What a nightmare!

Posted: 31st August 2009 by Trent in Posts by Trent
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Definitely one of our best ever.

So it’s the Easter service, right, and we’re just come out of this amazing time of meditation on the Cross and all such things, then Jacobs goes up to play. I was leading from electric, Kurt was playing bass. here’s a summary of the evening:

1.The acoustic guitar cuts out and disappears for the whole of the first song
2.Trent swaps a song on the fly and tells everyone except Kurt. Result: the drummer is tapping the song in and Kurt is panicking asking which song we’re playing. He guessed. He got it wrong.
3.Kurt then played the correct song, only he was playing it in E instead of G.
4.The drummer lost a stick
5.We finished off a quiet song and instead of Rachel singing her lovely melody while being accompanied by a mellow acoustic guitar, the acoustic guitarist stopped playing. kurt, however, didn’t. Picture a quiet ministry song being sung over a driving bass guitar.Nice.

To be fair it was mostly my fault, but personally I blame the sound guy…


Australia

Posted: 30th September 2008 by Caryn in Posts by Caryn
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Pics coming soon…

What a great holiday! It had all the elements – sunshine, happy families, a bit of touring, outdoor activity, beautiful surroundings – to name a few.

Kurt, Vix, Trent and I travelled the arduous 24 hour journey together, which made it more tolerable. Having come through yet another dismal English summer, we were reminded in Brisbane what that shiny ball in the sky looks like! We stayed with our Jacobs parents in Brisbane. Lionel and Tarryn with our two gorgeous nephews were just down the road. It was a complete Jacobs family reunion. It was great to meet 4-month-old Joel for the first time – our gentle giant of a nephew. Hayden (now 5 and a half years) adored his Uncle Trent (deviously trying also to become known as Uncle Sexy) and Uncle Kurt because they did cool things like build Lego spaceships and provide Wii games like Monster Truck.

Our days included lots of relaxing and, of course, excessive eating on the ever-so-pleasant Jacobs patio. We enjoyed time outdoors cycling, playing golf, visiting beaches and going out on Lionel’s boat. Trent particularly enjoyed driving around in a man-car (landrover) as opposed to the girl-car (Ford KA) that we drive in England.

On the only Sunday we were there, true to Jacobs style, we entered a place and dominated. The place just happened to be Discovery Baptist church, the small relaxed congregation amongst which the Australia Jacobs are active members. The event was Joel’s dedication, and Trent and I were involved as godparents. The surprise element of the event was that all the Jacobs siblings and their spouses, and Hayden led the worship. Rather presumptuous, you may think, to walk into a church for the first time and take over the worship? We thought so too, but were persuaded that this was quite acceptable. It had the desired effect on Mom and Dad Jacobs – the tears of appreciation flowed, and the day was described as “one of the most special days in my life.” Thankfully, other church members seemed to be appreciative too!

Then, just for laughs, we traipsed off to Melbourne to have a look see. No more kangas and koalas in this contemporary city. These were replaced with trendy architecture dotted all over the place and cafes along a picturesque beach promenade. The sea front area was very reminiscent of Sea Point in Cape Town. Took a long drive along the Great Ocean Road stopping at seaside resort towns along the way, one of which was a mecca for surf shopping – a conglomeration of every surf shop imaginable! I thought I might have to pull out the Ritalin for Trent in the Quicksilver shop, as he attempted to convince me that, amongst other FANTASTIC gear, ski gear with purple and orange tic-tac-toe designs resembling pyjamas would be cool to buy.

With lots of great memories and thousands of photographs, we travelled the 28 hour journey back to England. But we’ll certainly be back to Oz again!


Copenhagen

Posted: 19th February 2008 by Trent in Posts by Trent
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With our Schengen visa about to expire we had to have one last fling with Europe, so after much procrastinating, we made the final decision on 14 Feb (coincidentally, Valentine’s Day – how romantic!) to go to Copenhagen, Denmark on 15 Feb. The draw-card: free accommodation because Trent’s company owns a serviced apartment there.

There’s more pictures over here…

Our first taste of Scandinavia! My mission was to eat a copenhagen pastry in Copenhagen. But alas! We could find no pastries labelled “copenhagen” – and so the mystery of what a copenhagen actually is will perpetually elude us.

We did the slightly inadequate (only ran for about 4 hours) hop-on, hop-off bus thing for a little sight-seeing which took us to the palace, cathedral and the harbour (which included the much over-played statue of the Little Mermaid – apparently supposed to represent a sad story, not with a happy ending like Disney portrays).

It was great watching the changing of the guards at the palace. Very much like Buckingham palace except the guards wore black instead of red, and played musical instruments! The funny thing was that instead of the expected brass instruments, they played drums and flutes! This led to a very light-hearted twiddly sound, and I found myself wanting to dance a little jig. I could swear they played, “The Grand Old Duke of York”, and to prove it to Trent I sang to the tune. There was another allegro classical piece I recognised but could not name. Trent told me it came from Tom and Jerry.

The highlight was a colourful waterfront area along a canal, travelling inland, called Nyhavn, meaning “New Harbour”, pronounced “Nee-hown”. It was freezing, so it was great to duck into a restaurant and sit next to a heater to thaw over a warm lunch. After which we proceeded to go ice-skating in the park at the end of the canal, during which time it started to snow very lightly! Wonderful stuff.

