The Killers & Dartmoor

It has been busy times of late. Friday evening a group of us from school went into London to Hard Rock Calling which was on in Hyde Park. Despite the forecast being for thunderstorms, the weather held & we had a brilliant evening. We met Claire & Nic there, so it was lovely having some quality time with my friends. The Kooks were the main support, & I was slightly underwhelmed by them. I do really like them as a band, & have been to some brilliant gigs of theirs, but they were a bit lost in the vastness of the venue. The Killers on the other hand ROCKED. They are pretty much my favourite band at the moment & I can't get enough of them. I did kind of lose my husband for a lot of the evening, as he chose to watch Echo & the Bunnymen who were playing on the second stage, then once that was over he struggled to find us again! However with impeccable timing he did track us down just before the end of the evening. The whole of the Killers show turned into a massive karaoke party, & people continued the theme as we filed out of the park. "I've got soul, but I'm not a soldier" was the lyric of choice, & it was especially impressive reverberating around the subway as hundreds of people sang it on the way to the tube station.
Saturday morning I was up early in order to drive down to Dartmoor. I was helping out with my last ever Duke of Edinburgh expedition down there. I made it down in about 3 & a half hours, & had a lovely 3 days on the moors. We had two really hot days, & the kids struggled a bit, walking in the heat with their fully laden backpacks. However the middle day had a bit of light rain to cool them down. Dartmoor expeds are always good ones to go on as the kids wild camp out on the moors, but the staff camp in a field belonging to a very nice pub!

The famous Dartmoor ponies were everywhere, complete with foal. They were totally oblivious to anything around them & played havoc with the traffic in the middle of the moor. They were very very cute though...

I arrived back Monday night, with 2 days at Bearwood College remaining. I must admit, not a huge amount of teaching was done today as I farewelled some of my classes. Tomorrow I have my last 3 lessons. It was quite sad saying goodbye to some of them. There really are some great kids at the school. Tomorrow evening is the official staff farewell function. I'm not really looking forward to it as I have to give bit of a speech, which isn't really my thing. I think mine will be fairly short & sweet! Then it's pretty much 6 months holiday for me, as the NZ school year doesn't start until late January. Bring it on!!! I've got back to back summers to enjoy...