I went to a Bank Holiday music festival and get-together put together by some fantastic friends of ours in Kent. 2006 marks the 12th one so far, and I was fortunate to have been invited down for my third this year. I had been in the past (2000, 2004) by myself to sing, but this year I asked Adam to come down with me. My father came down too, intending to go back later in the evening, but decided to stay on until morning.

We took a seven day trip to Kalkan, Turkey to kick off the beginning of our holidays in July. Here's a link to my Flickr page with a few choice photos from our vacation.

This was the first holiday that Alison and I have taken, by ourselves together, since we have been with each other in five years. Which is not to say we haven't been places together. There have been weddings and receptions in Rome, Indiana, Stockholm, Ireland, Mallorca, London, Stoke-On-Trent... But those kind of trips always require your extra attention (and rightly so), and it's difficult to enjoy the place you're in for any amount of time before you zip back home again.

So at the end of June we decided to walk up to the travel agents and book something. Anything. We found that the Hotel Pirat at the Kalkan marina would accomodate us and our budget, so we booked then and there.

The transfer from Dalaman airport was fairly lengthy, weighing in at about 2.5 hours. Half the way through, Alison and I got off the coach and were driven by car to the marina. We made a good choice of hotel - it was right on the edge of the marina, so we could look out towards the sea. We were in the older part of the hotel - it was split into two parts - but it wasn't so old that it was bad at all. We upgraded for a small fee to the sea view from one at the rear of the hotel with a staircase view.

The food was fantastic. We dined at the hotel's pool restuarant almost every night with a wide choice of vegetarian and meat dishes. This was also typical of the entire area. We were slightly worried before travelling on a friend's word of caution that vegetarian food wasn't readily available.

Not wanting to suffer from continuous partial attention on our holidays, all the gadgets stayed at home with the exception of an iPod and speakers. Instead, I occupied my time reading "Men of Tomorrow" by Gerard Jones and "The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzweil. I'm still working on that last one, it's not a light read...

We took a day's boat trip to Kekova and met some lovely people on the way. It was also a great chance to swim in warmer waters and float right up to some of the nearby islands if you wanted to. Lunch and apple tea was served on the boat, and we explored some nearby rock tombs, as well as examined what little was not ransacked of the sunken city of Apollonia. We finished off the last day of our trip watching the World Cup final with the folks we had met on the day trip out.

At the end of it all, we had a nice and relaxing trip, didn't set any expectations and enjoyed ourselves and the people we were with immensely. A great pace-setter for the rest of my time off from work.

While I'm in the midst of writing a long history of Orion to post here later on, it was necessary to put something on here in the meantime to commemorate our beloved cat who didn't survive after his operation last Wednesday.

Thank you everyone for your kind words, emails and flowers.

Godspeed, little buddy, we love you.