The Alternative Friday Bike Ride

You've heard of Alternative Comedy? I always think that it's a bit like comedy but without any jokes.

Today Technophobe and I had an Alternative Bike Ride. Like our normal Friday jaunts, but without bikes.

It was bitterly cold and with rain driving like little frozen needles of ice, so we hopped in the car and drove to Stratford, where we partook of an excellent lunch in an Italian restaurant that has been open for only a few weeks. The food was superb, and the service was great too. We learnt the life history - or at least the story of the last almost 8 years since 25th December 2006 - of our very charming waiter. I won't go into details, but he had us in hysterics. (His English is coming along nicely as he spoke only 2 words when he arrived in England.) This photo is of the open kitchen there, complete with pizza oven. I asked our waiter if they would mind if I took a picture of the kitchen and he tried to grab my camera (phone!) off me saying "I take it. I take it. You be in it". It took some explaining to him, that I did not want to be in it, I wanted only the kitchen, without me.

After lunch we had intended to take some photographs in the town or by the river - TP had her new super duper camera with her and it would have been nice to be able to try it out. However, the weather was even more atrocious with really driving rain and extremely cold. Not the weather for debuting a brand new camera. We therefore came home.

When we arrived back in the village, we were greeted by floods of water gushing down the roads and forming great pools wherever it could. This was despite the council's efforts to clear all the drains and mend any broken pipes, rid the pipes of obstacles, etc. about 2 months ago, when they closed the road for days on end.

Oh well, it could have been worse - we could have been out on our bikes and got saturated and frozen. Instead we're lovely and warm and have had a great lunch.