Fog at Heathrow; flights cancelled and M25 slow
by matt @ 4:52 pm. Blogged under Travel / Holidays
With internal flights cancelled at Heathrow and Gatwick today due to thick fog, I wasn’t sure how clear I’d find the M25. Sure enough there was an accident at junction 18 and the variable speed limits were in force to slow everybody down right back at junction 11. I only got stuck in queued traffic twice, but it still took forty-five minutes to travel from junctions 9 to 13. The reason for my trip? Visiting my accountant to drop off the 2005/06 accounts, a return due to Companies House in January… and more importantly - corporation tax due on January 1st (how depressing). (more…)
Further adding to the delights and personalisation of this blog… I thought I’d set up a live webcam - showing a day-time view of my street. The view covers the end of my garden, the local car park and the homes of one or two neighbours. Each time a moving object is picked up by the lense, a photograph is taken and automatically loaded to this new webcam page. Take a look at 
Last night Suzie_Q and I had free tickets to see the new Boney M musical ‘Daddy Cool’ at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London. The downside to free show tickets (which we often obtain) is that you invariably find yourself seated in the upper circle with no leg room and a view not suited for sufferers of vertigo. Free tickets are not to be sniffed at though - there’s little room to complain when you’re saving £50! The major downside to the upper circle at the Shaftesbury Theatre was the stifling heat - it was like a sauna; as hot as the tube in summer time and I needed two bottles of water just to stay hydrated. Thankfully Daddy Cool was well worth the trip even if a little slow to get going. 
One of the main reasons I don’t live in London, despite working there, is the fact that I can step off the train each night into the relaxing environment of the Surrey countryside. Of course I don’t live on a farm and the station isn’t immediately situated in a field, but a short drive from home gets me away from vehicles, fumes and more importantly other people. Following two weeks of intensely long hours I was feeling a bit stressed by the time the weekend arrived. Suzie_Q reminded me that there was a family dog we could borrow for a quiet stroll down the local public footpaths, and with Sunday being unusually warm it was the perfect opportunity for some gentle exercise.
Fabio and Francesca’s wedding ceremony was held at the local church in Ortona at 5pm on Saturday, just as well because it would have been far too hot for a suit and tie any earlier in the day! The wedding didn’t begin very promptly but we were all entertained by a choir who put our English choirs to shame. Perhaps twelve men and women averaging 25 years of age and they really loved what they were doing – most choirs I’ve seen at English weddings consist of the elderly and the very young who sing with as much enthusiasm as a death row inmate on his final walk to the chair. If I had the cash I’d pay for them to come and do mine and Suzie_Q’s wedding, quite superb and a marvellous alternative to forcing guests to sing hymns (not that we could have done in Italian anyway). 
Ortona is very close to Pescara on the Eastern Coast of Italy in the region of Abruzzo. By car it’s about thirty-five minutes drive from Pescara airport into Ortona. A relatively small town with docked fishing boats, a small industrial harbour and wonderful beaches, the bay is surrounded by steep green slopes. The main town buildings in Ortona cut a straight and precarious line across a cliff edge, a winding road twists down to the harbour area. The odd medium sized boat comes into the harbour once or twice a day, but for the most part the calm seas are upset only by the occasional small leisure boats taking people out to dive and snorkel. This town is untouched by tourism and is authentic Italy through and through. 
With the added security measures currently in place, Stansted airport was absolutely packed on Friday. We arrived two and a half hours before our Ryanair flight was scheduled to take off and were confronted with two very slow check-in operators and a ‘queue’ more than one hundred people strong. I say ‘queue’ but it was more of a rabble, this is because Italian’s do not know how to queue. Such a sweeping statement might seem absurd but it’s absolutely true, the majority of Italians seem incapable of taking in their surroundings to gauge how best to behave. When confronted with a queue it is seen as a hindrance, so most Italians go around it, until you have a wide circle of people instead of a nice orderly English queue. It’s not that they’re being deliberately rude - more that they just don’t comprehend queuing. 
At lunchtime last Friday, Suzie_Q and I had a flight booked with Ryanair to Pescara. Pescara is a large town on the Eastern coast of Italy - roughly on a parallel with Rome. Suzie_Q has a lot of Italian relatives living in nearby Ortona and we were invited to the wedding of her second cousin ‘Fabio’. I met Fabio for the first time last year, spending a day or two with him and his fiancée ‘Francesca’ at their villa and on Fabio’s small boat. Flying to Italy for a wedding isn’t cheap, but it’s an experience you can’t really turn down, so despite being so close to our week in Ibiza, off we went. 
Now that we’re safely back home I thought it was time to write a review of the Bellamar Hotel in San Antonio Bay. I originally checked San Antonio hotel reviews on 
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