Bank holiday weekend

Well, it's the May-day bank holiday weekend and since I go to the USA a week tomorrow, for a week for E3, I've booked the family into one of the Alton Towers hotels on Sunday night as a surprise treat.

My wife knows but the kid's don't, so it'll be a sweet surprise for them. They get a day at the park and a day at the new water park on Monday, so I'm sure they'll enjoy it. I bloody hope they do since it's not the cheapest overnight stop I've ever forked out for... it took me 10mins to recoil from the shock of how much it is - but then doing anything with a family of four (even a trip to the zoo or something) usually costs £100 or so. Maybe I'm just getting old and miserable, complaining about the cost of things these days. Generally speaking, if it's not electronic, I don't want to know.

It's about five years since we went to Alton Towers and about 6months since we did all the theme parks in Orlando, so I hope the gulf of difference between how good the Americans are at it and how generally bad we are, doesn't show through too much. At least Alton Towers is about as good as we've got over here and I don't think the kids will notice too much. At least it's not bloody Blackpool - which I now despise after loving it as a kid.

They have a couple of hotels on site now, one of which, "Splash Landings" has a big water park and I think this will be a big hit with them. Being in the UK it's mostly indoors too, so we shouldn't have any problems with it being cold. Our 2nd day at Typhoon Lagoon in Orlando was spoilt because the temperature had dropped enough (after Hurricane Wilma!) to make it cold when you came out of the water.

Otherwise, Katrina has gone to work and left me a list of jobs to do as is tradition, so I've got to get on with those. I felt like I could have slept for another six hours though... but the Garage needs sorting out and I've been putting that one off for a few months now.

We had some other good news too - our neighbour (we only have one, since we have a little park on the other side) has sold her house, which means her ugly face and her yapping little dogs will soon be leaving. We've hardly spoke in maybe 6 years since she accused me of bringing my kids up incorrectly and bemoaning the length of the grass in our garden, suggesting it was upsetting her mother. She also more or less accused the kids of "stoning" her weak-hearted 14yr old little yapping dog to death when it died of a heart attack. Truth be told, we didn't get on - and it wasn't made any easier when Jack (at two) called her "bugger lady".