Fine Dining, Skiing & Cycling

What a great birthday treat Mrs DeeJay gave me this weekend (stop those smutty thoughts!!).

On Friday evening she guided me to a restaurant that is reasonably local to where we live for dinner followed by an even more circuitous route to our destination for the weekend.
This is a fantastic old English country house styled hotel that only has ten rooms and is furnished with antiques. There is a fantastic home from home (I only wish mine was as sumptuous) atmosphere where you really are encouraged to make like it really is your home. There is a superb library / drawing room overlooking the beach which has a telescope for watching the ships etc passing in the English Channel.

On Saturday Mrs DeeJay then led me once more on a secret trip to a place that I didn’t even know existed – a ski simulator, where I was treated to an expert lesson to improve my parallel turns. And believe me it did! I didn’t realise that 45 minutes on a hydraulically controlled rolling ski slope could be such hard work and at the same time so beneficial to improving skills. The literature maintains that an hour on this simulator equates to 5 hours on the slope and my legs can vouch for that – ouch!

We then returned to the hotel to borrow two of their ‘mountain bikes’ for a pretty exhilarating 8 mile ride along the sea front to Hythe and back, declining to take the easy route home via the RH&D miniature railway.

The whole weekend was topped off by an absolutely superb 4 course dinner on Saturday night cooked by the 5-star chef Clinton Lovell. All together it was a terrific birthday present even though I still have this horrible cold and sore throat it made me forget it for 48 hours.