A weekend with Nico

We planned it for quite a while. Nico, my nephew and god-son asked me over and over again when he can spend a weekend with me. He used to do this more often before I was a frequent traveller. When he asked last February or so I offered him to come with me to England for a weekend. And now, finally, we did it. Since it is the time of school holidays it was a little bit easier for him arriving home late at night on Sunday. That was the main reason why we waited so long. I had no idea what this 10 years old boy expected. All I knew was that he is always to shy to even say hello to Dave in English when we visit them. So I was very curious to see what happened now that he couldn't avoid it. But it was fine. My brother brought him to the airport and after check in we went to a 10 years old favorite place for dinner: McDonald's. I also decided to buy him a new book to make sure he will not be bored.
The most amazing thing was his wish to speak English. Great! He already tried a conversation with Dave on our drive home from the airport. Nico also had a lot of fun with Amber (I hope this is also true for the dog) and geocaching. Yes, we introduced him to this GPS based treasure hunt. And even with not being very successful with the first cache (we walked around for almost 3 hours before we finally gave up on this) he wanted to do more of this.
We also went to the Air Force base, but the only planes we saw on a Saturday were the exhibition ones.
After some more geocaching on Sunday and lunch at Burger King we went to an old Anglo Saxon village. It is kind of an open air museum with an exhibition of Saxon, roman and viking stuff they found in this area. And Nico was interested in this as well. I translated the descriptions for him and he asked questions and wanted to see more. It was amazing, we had a lot of fun and when we came home he asked me to schedule the next visit. We will see, the next school holidays are around October....

One more thing I want to share with you. Monday was a very interesting day at work. No, not because of interesting work, but because of a big fire on the other side of the road. My office is in a building next to an recycling company which stored a huge amount of all kinds of recycling garbage on their property. They had a 40 x 90 meters storage room with plastic stuff and on Monday morning this started to burn down. Now, on Wednesday, the firefighters are still busy and you are still able to see some smoke, even if it is white now and not black as on Monday. Here are two pictures taken with my cell phone. One on Monday morning, the other on yesterday afternoon: