Anzac Day - Aussies and Kiwis united and parted again

Here are two photos taken by Jonathan at a delightful al fresco meal that we all enjoyed yesterday, April 24, 2010, on the patio beside the pool in the back garden of R&R's home in the west end of Ottawa. The topmost picture is Rebecca, John and Richard; and the lower one is Richard, Janet Wendy, Wendy Hurst, Ivon Hurst. It's really most unfortunate that the unpronounceable Icelandic volcano burped when it did, depriving us of several days' company with Janet Wendy's nephew Ivon Hurst and his wife Wendy last week, when they should have been here. Instead we had a truncated two-day visit (really only one full day, yesterday, the late afternoon of the previous day, the day they arrived, and the morning today). At any rate the weather throughout was perfect and we managed to catch up on a lot of each other's news and views. (David couldn't join us, unfortunately. He had a complicated logistic operation all day yesterday in Waterloo and Toronto, for which he recruited daughter Christina from Trent University in Peterborough, and son John from Kingston. They had to clear older son Peter's belongings from his apartment in Waterloo, put them in storage, then drive back to Toronto, whence John took their car back to Kingston). When I collected them from Ottawa Airport, Ivon and Wendy Hurst were approaching the end of a round-the-world trip that took them first to Switzerland from their farm on the Canterbury Plains behind Timaru in the South island of New Zealand, then on to Paris and London. When he was young, Ivon worked for a few months on a farm in Switzerland, and they went back to visit his former host family. From what they told us, their travels in Europe and the UK were a success, and so was the enforced extra few days in London, courtesy of that volcano. When I phoned them in London to check up on their revised travel plans, I interrupted their sightseeing tour of Hampton Court Palace. In Ottawa there was time yesterday only for Rebecca to give them a quick sightseeing tour and 2-3 hours in the Museum of Civilization. Fortunately Rebecca took them past the tulip beds beside Dow's Lake yesterday, because today a 10-K or 20-K road race closed Queen Elizabeth Drive and frustrated my plan to drive them around the Canal past those same tulips -- which are a glorious blaze of colour at present, thanks to the unseasonably warm and sunny weather we've had throughout most of the past month. By the time the annual Tulip Festival gets underway in the second week of May, the tulips will all be long gone. Wendy and Ivon may have imported some alien respiratory viruses: they both had terrible colds when they arrived. We are all holding our breath and hoping for the best, hoping that we are immune to whatever viruses had afflicted them.

Today is Anzac Day, April 25, a date commemorated in Australia and New Zealand because on this day in 1915, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, supported by contingents of Indian and British troops and a naval bombardment by the Royal Navy, landed near the tip of Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey, in what proved to be a catastrophic military blunder that led to the slaughter of the Anzacs and of the Turks; in 2004, Janet Wendy and I visited Gallipoli and saw for ourselves the place where her father and several of my uncles had their first experience of the appalling and bloody Great War of 1914-1918; her father was wounded there, and one of my uncles is buried there. I've written about that elsewhere; maybe if I run out of things to say, I can paste some it into this blog.