Yours, Mine, and Ours

My turn! Here's a little entry written by Nathan. :)

So I get to write a bit about out time at a big family reunion of mine in Somerset. We headed off from Wales with Naomi, Vince, and little Loren for Knowle Manor, which is a massive 20-something bedroom house which was going to be filled exclusively with my family. I'd done my best to prepare Megan. 

What with traffic it ended up being quite a long journey, made slightly longer because we had to make sure that we approached Knowle Manor from the correct direction to maximise the effect.

Worth it I'm sure.

It was early evening when we arrived, which meant that as soon as we turned up Megan was introduced to at least 20 members of my extended family, not too mention more than a dozen nieces and nephews running up and grabbing her legs. Despite this overwhelming situation, Megan did absolutely great and before long she was gathered round the piano with some other girls, singing 'Wicked' loud enough to fill the house.

The days were all pretty relaxed, everyone doing all sorts of different activities. By Sunday pretty much the whole family were there, making about 50 people in total I think. So during the day, the gardens had people playing everything from badminton to boules, the swimming pool was full of people with inflatables, each of the lounges were occupied, one with video games, one with movies and one with a pool table and ping pong table, and the kitchen always had someone running in or out with a snack. Even the dining room had people playing board games and completing puzzles. Megan and I would wander our way round taking a turn at each of these activities. I'm pretty sure Megan's favourite was playing football with lots of the guys and plenty of the nieces and nephews.

After dinner the house did quieten down a little bit in that all of the 18 children were steadily put to bed. The general idea when that happened was that all of the adults would gather in the largest of the lounges to play games until you couldn't take it any longer and gave up and went to bed. The most common game was one called Werewolf. In this game each person is given a character, with two or three people being assigned as a werewolf. The point is for the rest of the people to try and work together and to figure out who the werewolves are and to eliminate them, but without anybody knowing who is who. Hours and hours later.. the game ends. That and a game called sign took up most of our evenings. Mostly it was just great to be around everybody hanging out and having a good time.

On Wednesday morning it was time to switch families, so Megan and I set off first thing to head off to London.

Back to my turn! We left the family holiday a little early to meet my family along with Rocky Fischer and Abby in London. We went to the London Bridge Experience. It was a walk through thing that explained about the history of the London bridge with sets and interactive actors. It was cool and informing. The second half of this walk-through was just meant to be scary. I will have you know that my family is a bunch of scardy-cats. It was really funny and okay, I was scared too. I can tell you who wasn't... Abigail! She is a beast! :)

We did all the classics after that... Big Ben, Westminster Abby, Houses of parliament, London tower... It was all very good. I had such a great time showing my family (Rocky and Abby included in the use of the word family) the cool things I have learned about England. I am so very grateful they came to England for our wedding. It was amazing having them around!