After the mammoth effort getting to the UK for Christmas, we managed to get back to Zurich with only a short delay.  We had decided that it was going to be far too difficult to get to St Anton on the evening we landed (30th) so instead would wait for New Years Eve before heading up.  That gave us just enough time to go out and see Colin, Gwen and Rick at Paddy’s for a bit of an impromptu engagement party.  Also a conveniently good time to ask Colin if he would be my best man – although considering the state of all of us by the time we left, I think I’ll need to double check he still remembers that conversation!

So we headed up to St Anton on the 31st, arriving just as it started to snow making it a little treacherous getting there.  At one point we were headed sideways down the road towards a sharp bend, would not have been an ideal start to the New Year (falling off a cliff rarely is) but thankfully the tyres caught and we could continue on to St Anton – admittedly quite a bit slower than before.  Dermot had organised dinner at Robi’s Rodelstall, a restaurant at the end of the sledge run from the top of the mountain, so we headed up there to meet everyone else.  The meal was very good and the restaurant is nice and authentic.  After that it was straight off to Cuba for their Back to the Future NYE party.  Unfortunately we had been previously informed that it was going to be a Mardi Gras theme so our fancy dress was unfortunately useless, but it was a good party nonetheless and we got to see in both European New Year and British New Year before needing to head home.

We spent the next couple of days up on the hill before Becky decided it was time to give skiing another   go.  So on Sunday she rented some skis and headed off to ski school while I headed up to give the DannyCam its first outing.  A couple of years ago we had discussed picking up a helmetcam but never actually go around to it, but Danny had seen one that he was impressed with so bought it as his Christmas present to himself.  We had pretty good (if cold) weather and some lovely powder that had come down the day before to give it a proper test.  If you’re curious the footage can be seen by clicking here.  After Becky having elected to join the absolute beginners group she managed to get promoted the next day and seemed to be taking to the skiing quite happily!  In the meantime I was unfortunately back at work so couldn’t partake, but Becky happily kept putting what she’d been taught into practice.

On Monday we had a visit from Ariel and Tania over from Moscow for Russian Orthodox Christmas.  They only stayed one night unfortunately but it was great to see them and we had a very nice meal in the Museum on Monday night.  Nathalie had also come up on Monday and so headed off with Becky on Tuesday morning to get some skiing done.  Since the weather on Tuesday was spectacular and it was a night sledging day, I booked us into the Rodelalm (halfway down the sledge run) for dinner and we headed up to give Nathalie and Becky a bit of an introduction to night sledging.  It was great fun, and our places in the restaurant were literally on the side of the fireplace which made it really good fun – although as usual I was defeated by the Schweinhaxe which is just too much for one person!

The rest of the week was much of the same with none of the predicted snow arriving leaving us with only what was left of the snow that came down the previous weekend.  That did not prevent us from having a bit of a ski around and the weather was beautiful on Sunday allowing Rick, Danny and I plenty of opportunity to stretch our legs on the longer pistes around St Anton.

I’m back!!!! Yes, I know, I know it’s actually February and here I am about to write about Boxing Day (if I can remember that far back). However, I thought I should get on with it so Ben can post the other things he has saved which came after Boxing Day. So..Boxing Day.

Well, we got up reasonably early to go to my parents (a little excited to be able to actually show them the ring!). We arrived at sometime late morning, giving us chance to catch up on the events of the last few days. As we hadn’t told my Gran or ADAM (collective name for my aunt, uncle and cousins – Alan, Diane, Alison and Matthew – clever, eh?!) about the engagement yet, we were also pleased to be able to tell Granny and to play a little game of ’spot the ring’ with ADAM (we were curious to see if my family were any more observant than Ben’s!). However, we kind of spilt the beans by changing our facebook statuses too early, so my eagle eyed Auntie Di spotted it straight away (guess she wins the prize for ‘most observant’!). Luckily she didn’t tell Alison or Matthew, so we still had a chance to play the little game and that lasted up until lunchtime, when my Dad announced it!!

Another lovely lunch was followed by some games – we found a great use for the cracker hats – guess the famous person, with what can only be described as a ridiculous number of clues given to help people out when completely stuck. Then we ate more (shocking!) and played the game I now remember being called bagatelle, where you ping balls around a board, trying to get a high score – great for the competitive amongst us – you know who you are!

