I went down to Swindon to visit friends for the weekend, and despite it being incredibly cold and involving a lot of travelling, I had a great time. (Sorry about the poor photos – they were all taken with my phone :()

Friday night we stayed in and played Cards Against Humanity, and on Saturday we met up with some more of my old friends and had a pub lunch. I didn’t take any pictures of the food because it wasn’t great on the whole, but the company more than made up for it :D I hardly stopped laughing the whole time, and it touches me that my friends remember things like my odd socks, that I don’t like wine, tea, or coffee, and laugh (fondly?!) at me because I cut the rind off my gammon and bacon like a crazy person.

I stayed with my friends Ells and Jon, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to edit Ells’ to do list slightly ;)

After that, we went to see animals. Lots and lots of animals. My favourites were the meerkats and otters, but the butterflies were amazing too. I really, really wish I’d taken my camera and macro lens to take proper pictures, but hopefully I’ll get the chance to do that at some point in the future when it’s warmer and the animals and insects are feeling a bit more sociable.

The meerkats had a red heat lamp on them, which is why this picture is greyscaled (they looked a little too psychotic otherwise):

On Saturday night we went to the pub for a bit, but I was pretty much falling asleep after staying up talking until 4am the night before, and then falling asleep watching The Hitchhiker’s Guide on the sofa after lunch on Saturday (totally turning into an old woman).

But I woke up feeling much more energised on Sunday, and after pain au chocolat and bacon, I was ready to go shopping at the local designer outlet place.

The shopping centre had a giant show made out of Lego to advertise a particular type of Kurt Geigers on sale – pretty neat idea:

Lots and lots of chocolate in the Lindt shop; somehow, I managed to resist:

One of the reasons I love the Outlet Centre is because of the discount Calvin Klein store. Sadly (or happily, for my bank balance), they didn’t have anything I wanted there. But I did clear up on shower gel at The Body Shop. It’s normally £5 per bottle, but by stacking discounts, I managed to get four bottles for £5.40. Bargain.

Now I have a total of ten bottles, I can stop buying it for a while…!

On the train home, I started reading this fantastic book (so much better than the Coke book I picked as my business read for the month):

Definitely worth reading.

All in all, I had a good weekend :D I got back, exhausted, to lots of snow and more freezing cold weather. Oh well! I’ve got tonight to recover and catch up on more sleep, and then I’m back down in London on Tuesday and Wednesday to give a social media presentation and have a meeting with a certain huge web hosting company. By that point I’ll have travelled over 600 miles in 9 days. Whew!