Have had an amazing long weekend, and am happy to share with you what I did.

Dear reader,

My apologies for not writing all these days. The truth is that I just did not feel that words could do justice to the amazing time I had on the last long weekend. I say long because I got an entire 4 days o holidays last week. Friday was off on account of it being a Good Friday, while Monday was off to compensate for Easter Sunday. As a result, I ended up doing some fantastic things to make it all worthwhile. 

Friday, 25th March, 2016:

Early in the morning, I coordinated a visit to Rossall Beach to do some serious bird watching with Martin Lever. Actually, the beach visit was his idea, as he has been there several times. He assured me that we would definitely see new grassland and perhaps sea-birds on this visit. I caught up with him near where the 14 number bus takes passengers; we rode together to our destination, about half a km from Rossall Public school. From here, we set out among open fields to try and see birds. Initially, we saw some greenfinches, crows and starlings. 

Common Starling

Ringed Plover

Sanderlings

Common Kestrel

As we proceeded further, we were walking parallel to the sea shore. We saw many more birds and had a really good time. I will share more pictures in my next post.

Saturday, 26th March and Sunday, 27th March, 2016:

I spent the weekend exploring the Cumbria Lake District. I had planned some of the things I was going to do, but not everything. In the end, the unplanned things gave me an opportunity to do things which were out of the ordinary. On Saturday, I took a train to Preston, then changed to another one to Ormskirk, and finally, yet another one to reach Windermere at half past eleven. It was a wet morning, and as I had booked a hotel room at Ulverston, I would have no other choice than to wait for a bus that would take me there. However, I did something I had not planned: I took a short distance bus to the Windermere boat pier. There, I boarded a 45-minute "Islands cruise" and enjoyed my time on the lake. Returning to the pier, I then caught the same bus I was to take earlier from the station and arrived at The Sun Inn, Ulverston at about half-past two in the afternoon. I had booked a night's stay here through www.booking.com.

In the evening, I visited the nearby Laurel and Hardy Museum, located inside a cinema house (Roxy). This is the only museum of its kind in the whole world. It is located here in Ulverston because Stan Laurel grew up here. The museum was small but interesting. Additionally, it screened L & H movies all the day on their big screen. 

While I had had a lunch within the inn, I went for dinner to an Indian restaurant located about 250 m away - the Naaz Restaurant. The food was good indeed. I had a simple dinner, though.

On Sunday, I first caught a bus to Haverthwaite station. Here, I boarded a steam-engine driven heritage train that took 18 minutes to take its passengers through a hilly route via tunnels and such, to Lakeside. 

As Lakeside is on the other coast of the Windermere lake, I had to once again take a boat to Windermere pier, and from there, another boat to Brockhole. This place has a lot of activities at its Tourist Information Centre. The Brockhole TIC serves to highlight a lot of lake district activities, but for me, it served as a portal to have close encounters with different kinds of owls (with some of which I had photos taken) and to examine several garden birds through a bird-hide that was located here. It was an amazing experience, as there were volunteers here who helped identify bird species I had not seen earlier. 

After this, I took a bus back to Windermere station, and then a return train journey that brought me back to Blackpool by six p.m. in the evening. 

All in all, a very interesting three days indeed!

Another Saturday, another walk, and lots of new pictures.

On this Saturday too, I went on a cross-country walk. As I had done the last week, I first went through the road that emerges out of my hospital, then past the golf course to Marton Mere Local Nature Reserve, where I stopped inside a bird hide to see a lot of different birds, and then, via a different route, to Stanley Park, where I again saw and photographed many more. In the process, I also walked quite a bit and met a birder-photographer by the name of Martin Lever, whom I befriended and stayed with, as he showed me many new potential bird-sighting areas. 

Martin is a recently unemployed professional photographer who shoots weddings for a living in addition to freelancing by selling his photos to magazines and other forms of publications. I was impressed by his very light camera and lens combination which, nevertheless, took awesome pictures all the way. 

The entire walk-cum-shooting of birds took over three hours, but by the time I finished, I had a respectable list of over 20 birds and nearly a hundred photos in my camera. Here, I share with you all some of the best ones that I captured.

Woodpigeon

Pheasant (female)

Chaffinch

Magpie

Moorhen

Red grouse

Chaffinch

Dunnock

Pheasnat (male)

Reed Bunting (male)

Carrion crow (juvenile)

Great Tit

Black-headed gull (summer plumage)

Black-headed gull (winter plumage)

I hope you liked the pictures as much as I did preparing them and sharing them with you. Thanks for reading. 

Back in the UK, the past 10 days

After arriving here in the U.K. I have immersed myself in work but have not lost any opportunity to relax and entertain. My readers who are also connected to me via Facebook may have seen my post related to my one day trip to Liverpool on last Saturday. I also went out to eat a solo dinner on the last Wednesday (at the Akash Indian restaurant) and a dinner with a friend on the following night - with Michael at Nunzio's (my second visit to this amazing Italian restaurant). 

