{"id":1375,"date":"2009-06-09T17:21:55","date_gmt":"2009-06-09T16:21:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=1375"},"modified":"2009-06-17T13:17:15","modified_gmt":"2009-06-17T12:17:15","slug":"back-from-vacation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=1375","title":{"rendered":"Back from Vacation"},"content":{"rendered":"

As some of you may have guessed from the lack of updates – I have been on (a much needed) vacation for the last week or so.\u00a0 Along with my wife and a couple of friends, I went to a lovely little seaside village called Portreath<\/a> in Cornwall<\/a> and discovered that it is indeed possible to spend a happy week without the Internet.<\/p>\n

We stayed in a a cottage called Gull’s Roost<\/a> (highly recommended by the way) and the weather was absolutely glorious.\u00a0 While swimming in the clear azure sea with the sun beating down, I felt more like I was in the south of France or Italy rather than in the UK.<\/p>\n

One of the biggest tourist attractions in the area is The Eden Project<\/a> (click here for the wikipedia page<\/a>) and we spent a wonderful day there.\u00a0 For those of you who haven’t heard of it, The Eden Project is essentially a couple of very big greenhouses but that’s a bit like saying that the pyramids are big piles of rock in a triangular formation.\u00a0 The greenhouses are in the form of massive geodesic domes<\/a> (referred to as biomes within the site) large enough to accommodate entire rain-forest trees (and they contain several).\u00a0 Some of my photos are below.<\/p>\n

\"Pictures<\/p>\n

The variety of plant life there was truly astonishing and I imagine that if I had visited the site when I was younger then I would easily have been convinced that a degree in botany, rather than theoretical physics, was in my future.\u00a0 The so called sensitive plant<\/a> for instance which quickly responds to touch was very cool.<\/p>\n

The site has plenty of mathematics as well though if you know where to look.\u00a0 The geometry of the biomes<\/a> themselves is interesting enough but there is another building there called The Core<\/a> whose architecure is based around the Fibonacci numbers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Another visitor attraction I highly recommend is the Camel Valley Vineyard<\/a>.\u00a0 I only recently discovered the fact that there were good quality vineyards in the UK thanks to a TV series<\/a> and it turns out that some of them (such as Camel Valley) are world class.\u00a0\u00a0 We had a tour of the vineyard along with a tasting and everyone loved it.<\/p>\n

So, I’m back and have a lot of things planned for Walking Randomly over the next couple of months including<\/p>\n