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So, a pretty non-stop year this year. I must have done well over 100 flights this year, and I've yet to do the best one. Concorde is booked for the 23 December for Christmas and New Year in New York and Philadelphia.

Work has been most of the travel, though, mainly in exciting places such as Milton Keynes, Hull, Birmingham, Veghel and Nijmegen in the Netherlands, Leuven and Mechelen in Belgium and also places in France. The first weekend of the year was spent in two warehouses in Veghel as we moved a client operation from one to another over the weekend. I checked the distance I walked with the pedometer Amanda and Kevin got me for Christmas 2000 and reached over 19km on one day, just around the warehouse. The move was successful, and I got my first day in the office half way through January. I was to get to ten days total in my home office by June.

Work has been fun, though it's not easy travelling so much again. On top of that I was trying to sort out the house build. The first drawings were started in January, and the approach by Hazel doing the design was excellent. I was really excited when I got the first drawings, and was planning to start construction around June, but now we're on the second planning application having an interesting time dealing with building guidelines and fitting into the design of the street, though as my local representative on the planning committee said, there's not much competition around my street. The swimming pool doesn't really present the problem, but seems to be more the number of windows, the amount of roof visible from the road, and one building guideline about light and visibility for the neighbouring houses. Meetings with the planner seem to give us hope and seem pretty positive, but then a couple of weeks later, opinion seems to shift. We'll see if I can get planning permission hopefully early next year.

The delays in the planning application have changed living plans for the next year. Ralph, who works for a client and who I have only met in the Netherlands, was talking about buying houses in Milton Keynes, and explained how cheap they were compared to around Crowthorne and Berkshire. I was worried about the amount of rent I would have to pay in rent if I wanted to carry on living round here while the house was built. Two weeks later I had an offer in on a house in Milton Keynes in Tattenhoe. It's a three bedroom detached house and should make a good place to live while the construction is going on in Crowthorne. Completion is set for 22 February 2002, but that leaves the dilemma of what to with the two houses, since I am now unlikely to be able to build during 2002. It looks like I'll put both houses up to let and live in the one that doesn't get rented out, or that brings in the least rental income. Once the house is built in Crowthorne, I'll rent out the one in Milton Keynes. At least looking for a place showed me some of the good points of living over there. We'll see how it goes when I get there. At least I haven't had to move this year. And it has got me around to putting up curtains in the house that I hadn't bothered with up till now since I was expecting to knock the place down.

There have been a lot of trips this year, including such places as Coed Y Brenin in Wales in order to throw myself down mountains on top of a bike; Moutiers in the Alps to visit Philippe, Fabienne and Yann and also getting in a gig by Hubert Felix Thiefaine; two trips to Avignon to see Benoit, Fabienne, Noellie and Gautier, one for Gautier's first communion and one where we went up to the Cevennes and drove around in Benoit's 4x4; a couple of trips to Nice, one to do the hash down there, running around the foothills of the Alps and along the beaches to the surprise of many of the local residents, and the visitors; and a trip to the Peak District, again rushing around on mountain bikes.

There were three main longer trips. The first was skiing in France at Les Arcs, getting to see Philippe, Fabienne and Yann again. The skiing was great, as was the chalet, with great snow and less mist and fog than the previous year, though there was one point where on the way back at the end of the day crossing a point at about 1600m it was raining hard, and we thought that might be the last of the snow, particularly since we were down at about 1200m, but by later that evening it was snowing down at 900m and we woke up to spectacular powder. We got some great powder runs, and as usual, I got some great powder falls. We also all took a snowboarding lesson one afternoon. It definitely seems a lot easier than skiing, but I'm not sure whether I'll get to spend a lot more time working on my technique or if I'll stick to skiing.

The second longer trip was to Egypt, going diving every day from Hurghada. I hadn't been there since about 1994 when I first got my PADI qualification. The diving was better than I remembered it, and the resort had grown beyond all recognition. Louise Beaumont (my dive buddy) and I did our advanced open water qualifications with Divers Lodge who were also hosting the world free diving record attempt (which was successful). Dave and Maria also passed their open water PADI qualifications, and then later this year we arranged trip number three.

Number three was a dive trip to the Maldives. It was a fantastic trip, though fairly different from Egypt. The water was not so clear, since Egypt, being in the middle of the desert, gets very little rainfall or water run-off from the land. With little space to let water in and out of the Red Sea, the tides have less influence, so the currents were much stronger in the Maldives. The Maldives definitely has much more marine life, and we saw loads of turtles, masses of sharks (versus the four we saw in the Red Sea) including hammerheads, grey sharks and white tip reef sharks with masses and masses of fish, a few octopi and other marine life. Only one wreck here though, out of 19 dives, whereas we saw a few in Egypt. We only went for a week, though the trip took a bit longer due to the time it takes to get there and back again. Definitely a good place to dive, though, and we got a good crowd on the liveaboard boat, which must make a major difference to how good a trip like this is. The old Egypt crowd came along (now all qualified) plus Tracy (a friend of Maria's) who didn't dive, but had a good time snorkelling, and Caroline, another Mark Warner junkie who is also a qualified diver and buddied up with Dave since Maria was unfortunately too ill to dive most of the week.