My souvenir from Denmark is a Bodem tea plunger – like a coffee plunger but a cute teapot shape and used with loose tea leaves instead of tea bags.

Caryn


Skiing 2008

Posted: 31st December 2007 by Trent in Posts by Trent
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It was a holiday of firsts… Our first white Christmas, The first time on skis for the Schalk Van Dudgeonwyks, my (Trent’s) first black run, and it was also the the first time Trent dived like an MI6 agent to save Caryn from falling down a huge slope into someone’s wooden lodge. More on this later…

In summary, it was awesome. If this is as much as you want to know, you can stop reading here…

We had 6 full days on the snow, 5 of which were in lessons for half of the day. Anton and Tandy had lessons in the morning and ours were in the afternoon, which meant we didn’t ski much together in the first few days. Anton took a bludgeoning approach to skiing which meant he was awesome when he could go fast but fell over like someone who falls over a lot when he was skiing slowly and trying to turn. Much like myself, actually… 🙂

We took the Schalks out on their first proper run after about 3 lessons, knowing that it was a fairly simple run except for this massive section in the middle where you have to point your skis downhill and go as fast as you can or you would never get up the hill on the other side. I wasn’t sure how we were going to get around this, but after having resigned myself that we would be hiking up the hill Caryn said “There’s a massive downhill, you need to go as fast as you can. Off you go then.” and sent them on their merry way to death and destruction. Strangely enough no one fell, no one died, and no one was sued, and from then on we ski’d everywhere.

Caryn and I had a special moment towards the end of the holiday while we were doing a red run in preparation for a black run we were supposedly doing in the afternoon. Anyways, right at the end of this red run we hit this ‘vertical’ HUGE slope. Our approach was to stand at the top of the slope and contemplate it. We would have liked to contemplate it for much longer than we did, but I slipped and fell. And fell. And fell. After sliding uncontrollably for what felt like ages I came to an abrupt stop in the middle of a small drift feeling cold, sore, and very sorry for myself. The fall had managed to get snow everywhere (and I do mean everywhere) and my jacket pockets had ripped off which meant my camera (with it’s brand new memory card) was somewhere between where I was and where Caryn was at the top. (To be fair I would rather be where where I was – Caryn still had to get down somehow…)

So I did what everywhere loving and caring husband would – I ignored Caryn and started looking for the camera. Actually, I didn’t ignore Caryn completely – I tried to enlist her in the all-important camera search. I thought that the best thing would be for Caryn to look for the camera from where she was, which was at the top. Caryn, on the other hand, thought my frantic camera communications were along the lines of “I just fell, please take a picture of me” and what she was trying to communicate was something along the lines of “I am about to fall, I can’t even stand up properly, leave me alone” although I don’t think I got the wording quite right there. Feel free to ask Caryn.

Anyways, after a few more minutes of this, I see nothing of Caryn but I do see one of her skis go sliding past me. I thought this would be a good time to stop asking about the camera. Caryn eventually got to me using the traditional bum-brake method, at which time we calmly discussed our differences. There were gestures involved.

So… we regrouped and decided to look for the camera (ironically this was Caryn’s idea, not mine). Strangely, looking for a silver camera on reflective snow doesn’t work that well. I was heading towards giving up when I saw Caryn fall out of the corner of my eye. I knew she was going to fall uncontrollably, much the same way I did, so I ran and did the most heroic dive ever. Even in my memory it’s a slow motion shot. It’s a pity it only made things worse… I did manage to grab Caryn’s arm, only to have her pull me along with her. I stayed calm and said “Oh £@£$%^” and we both plummeted towards a wooden cabin. As we sped towards said obstacle I did find myself wondering whether this was a good thing (at least it will stop us) or a bad thing (I found myself feeling very breakable all of a sudden) but luckily I never found out as the off-piste snow eventually stopped us before any conclusive results regarding death by cabin were reasoned out.

And that was that. Well, for Caryn, anyway. I still had to hike BACK UP THE SLOPE to fetch our skis. The thought of this all was quite depressing, so I just sat down and went back to doing what I originally wanted to do, which was contemplate the slope. While I was sitting there a random snowboarder boarded up to me and said “Excuse me, but did you lose a camera?” This is him. Isn’t he a nice guy?

TODO

We ended off the holiday on a real high after the 4 of us went a beautiful long run all the way to a small Swiss town at the bottom where we had a late lunch and hot chocolate. Unfortunately the day disappeared quickly and we had to resign ourselves to the fact that we didn’t have any more time to do another run, which was a real pity ‘cos I wanted to take Anton on a red run. However, we got to Wengen (the ski area at the top of the slopes) and before we got on the train (at 5:29pm… the slopes were officially closed at 5:30pm because of lack of light) Anton and I jumped out the train and jumped onto the slopes to try to race the train (and the light) by taking a half hour cross country slope down to Lauterbrunnen. It was scary, exhausting and seriously icy but Anton and I had the best run of our holiday! Unfortunately the train beat us, but only my about 2 minutes and we arrived in time to see it pull off with our lovely wives looking out the window (apparently).

So.. all’s well that ends well, and this ended very well indeed. Next one… December… 😛

Trent.


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