After that, we went over to Granny’s for tea and to play yet more games. As is traditional, we played ‘Bob’s your uncle’ (which has another name in our family and which I will not reveal for security reasons!). As it was getting late by then, we made our way back to Gloucestershire back to the house Ben’s family were staying in. Sorry it’s so short – I’ve forgotten some of the details, I fear. However, I have learnt a valuable lesson (thanks Ben) – that is why you should do the blog as soon after the event as possible. So now I know. I guess now you get to find out about January.

Well, where to start?  I had been thinking for a while that Becky and I had been together for quite some time (at least in total) and so far showed no signs of not wanting to spend more time together.  She had moved over here to Zurich to live with me and so far we had managed not to kill each other – or even come close.  It seemed therefore a natural step for us to get married.  That and of course the minor fact that I want to spend the rest of my life with her.  Of course as anyone who has proposed knows, it’s not quite as simple as it sounds.

So the first step was to find a ring.  Surely not too tricky, this being a city there are plenty of jewellers around.  This proves quite clearly how little I know about buying jewellery, but at least I did know that I needed to find out what size ring to get.  How to do this though, was anyone’s guess.  I raided Becky’s jewellery box to try to find a ring to give me some idea of size (not to pawn and pay for it I assure you) however as those of you who know Becky can attest to, she doesn’t wear much in the way of jewellery and I couldn’t find a single ring anywhere.  So I had to do the next best thing and guess – at least that was after I had discounted some subtle finger measuring device I could try to use when she was asleep.  So I went into a jewellers and had a long look at all they had on offer and chose what I hoped would be a ring that she liked.  They assured me that they would be able to resize it between one or two sizes should my guess have been wrong, but they just as quickly assured me she couldn’t return it if she didn’t like it!

So armed with a ring, I now needed to ask her father’s permission.  I know; a lot of people don’t think that’s necessary anymore, but call me traditional, soppy, whatever you like, I felt I had to ask.  This however was not quite as easy as it sounds since Becky’s family live in the UK and we are in Switzerland.  I was pretty sure this wasn’t the type of conversation I wanted to have over the telephone, so I had to decide when I would next see him face to face.  Since we were coming over to the UK and staying with Becky’s parents first, that seemed to be the perfect opportunity.  So I tried to figure out some way of broaching the topic and decided that it would really have to be a spur of the moment thing, but hopefully there would be enough moments since we were going to be with them for almost two days.  Of course as anyone who’s read our blog recently knows, Easyjet, Luton Airport and the Great British Weather quite nearly made this an impossibility.  So, fighting the very strong temptation to forget about it, I summoned what little courage I could find in the sub-zero English winter and asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage.  Thankfully he said yes (or this would be an extremely embarrassing blog post) so that was the second step out of the way!

So, ring and permission on my side, I now just needed to decide when to ask Becky.  I thought Christmas Day would be pretty good and was seriously hoping I hadn’t confused ‘good’ with ‘horribly kitschy and cliched’.  I toyed with a couple of ideas but decided I was pretty sure that I didn’t want the potential embarrassment of asking, and getting rejected, in front of my entire extended family (see the post here for details of what we were doing for Christmas), so it was Christmas Morning then – before we’d met everyone else.  So along came Christmas Morning and as we were opening the presents that my mother kindly supplied us with in our stockings, out came a little extra present.  I had earlier decided that the standard jeweller’s ring box was a little dull and obvious as well, so had elected to buy a little wooden draw that Becky and I had seen at the Christmas Market in Zurich and had thought was very nice, but completely useless.  As she unwrapped it, I explained that I thought I had found a use for it – and thankfully Becky agreed and the answer was ‘Yes’!

 
As we struggled to figure out which hand the engagement ring should go on, we decided it might be quite amusing to actually not mention anything to anyone and see how long it would take for people to realise.  Becky doesn’t wear much jewellery so we didn’t think it would take long with a number of eagle eyed female aunts and cousins, not to mention my sister and father.  However the only people that realised for pretty much the entire day were my cousin and his girlfriend who were staying in the same studio as us and confessed to actually overhearing.  It wasn’t until much later in the afternoon that one of my cousins realised what it was and then the proverbial cat was out of the bag.  One thing I hadn’t considered prior to deciding on when to propose, but that was a particularly nice fringe benefit, was that we had plenty of bottles of champagne already chilled for toasts before Christmas Dinner.

 
So there you go, for those that had been pressing for the story, hopefully you’re satisfied!  Now to go off and plan a wedding.

