Family wedding

June 6 was a gloriously happy day being nephew's wedding in a garden, in Geneva, Switzerland. Hordes of us invaded to meet his wife's family and celebrate their marriage.
The invitation to us all meant we four siblings, met for the first time since our mother died, nine years ago. We flew or trained in from the US, Scotland and England. Who knows when or if we’ll meet again? Nephew, T, has three cousins who married quietly during the years of Covid and lock down, my daughter on another continent, giving us only 23 hours’ notice! 

The build up days of the week before the wedding included an evening get-together. Our side met Friday evening at an Auberge where half the family were staying. Prosecco and nibbles followed by pizza or pasta if you wanted to avoid gluten.  I got to meet my nephew, C's new wife, and nephew, G's girl friend. I left after we'd got through a couple of bottles of wine or more, but the twenty and thirty year olds went to a whiskey bar found a wonderfully smooth one, made locally, so local that it was the bartender who made. It's great that these cousins too have got see each other and meet their partners after so many years - the last meet up being their grandparents 60th wedding anniversary in 2010.

My grateful thanks to T & I for inviting us all, and to I's parents for hosting us in their garden.

Poolside

Why leave home?  If you had a home like this, you'd stay.  This is my brother's back yard, with wisteria shading the veranda by the pool, and a couple of affectionate, animated shaggy hearthrugs, Wheatens, to bark at intruding birds.

Jet lagged for the first few days, we unwound here in the mornings, in the afternoon hiking in nearby mountains.  Here we've reached the top of Fletcher Canyon, a gain of height from around 6600 feet to 7700 I think.  We need to be fit.

Then we went to Yosemite with brother and sister-in-law, staying in a huge cabin - bigger than the first house I had.  Each of the four days, we went on a hike round somewhere, Nevada Falls, Glacier point, Panorama view, Vernal falls, Yosemite falls, seeing lakes, meadows and the Mist Trail.  At least the mist wasn't there that day, dampening the steps.

Rocks, like El Capitan,are enormous and even using binoculars the climbers were still tiny pinpricks.   One evening we watched the sun set over another famous rock,  Half Dome.  Another evening we came past El Capitan in the dark and could see the flashlights where the climbers were stopping for the night - it takes days to climb these rocks.  For a light hike, we thought we'd visit the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias, but it turned out to be another four mile trek up hill, as usual and we got back to the cabin hungry for our lunch and a siesta. 

On the final evening, we had a talk from the Search and Rescue Team http://www.friendsofyosar.org/.  This speaker told wonderful tales of the perils in the park, and afterwards we realised that the scary steps down by the Mist Trail were just as dangerous as we'd felt when we were negotiating them. 

Now we're home again, resting, catching up with news, blogs, photos, and audio diary, just relaxing by the pool again.

New years' travelling plans

You don't want to spend a fortune on air tickets to another continent and then not stay for more than a couple of weeks. I have such a dilemma in that I haven't been to see my brother in the States for 16 years. I last went to visit brother and his wife in 1996 when they paid for us to spend Christmas with them after my husband had died in August. Christmas promised to be very bleak that year, and I was devastated, deep in mourning. Since brother & wife hadn't been able to fly over for the funeral, which would have been an utter waste of money to fly so far for a couple of days for the sake of someone dead, brother paid for daughter, son and me to fly to Vegas and to stay with them for three weeks. Son had three weeks holiday from his new school, and I just took daughter off for the last week of her school term without even asking permission.

I remember those weeks well, brother's very sensitive care for all of us, sister-in-law's welcome and companionship, and they kept us busy. They took us to visit the Vegas casinos (keep within the paths because we were with children), see the white lion, and the first time I saw Cirque du Soleil. I'd never heard of it then, but it was the most amazing circus, with no words, just acrobats, and clowns. They weren't nice clowns though. SiL told us that we weren't going to have seats near the front in case the clowns picked on us. And we watched one poor man following a clown who had his tickets and was showing him to his seat, along the aisle, along a row, over the back of some seats, along another row, over the back of some seats, then the clown tore up the tickets! The poor man was stranded.

But I haven't been to see brother & SiL since. They've come here several times, and
my son has visited them twice, but I've not been there. Mainly I've been engrossed in bringing up my children, first on my own, then I remarried, and have been building relationships with my new family, and husband had paid work too and didn't retire until 2008, by which time I was well into my PhD, so couldn't travel too much - except for that trip to India for the Navjote. I could travel to academic conferences for my studies, and even got the expenses covered, so I managed to get to a very eminent conference in Canada in 2010. This year I presented at a conference slightly closer to home, in Amsterdam. Now I have no academic affiliation that will support me at conferences, so I'll probably only go to a couple in Oxford, and might even gate-crash those, depending on how much they cost.

So I want to go and see brother & SiL in 2012. I've arranged my Open University tutoring so that I am free in September for two or three weeks, and husband's agreed to it, though he hasn't yet agreed to more than two weeks and we haven't yet booked our tickets. I expect we can do more than just stay with brother & SiL like I did last time, because now we don't have lots of children to look after. In 1996, SiL had three children and I had my two. I visited them earlier in 1988 when between us we had five children under school age, and we went nowhere but the supermarket, which was my excitement of the holiday - I'd never been in an American supermarket or anywhere in America for that matter. So my previous two trips to the States haven't been very good, and I've had little to entice me back, but this time husband and I might hire a car and go some other places too, like the Grand Canyon, or Zion National Park, and if we go in September, SiL says the temperature is good and we could go alpine hiking up Mt Charleston or visit their holiday hut.

Maybe husband and I will visit India in 2013, or I wonder when I could visit with daughter. When I was in India in 2008, I watched all those young women, and I missed my 17 year old daughter, and I watched them together and thought that she would get on with them. But daughter is finishing her first degree this year and may have a job without much leave in 2013, so she won't have the time to come with me. On the other hand, she loves linguistics, and has just spent a year studying maths in French in France before returning to Bristol to finish her maths degree, and is considering taking a masters in linguistics. At the moment she's looking at studying in Dublin or Wales, and she's job hunting. I wonder if she could study languages of India or linguistics in India. Then spending money to visit India with her in 2013 wouldn't seem like a waste of a fortune.

Sixty reasons to cheer

Sixty soon and sixty friends and sixty things to do - what a long list compared to that of a six-year old - did I have a birthday party when I was six? I might have had. I know I didn't have a party when I was seven, because instead my baby brother was born, and they told us (my bigger little brother and me) in the playground at school that we had a new brother, and we went home and saw him in bed with our mother.

Following the example of a colleague who was fifty recently, here are my sixty reasons to cheer in my sixtieth birthday.

Visitors from states

Husband and I went to Waddesdon Manor with Brother and sister-in-law for a fine wine & cheese tasting in the aviary. They'd flown in with my nephew for a 10 day visit. We tasted red wine, a sauvignon and a sauternes.

Then we came home and tasted some more wine with our pizzas. Some of us stayed up past midnight.

In the morning, over a leisurely breakfast (very leisurely as teenagers had scoffed all the bread so we had to nip out to bakers) of rolls and cheese and garlic sausage we had time for slightly more chat before they left for Lancashire.