I got myself a new camera for the first trip: a neat little Canon Digital Ixus, dead small and giving pretty good pictures. But I got a simple housing in Egypt and that leaked, destroying the camera. Insurance money replaced it with the more up-to-date Digital Ixus 300 with a slightly better zoom and short movie facility, but most of all, a Canon own-build underwater housing going down to 30 metres, so the pictures from the Maldives from underwater were much better than those from Egypt. On top of that, they had a computer aboard the Discovery 1 (our liveaboard boat) so we uploaded the pictures in the evenings to check them out.

The Maldives, being a safari liveaboard boat, meant more time chilling out, so more books got read. I had managed to avoid Harry Potter up till then, but got hold of a copy in French, so I figured it was good practice. It does seem to be an excellent children's book, but I don't think I'll be rushing out to read any more. I do think it is about time I read the sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance though, after I re-read this in the Maldives, too.

One more water activity in the year was trying out wakeboarding, a Christmas present from Amanda and Kevin. I waited till the early summer to give it a go, and went not far from home, just down in Surrey, to one of the country's three fully authorised wakeboarding training centres. It was really good fun, though it is strange how it is much harder to get up 'goofy' rather than the normal way around (in fact, I never managed to get up goofy). It seemed easier than waterskiing, though maybe that's because I tried waterskiing first. Not something I'll do every week, but definitely something to do when on holiday for a quick run.

Activities that still involved water were triathlons, of which I did two Olympic length and some sprints this year. The two Olympic length ones were Bath and Windsor. Bath was really hilly, and I don't think the gears on my road bike were really set up to cope with it. Someone had told me the course followed the ridge and that there was really only one steep hill, but by the sixth hill, I guessed they hadn't read their map properly. Even the run course was hilly, but fortunately, the swim, in a nice 50m pool, turned out to be on the flat.

Windsor was probably the most fun triathlon I have done. It had rained heavily the day before, so the Thames was cold and had a good current. 900 metres of the race was upstream, and only 600 metres was downstream. The first waves started just after 06:00, and I started about 07:30. We had to get through quickly to allow for the tourists who would arrive in Windsor later that day, and we didn't want to be blocking up the roads. I have never seen so many people on the ride before, but that was because there were 1600 entrants and we weren't that spread out. The run was three laps of Windsor and Eton, right up the hill in front of the castle, and the run route was packed since with three laps, we had three times as many people in the same place, which made it much more fun. The tourists did think we were a bit weird, particularly the jet-lagged Japanese tourists who had been up early in the morning watching us in disbelief as we swam up and down the Thames.

The final slight water piece was a duathlon with no swimming involved. It was off-road, and I have never been so muddy in all my life. It was a run, followed by a mountain bike ride, followed by a run again. Part of the run was one lap of the cycle course, and the route markings forced us through mud up to the tops of my thighs. On the bike, the mud came up over the crossbar. Spectators had chosen the most difficult bits to watch at, so you got a cheer if you stayed on your bike through a really deep bit of mud or over the top of a steep climb and fall. I was surprised when I finished my bike ride that no-one had finished the run, since it was only 1.5km, and I had started near the back of the field. I was even more surprised when I came over the finishing line in sixth place, but I think this was mainly due to the fact that the triathlon people doing it were not used to keeping a bike upright and going fast in that much mud, and I have obviously just had too much practice.

The exercise has taken a bit of a blow at the end of this year. I entered the Windsor half marathon, then the weekend afterwards did a 10km run and both of these were on tarmac. Since most of the running I do of longer distances is around the local forest, the floor is fairly forgiving, and I hadn't realised how much that would affect me. I ended up with shin splints and have had to lay off running for a couple of months. Travelling to hotels with no gyms means I haven't really got a lot of exercise in since with no running, there is not a lot of cardiovascular stuff you can do. So I am feeling particularly unfit at the moment and have to start the running again soon. To tie in with that, I didn't get through the lottery entry scheme for the London Marathon, though I'm not really so surprised about that.

Anyway, that leaves me to round the year off by using up a whole stack of air miles to get to New York on Concorde (but coming back on a regular aircraft) which is something I have wanted to do for a long time. It is actually a plane trip I am really looking forward to, and I'll get Christmas in New York and New Year in Philadelphia, so should be a good laugh.

So, take a look at the rest of the web site to see the photos (as long as I have put them all up by then), and note the change of web site and e-mail addresses (depending on which one you use) to http://www.nic.dent.macunlimited.net and nic.dent@macunlimited.net, though nic.dent@usa.net still works, and have a good year next year.

Check out some of the photos from things I did this year in the Photo Album (under vacations).

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