 
As mentioned in a previous post, Christmas this year was spent with my father’s side of the family in a very scenic little farm in the Cotswolds.  After managing to arrive without too much trouble (especially compared to some of the others travelling that day, the UK spectacularly failing to deal with snow as per  usual) we found our residence for the week was the studio a little two bedroom studio above the Havana Club – our own private club room should we want to use it.  We were sharing the studio with one of my cousins (Noah) and his girlfriend Lotte.

We soon worked out that the social hub of the farm was going to be the main manor house, although the ‘younger generation’ did tend to spend some time congregating in the barn as that is where most of them were staying.  We headed straight over there once we’d unpacked to meet everyone and offer to help out wherever we could as it is often very hectic while everyone is arriving and figuring out what needs doing.  Unfortunately dinner that night was being brought down by Theresa and Joe who had had an awful drive down from Liverpool so we were all pretty peckish by the time they arrived later that night!

The rest of the days leading up to Christmas were spent socialising and exploring the countryside.  We were remarkably lucky with the weather (as you can see from some of the pictures on this page), it either seemed to be very sunny (but cold) or snowing (making it very Christmassy).  The cold weather led us to have a bit of fun exploring a little frozen lake above the farm which we (very tentatively) worked out was sufficiently frozen to support our (combined) weights.  Although none of us were too enthusiastic to fully test the strength of the ice by finding some ice skates and trying it out.

Meal times at these family gatherings are always the highlight of the day.  Although attendance (due to workloads primarily) varied from day to day, we normally had around 18 people eating dinner together in the dining room – sometimes as many as 22!  As you can imagine, preparing food for that many, as well as the logistics of serving and actually eating, makes for a time consuming experience.  It is however also extremely enjoyable, and of course Christmas dinner was no exception.  After yet another failed attempt to get to one of the local pubs, The Royal Oak in Gretton, we headed back to the house to prepare dinner (stopping by the other local pub, the Bugatti Inn on the way for our Christmas Day drinks).  By the time dinner was finally on the table everyone was just about hungry enough for it along with the associated present opening that went on afterwards.  The family had organised Secret Santa so that there did not end up being too many presents for everyone to buy, and these were opened at the table with everyone reading aloud the dedication and trying to guess who had purchased the gift – a nice little twist!  Of course none of this ended up preventing the customary build up of presents under the tree, but at least it was an attempt!

After Christmas dinner there was a chance to relax (after the washing up had been taken care of, of course) and catch up on Christmas Day TV and a chance to open the remainder of the presents that everyone had bought their immediate family members.  We ended up having a relatively early night because we were getting up early the next morning to visit Becky’s family for Boxing Day.  Since we were only going to be spending a day there, we wanted to maximise our time by leaving as early as possible (basically once the ice had melted) and heading over.  But that’s another story that Becky will relay.

Once we were back on the 27th we still had another couple of days before needing to head back home for New Years.  Becky and I had picked up my little brother Callum, who had spent Christmas with his mother’s family, and thought that a nice walk around Sudeley Castle in nearby Winchombe would be a good way to burn off some of the several Christmas dinners we had had by this point.  Once the sun had gone down it was back to the house to take advantage of the games room they had thoughtfully provided us with!

The next day we headed off to check out the GWR (Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway) that runs from Toddington to Cheltenham Racecourse.  It is an actual working section of railway that follows the path that the actual Great Western Railway used to follow.  Volunteers have restored the stations, track and most importantly old steam locomotives that used to travel on these lines.  They run regular services during the day and so we hopped on the train at Toddington for a round trip (just over an hour including the break at Cheltenham required to switch the engine around for the return trip.  It was a very enjoyable trip (mainly thanks to our compartment having working heating) and had some amazing views, not to mention the benefit of going past the farm we were staying at.  I had the opportunity to sample their Rail Ale and Track Cider – a pretty hefty 8.4% local cider produced exclusively for the GWR by Minchew’s.

It was impressive to see the old steam locomotives in action and equally impressive to see how much work is required to actually man and care for them.  There are so many train enthusiasts out there that gladly give time and money to help, in fact the Gotherington station is privately owned by one such enthusiast!  All in all it was a nice way to spend an afternoon and get a bit of history as well.

