Christmas time is just around the corner, only 1 week now! Today we had a group of friends together at Chris’s on his rooftop overlooking the city. Christina cooked a massive leg of ham which had the best honey glaze on it ever, I was in ham heaven yum!  Looking forwards to Christmas day now for a big turkey and all the trimmings

Chris’s rooftop has a great view South towards Sydney CBD

Christina carving up the lovely ham she made so well

Yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuum

I have the best sunnies, I look so cool!

Brendon and I rode the Sydney to Gong event for MS Australia again this year. It was my 3rd time doing the event but the first time for Brendon. I was just getting over my horrible cold from last week and I knew it would make me 100% better or worse, luckily I kicked it out my system like I was hoping. We fitted semi-slick thin road tyres to our mountain bikes and away we went. If you don’t know the route we rode from Sydney to Wollongong aka the ‘Gong’ here it is.

Sydney to gong route map

One third in tea and muffins stop

Instant coffee and muffin for Brendon

Near the end we stopped at Brendon’s place which was on-route, I threw
Cadburys Twirls at him to try and make him get up and continue

Stopping at Brendon’s on-route, I demolish some rice
crackers and a big can of Mother energy drink

On the way back to Sydney afterwards with a train full of all kinds of bikes

Brendon said it was easier than he thought it would be (road riding is much easier than off-road riding) and we discussed that in future years we would do it different. Either do it as  race and try and get the quickest time, do it dressed up possibly something to do with the new business, or ride to the gong and back to Sydney again for a long distance challenge.

I have just finished moving my web server over to a different company called GoDaddy which is in a different location in the US which now gives me unlimited monthly bandwidth and a whooping 150Gb of online storage, if that doesnt impress you it bascally means, much more space and much faster!

Hi all, We just got back from a very very fast and rushed trip to Europe for 2 & half weeks, The main reason for the trip was to go to our good friends Mad & Loic’s wedding in the south of France and to make a small business trip to Cornwall with mum & dad.

Here is where the iPhone tracked us as driving all over the UK and France:

First stop after arriving in England was to go for a brisk walk in the cool Autumn air on the Trundle hill at Goodwood, Chichester which is local to where I grew up.

After a couple of days in the UK to get over the jetlag, we borrowed mums lovely new BMW 1 series car to drive to the South of France. This is arriving in France on the 4 hour Newhaven to Dieppe ferry.

Then we drove for a few hours south in France, past Paris onto Orleans where our favourite French flatmate Damien lives. Well he now lives in Paris but his parents house where he grew up was in Orleans. He was very happy to see us and us to see him, still very good friends and we have a laugh.

We went out to dinner that night at a French crepery and we had far too many beers, including I had one called Devils beer which was 12% alcohol in strength and was just too strong for beer!

The following day with a bit of a hangover we had to drive 6 hours to the south of France to the region of the wedding. Here I am in a old French historic town trying to blend in as a local.

Here is what we came for, the wedding our our lovely friends Mad (Madeline a Aussie girl) & Loic (a frenchie who has lived in Australia for years). It was a small wedding ceremony in a village hall but a grand wedding reception at a French vineyard. Unfortunately I was a bit sick on the day of the wedding and I couldn’t enjoy all the beautiful wines that were made on site where the wedding reception was (I did enjoy a bottle the day after).

A beautiful guest at the wedding that could have been a bridesmaid she was so beautiful.

The day after the wedding was a more informal lunch where all the guests got together, ate more food and drank of course more wine from the same vineyard. Then they brought our the dessert and there was a very happy girl.

In Cannes I caught up with my old friend from Chichester Tim. Brought back memories for me when I spent a couple of weeks living and working on a big yacht in tropical Queensland Australia quite a few years ago. He is now the engineer on a huge and expensive (would be an understatement) motor cruiser.

He gave us a guided tour above and below decks. It was very extravagant in all areas with no expense spared, Gold here there and everywhere, the owner is the rich Arab business man who built and owns the famous indoor ski slope in Dubai and other hotels around the world.

Tim showed us his new car, its called a ‘Fararee’ or something he said.

Some cocktails in Cannes with Tim. He showed us some nice bars and restaurants and showed us his new place he just bought there up on the hill overlooking the Marina just 5 minutes walk down to his boat.

While we were staying in Cannes visiting Tim over a few days we made a day trip to Monaco which was just an hours drive away. Here is the famous Monte Carlo Casino in the centre of Monaco. We walked the entire length of the Monaco Formula 1 track apart from the tunnel section. We drove the tunnel section in mums BWM before we nearly ran out of petrol, its impossible to find petrol stations in Monaco, its just so dense with buildings. Oh we also broke a ticket machine in a car park and made 8 cars stack up in a queue, it was one of those days but we had fun.

The view of Monaco from above, its one of the smallest countries in the world.

We left from our time in the south of France and drove for 8 hours north back to Orleans. 8 hours is just too long to drive in one day, next time we fly, its cheaper to fly because of all the French toll roads too. We met up with Damien again and he took us for a twilight tour of his city Orleans.

