and were going out for a Chinese meal in the evening but Mark and I both felt it was one of the best rocky roads we have ever tasted.

Sunday morning dawned... wet! We went down to Bucks Mills hoping for a break in the rain long enough to do some filming. The boys had decided that it would be good to film the awase that Mark had taught and give copies to the students who attended the workshop to help them remember what they had seen. We managed to film the Jo awase and also the 31 partner practice in between heavy downpours.

Since then we have discovered that my camera records in AVI format and can be edited in Movie Maker while both Mark and Richard's cameras record in MOV format which can't. So I am going to have to get some different software to enable us to create a DVD of the recent filming and also that which we recorded when we visited Diane in Italy.