The next and final evening was our turn to cook dinner for the group – although by this point we had been reduced to a mere 16.  We had decided in advance to prepare a local Zurich dish to give them a bit of variation so went with Zueri Geschnetzeltes with Roesti followed by the not so Swiss Stollen and Panettone.  I think the meal went down well (at least not reports of food poisoning reached my ears) and it was a fun experience cooking for that many.

 
Looking forward to the next gathering in two years already!  If you would like to look at more photos from the holiday, check the album in our photo gallery by clicking here.  In fact, here are some pictures from many, many years ago when we met in Malta.

Initially I wasn’t sure what date to put in the title for this post because we were originally supposed to head to the UK for our Christmas holiday on the evening of 21st however, as anyone travelling to the UK around that time can testify, Mother Nature had other ideas.  The UK was suffering quite badly from snow and ice so we had spent most of the day checking to ensure that the airports were OK and flights had not been cancelled.  We headed off to the airport hoping that the weather reports that had Luton listed as getting heavy snow that evening were somehow wrong.  Unfortunately as we arrived at check-in we were greeted by the news that our flight had in fact been cancelled.  We weren’t sure what exactly to do, and the staff suggested waiting a little while since their systems had switched to showing the flight as only delayed, not cancelled.  We patiently waited (along with a fair few others) however no-one really seemed sure what was going on; the UK was reporting that Luton airport was closed, Zurich airport was reporting that the flight was only delayed, but apparently the plane was in Luton so how that was supposed to get to Zurich in time to get us back to Luton was anyone’s guess.  After an hour or two of waiting around we decided the flight was not actually going to fly so went online to alter the booking (free of charge) to the next available flight which was the following day at about midday.  While this was not ideal since we already had plans for the next day (plans that required us to be in the UK!), we decided it could have been worse.  We headed home a little bit depressed that the start of our holiday had gone so terribly wrong, so we decided to have an early Christmas and open some of our presents that we weren’t going to be able to take with us to the UK.  This provided some enjoyment and lifted our spirits enough for us to get a good night’s sleep.

 
We got up the next day feeling hopeful that things would go well today, after all they’d had the entire day before and morning to clear things in Luton, how long would they really need???  Unfortunately that feeling didn’t last long as Becky checked online and straight away saw that our second flight had been cancelled.  This time when we tried to change the booking online the next available flight from Zurich would have been the evening of 23rd December – a full two days after we were originally supposed to get to the UK.  Considering we were supposed to be in the Cotswolds the afternoon of 23rd, that was less than ideal!  We quickly had a look to see if there were any other possibilities of getting there earlier than that, not really expecting to find too much, but lo and behold, Swiss somehow had return flights to Birmingham (which is really a more convenient airport for us anyway) for a very reasonable rate (less than CHF 300 return each) and the flights were going to be leaving at midday that day.  Without wasting any more time we booked the flights and suddenly things seemed to be improving – we were going to make it to the UK that day, and we were going to a more convenient airport, and we didn’t need to worry about extra baggage allowances and it would be generally a more comfortable flight what with it being Swiss instead of Easyjet!  We were prepared to accept the additional cost of booking completely new flights if it meant that we were going to be able to enjoy our Christmas – just to make everything that much better, Easyjet actually refunded the entire cost of our return flights to the UK for that holiday as well!

Despite reports of snow inbound to Birmingham, Swiss still managed to get us there so we were picked up by Becky’s parents only about 15 hours later than originally planned.  Although this had somewhat messed up plans for 22nd, we had planned on having a pre-Christmas Christmas dinner because Becky and I would be with my family for actual Christmas Day, we were still able to get back early in the afternoon so hadn’t lost the whole day.  We had a very nice Christmas dinner and were able to get all the present wrapping we still had to do completed.

The following day we packed up the presents and what we would need for the rest of the week, and headed off down to the Cotswolds.  Every two years my family (on my father’s side – he was one of six) have a bit of a get-together where as many family members as possible all gather in rented accommodation for the Christmas period.  Generally this is either a huge manor house or collection of cottages, this year it was Middle Stanley Farm, just on the border of the Cotswolds.  This was only an hour and a bit drive from Becky’s parents place so we headed over in the early afternoon aiming to avoid the predicted snow if possible.  We arrived (with the help of GPS) without too much trouble, just as it was starting to snow.  We were luckier than other members of my family though, one group had experienced a puncture and had to change their tyre and another group managed to get down the wrong driveway, only to realise it was no longer possible to get the car back out!  We were just happy to have made it there!