One thing I forgot to mention from a prior blog posting on our Arkansas holiday, which I think may have been in 1998, was the day we spent at the Ozark Folk Center (http://www.ozarkfolkcenter.com/). We discovered that there was a big Scots heritage there - the names, music and the dance felt very familiar to us. We went in to watch a show at the auditorium and I was picked on to get up on stage to partner one of the performers in a traditional dance! Can you believe it? I've seldom felt more like a fish out of water. Nice place though - worth a visit. It rather spoils the image of the place, but we had to do the silly tourist thing, didn't we?:
Another omission from prior postings was one of my best ever wins at golf. KPMG annually organise a Business League in the North East and for a while, we used to enter a team. Well, in 1996, we (my colleague Clifford Alexander and I) played well enough to qualify for the end of season Finals Day at Lossiemouth and, guess what? - we won! Not only were we best team by a mile, but I also won the individual event. The subsequent evening prize-giving back in Aberdeen was covered by the Press and Journal and they published the following photo:
I've been trying hard to sequence the various holidays and other events, but, pre-1999 and digital technology, some of the memories are a little fuzzy and may differ by a year or so, but please allow me this degree of error.
I had written before about our trip to Gibraltar and I recently came across this photo, taken there:
I think this may also have been the holiday when Jo made an aborted attempt to learn some Spanish:
Staying in Europe for now, I remember one trip to Italy. I had booked a time-share in Assisi and we did a bit of touring round that area but I have just 3 outstanding memories of that trip. The first was buying some wine at the local grocery - they supplied it in large refillable plastic bottles, a bit like you would use at a filling station.Given our prior experience in Malta, we made no attempts this time to try and take any of the wine home!
It was also on that Italian trip that I firmly established some of my grudges/prejudices against Italians. It was a very small sample, I know, and I shouldn't extrapolate that to all Italians - but - some of those that travelled with us on a city trip in a mini-bus really got my goat. We were told to turn up at the allotted hour, but I noticed there were 2 times on the notice - one for foreign visitors and one for the Italians. Despite their time being earlier than hours, a bunch of them still showed up late and held up the rest of us waiting in the mini-bus. They repeated this on the return trip. On neither occasion was there even a hint of an apology. Quietly seething.
My last memories of Italy were when we moved on to Rome. On arrival at the central station, we discovered there was a strike of taxi drivers that day - sod's law. We struggled with our cases, attempting to walk before deciding to risk trying the bus. We made it safely to our hotel and then went on the tourist trail - the Spanish Steps, Trevi Fountain, Vatican, Colosseum etc. The city is just full of ancient history and is a World Heritage site, but I was appalled at how much graffiti there was everywhere - and I don't mean modern artistic graffiti, Banksy style - I'm talking about simple hooligan-style defacing. Very disappointing and a bit off-putting. Anyway, here's a photo of Ross and Jo at the Colosseum:
Also probably out of sequence, here's a few taken on our various trips to Florida:
Jo - the big hair years. One of these may have been Disney, Paris.
That would all have been in the first half of the decade, but, moving towards the latter years, Lucy graduated from RGU in, we think, 1996 or thereabouts:
We suspect that our first trip to see Lucy in USA may have been in 1997 when, as mentioned previously, we went to Arkansas and Memphis. I believe that, from there, we headed to California, where we had our first glimpse of magical San Francisco:
It was early morning when we arrived and the usual mist was hanging over the city. In one direction, we could see the Golden Gate Bridge slowly appearing as it started to heat up, whilst the other way was Alcatraz. Stunning. You have to pre-book trips over to the island for a self-guided tour of the notorious prison and we hadn't done so on this occasion, but we made sure we did so the next year:
There's more - much more - to come before we're finished with the 1990's, but I'll close this post now.
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