In other news:

•  my work is getting better now that I am able to understand the system. 
• I ordered a "kettlebell" for working out from home. 
• I am missing the gymnasium on account of being busy until the late hours of every work day. 
• I am enjoying home-made chapatis for dinner. 
• I am still finding it difficult to cook food, and so, am eating the dal I had cooked on the last Wednesday. 
• Finding cooked food is not so difficult in the UK, and I usually end up stocking my small refrigerator with stuff bought from M & S, W H Smith, Sainsbury or similar outlet. 
• On last Sunday, I went on a cross-country walk inside Blackpool. This walk begins from a gate inside the hospital complex, cuts across the golf course next to the hospital, and keeps going towards Staining, a suburban area of Blackpool. During this trip, I caught some birds and landscapes on my Canon camera. The photos haven't exactly been award material, so I am going to post just a few here. 

A Blackbird

On a cross-country trail, a group of riders

Victoria Hospital, from the trail I was on.

The cold weather freezes the exhaust from a continental airliner.

Robin

A sea gull

A mallard drake

India Visit, Day 10: Final adieus and departure for U.K.

I am now nearing the end of the re-telling of my first short vacation to India from the U.K. It was a very eventful holiday indeed. More than anything, the surprise element added charm and love to the whole thing. I imagine I might have inspired others to do something similar to spice up their own encounters with their near and dear ones. 

I did surprise my family in one more way. I had a tattoo of a traditional tribal design made on my shoulder when I was in the U.K. and when I showed this to my family members, it made them all gasp with shock and pleasure. I would like to share that with you, dear reader. Not their look of surprise, but the tattoo itself:

The final day was spent in packing my bags. There were a host of things I had collected over the last week, a list of which I had made much earlier when I was still in the UK. Among these things were a good quality kadai with a glass lid, some spices and condiments I had missed earlier on my first travel to the UK,, some new clothing that I got stitched while in India, and a lot of miscellaneous stuff. 

Eventually, I left the house at about four o'clock, and reached the airport at around five p.m. in the company of my daughter Hannah. The return flight was at half past nine, and this took me across Asia and Europe till I arrived at Manchester early in the morning on Monday, the 7th of March 2016. 

Hannah and I in the foyer of T2 Terminal of the CSIA

Smiling and cheerful faces hiding the inner pain of parting

This ends the string of posts describing my brief but memorable holiday in India. On to my newer posts about life in UK. Thank you all for reading ...

India Visit, Day 9: Trip to Imagica with brother Murtuza and our children

Today was a highlight day in my India visit as my brother, with his two children Shabbir and Umme-Salma, and I, with my daughters Inas and Hannah, went to Adlabs Imagica - a full-scale adventure park located near Khopoli off the Mumbai-Pune expressway. We were all excited, and the reason I was excited was the fact that I had never been to this park despite my knowing about it since nearly a decade. The great thing about this visit was that I was being allowed in totally free, as I had just had my birthday a few days before. 

We drove to it in my car, reaching there at about nine o'clock. The younger kids of Murtuza were too excited to be there, and no sooner had we entered the park than they had run to the first of the many rides that are available here. When we had entered the park, we were all given some or the other things to wear on our bodies. I got a "Birthday Boy" wristband; my family members, including the brother and all the 4 offspring received "Team member" badges. Over the course of the next few hours, we took one ride after another, until, at about 1 p.m., we sat down near one of the restaurants to have lunch. 

As we did the rides, one thing struck me immediately: this park has everything on the same scale as international adventure parks like the Universal Studios park that my kids and I had visited in January 2014 in Sentosa Island in Singapore! Additionally, the creators of this park had changed the themes to fit them to the Indian culture and Indian stories. A simple show based on a montage of movies shot from a helicopter at different majestic locations in India literally took our breaths away! There were roller-coasters - three in number. I did not have the guts to sit in any of the open ones, but I did sit in one that was inside a dome and in complete darkness. I could feel my insides taking a toss, but I never realised that I had gone through 2, or maybe 3, 360 degree turns inside the space of about 55 seconds! One was supposed to keep one's eyes open to view celestial images (the ride was called a Journey into Space - or something similar, but I did not see anything as I kept my eyes firmly shut in an effort to stay calm under pressure. This ride began with our train moving slowly to a "gate into space", and then the train suddenly zoomed ahead - so fast, in fact, that I felt like screaming. What an experience!

There were fun rides too, such as revolving around a hub seated on what seemed to be cuddly flying elephants, going up and down in a tower (that was scary!), shooting each other with water cannons in a sort of pirate adventure, and a virtual ride in a car that rides and flies across different landscapes of the Imagica ground in an effort to save innocent children from a villain. We, the riders, are in cars that shake and grind to give us a virtual experience while the screen shows us the visuals of what we might have been actually experiencing had our cars been real. The hero we are helping is a cartoonised version of Anil Kapoor as Mr. India, while the villain is Mogambo - played by a cartoonised version of Amrish Puri. This was a very enjoyable ride indeed. 

We finished all the rides (barring one, which closed before we could reach it) at around sunset. Our trip back home was uneventful, and the hectic day ended when we finally reached home around ten p.m. 

There are so many memories we have of this day, but I am sharing some here with you. Enjoy.