autumnal

The view from our window on Saturday morning. Everything rain-soaked after a drookit night, leaves on the turn, apple boughs bowing and the sun starting to do her thing. It looked amazing and like a day full of promise.

Chilly, but. There's a definite air of autumn about Edinburgh right now. Emergency gully clearing (all those leaves). Lots of rain - interspersed with blinding sunshine. Skidding over crabapples on the way to work.

So, on our day full of promise, we headed west. But Glasgow had other ideas. As is often the case on the 45 min trip, the skies got greyer and more ominous. Still, we made it to Kelvingrove (via the clockwork orange and a walk along the river) without getting wet. And there was plenty there to keep us occupied as showers passed by (with a tasty lunch stop across the road at Mother India's cafe...butter chicken to die for, zingy lime and coriander baked trout). When we first came to Scotland, Kelvingrove was closing and we thought we wouldn't still be here when it reopened. Sorry mum! It's a great museum - fine art and natural history under one roof, Dali rubbing shoulders with the dinosaurs. I don't normally go in for old bones, but my favourite thing was the majestic, enormous skeleton of the giant Irish deer (pic#7).

We've been in Greece

Hence the dearth of posts.

We've been back a week and I'm slowly adjusting to normal autumn Edinburgh life after more than 2 weeks in the Greek sun. My tan is fading, summer clothes have been packed away, but we still have plenty of photos to wade through.

Pictured left is Oia, in postcard-pretty Santorini, one of three islands we visited. It's extremely photogenic, from the pastel-hued villages that cling improbably to caldera cliffs, to red beach, a colourful result of the island's volcanic past.

One morning, we woke to a deafening boom echoing around the caldera. A, half-asleep, thought the volcano was erupting again. Fortunately not. Instead it was one of several dramatic thunderstorms that punctuated our trip.

Even more hair-raising was riding on the back of a scooter up (and more to the point, down) some seriously steep and winding hills. A few off-road adventures, too - especially on Naxos, which is a much bigger island and therefore easier to get lost in. But you're never far from a gorgeous beach and/or greek coffee, so getting lost's no great hardship.

We liked Naxos a lot. It may lack Santorini's drama, but it also lacks many of the hoardes of tourists (especially in September), making it a much more relaxed proposition. More soon...