A lovely photo I took of the main river that passes though Orleans. I thought this came out really well considering it was taken on an iPhone I was pleasantly surprised.

The French really know how to do toll roads, this toll booth had 38 toll booths!!

After too many hours to remember of driving, a ferry ride and some more driving, we were back in England, and it felt comfortable to be home. The following night all the family got together and went out to a pub for dinner. Left to right, Grandad Fos, Nanny B, Michael, Sanna, sister Nicki, Mum & Dad.

Next we had a 2 day business trip to Cornwall (regain of south west England) planned with mum & dad. We stopped in a beautiful old pub with a stream running through it in Devon Dartmoor, here’s dad getting some beers. In Cornwall the Cornish beer ‘Tribute’ was very good I found.

This is proper English pub food a English ploughman’s lunch, Ham, cheddar cheese, salad, some chutney to go with the cheese and ham and some fresh bread, it was bloody lovely.

This cow was very funny, it got really angry with our car driving through its turf and wanted to head butt the car side on.

Beautiful Devon countryside in Dartmoor. Well this is a photo to finish the holiday. It was very rushed and we ended up driving some 3000km’s but it’s always nice to visit Europe and see family.

Back to Australia, back to jobs and, oh I have to do that supercar spin episode……

I have been working on a short film called ‘Empty’ over the last few weeks with director Jay Ng who I worked with on the short film ‘’The Poker Table’ last year for Sony Tropfest  View it here on YouTube.

This film like last one is a pretty intense and dark film penned by Jay Ng himself, it makes me wonder what kind of dreams the guy has at night! 🙂 The film is about a young women Anna who returns to her office job after a terrible accident and the series of lifelike flashbacks that she imagines (or not) as she try’s to return to her boring office job. As said the story and script are pretty intense and dark, have a read of one of the pages from the script below:

All the crew, actors and extras had fun filming over the 3 and a half days of shooting with lots of fake blood, drilling into baby dolls heads and between takes lots of laughter. A lot of the crew form ‘The Poker Table’ were called back with myself acting as chief on camera or ‘Director of Photography’ for the wanky term. All the crew were all playing their parts well in this short film and we felt like we were more professional and gelling as a team more compared to the last film, which was great.

Here are some photos from the first 2 days shooting.

Setting up for a scene in a warehouse

 

I had to learn how to use a pretty serious video camera

Applying some fake latex skin and patches of
blood to make a dead like arm and hand 

One of the actors playing out a scene where he drills a baby dolls head

 

Me on camera filming in the ladies toilets for a mirror scene

I washed the new car at Brendon’s the other day on a cool late winters day. Its amazing how clean a Black car looks just after you give it a good clean, basically everything but the internal aluminium interior is Black and it all shines a deep Gloss Black.

There were a lot of swirl marks on the Black paint I noticed, basically from the car being taken to bad car washes in its 3 year life in Melbourne so far. I got in contact with the guy who details all of Lamborghinis cars for them and he detailed the car inside and out over a day at the Lamborghini service centre. The body work apart from a couple of tiny stone chips on the nose looks like new like it has just left the factory.

I also bought a soft top roof from a guy in Melbourne from the Lotus club. I got it half price at $700 which was a good deal as it is brand new. It didn’t fit his Exige as he has a roll cage fitted but fits mine, and it means I can enjoy some open top motoring again once the weather warms up.

smart car + mountain bike inside = looks very funny

Hello all! Brendon and I completed our first ever mountain bike race on the weekend called the 3 Ring Circus (mountain bike events always have funny names). It was a endurance event over 50 km’s off-road with a mix of fire trail and single track.

Note I am laughing here in front of Brendon for some reason

There was a bit of a issue at the start though. The night before Brendon and I pulled apart our bikes to squeeze them into the back of our tiny cars, my Peugeot 206cc and his smart car (smart car + mountain bike inside = looks stupid). Trouble is as it was dark I left one small part that holds my back wheel on, on the grass!

When we got to the event we found the part was missing and so asked the race mechanics but as I have a fancy bike (or whizz bang bike as they called it), they didn’t have the spare part. Next the announcer on the PA put a message out to the hundreds of people asking if anyone had the spare part, no one came forward.

Then after 2 minutes this lovely lady came over and said she just found out she has bronchitis and did I want to use her bike. well it wasn’t the best bike in the world it has to be said, it was pretty crap really, but it was a bike!

I did the event with my handicap of a crappy bike and to my amazement I overtook crazy rider Ian in the last few km’s and came first out of our 4 man group with a time of 3:24 and 54 seconds, great! Go the girl bike!

Brendon just finishing just a millisecond before he tripped up LOL

All at the finishing line, Akhil, Brendon, Me and Ian 

Here’s how our times stacked up, I came first and on a girls bike ha-ha.

The feature to make comments on Beddysblog has been unavailable for a few months now but I’ve finally cracked it and you can leave comments again, hooray!