Thursday 18 December

I hate to keep repeating myself, but Thursday was another warm sunny day. I have just checked the weather in Kingston (7:08 GMT) and I see it is -14, brrrrrr!!!!
We decided that we would see what the day offered without making any plans. After breakfast and getting the kids off to school, Jeff, Louise, J.J. and I set off for a walk around the country side. It was interesting to see flowers blooming and crops growing in the fields.
Along one stretch of woods we came upon some mega bird feeders, 45 gallon plastic drums filled with oats. One of Jeff and Louise' friends explained that farmers raised pheasants and grouse for hunting. They released the birds just prior to the hunting season and kept them close by with theses feeders until such time as the farmers can come out and kill them. They release close to 10,000 birds in this area and only about 500 will survive the dogs and guns.
After our return home and a cuppa tea, Jeff and I set off for St. Ives to do a little Christmas shopping (we are upholding the time honoured tradition of men to leave Christmas shopping until just days before Christmas) and to do a little geocaching.
The shopping was a struggle and we worked up quite an appetite so we headed to the nearest pub. Finding a pub was not the chore it was in Peterborough, as they seemed to be everywhere. We chose the Robinhood Pub on high street and I had my first fish and chips in an English pub. Bangers and mash are next on my list. I also tried one of their cask ales, Courage Director's Bitter, another truly delicious English ale. I limited myself to one pint as we still had some walking about to do, looking for gifts and caches.
We were able to find one caches that Jeff missed on a previous visit because the gate was locked. We missed the second cache because of a locked gate. Later we discovered that had we crossed the bridge we could have walked right to it. Oh well, another day.
We gave up on Christmas shopping since we still had 7 days to go and were not under any pressure, yet.
After supper, we had a Gray's Anatomy marathon and a good night's sleep.

p.s. I took the photo of the grave stone because of the pot of skulls in the upper right corner - rather gruesome