In The Year of the Rabbit

hubby & I made a trip to Sabah, Borneo, we were staying with the in-laws relations in Kota Kinabalu. It rained, & rained, & rained. We had plans to climb Mount Kinabalu, visit the islands, a marine park, plus travel to Sepilok to visit  the Orangutan Sanctuary. We climbed Mt Kinabalu, setting off at 10am we reached our overnight accommodation at Laban Rata at about 4pm after a pretty tough climb of 6kms,  in damp conditions, we got our bowl of noodle soup, had a couple of beers then retired to our bunks for an early night as we were setting off at 3am-ish  to reach the summit (4,095mtr) for sunrise at 5am-ish. We had all the right wet weather gear fortunately as we needed it. The last section was tough going as we only had ropes secured to the rocks to keep us from falling .. Sunrise was a non event .. extremely wet, cloud cover..Been there, done that, got the photo. Then the decent .. Phew!!! By the time we reached the entrance to the national park our legs were like jelly. First stop Poring Hot Springs mineral baths .. That felt soo good, I did'nt want to get out.
That box ticked, more rain, landslides, flights cancelled to Sepilok, we took a train from Beaufort to Tenom, an interesting & colourful journey on a not particularly comfortable train. The seats were rather hard :- ) We stayed a couple of nights, on the return train journey running parallel with the river there was a rockfall across the single track. Hubby & the locals on board moved the rocks off the line so that we could continue. Back to Kota Kinabalu, we decided to bring our flights forward and head back to Singapore, hopefully finding some sunshine. From there we took the train from Singapore in Butterworth then caught the ferry across to Penang. Watching Michael Portillo travelling through Asia on the train has brought back so many memories. His visit to Royal Selangor made me think of my pewter stamp for The Year of the Rabbit, so I dug through my box of memorabilia, & here it is, perfect I think for Tiny Tuesday.
Had a busy fairly busy day yesterday (back blip as I was'nt feeling too viddy last evening so went off to bed early). First thing i heard while in bed was a noise that I could'nt quite make out, then realised it was flapping wings. Shot downstairs, out the back door up into the garden where I found  a bloody cat attacking a pigeon in the garden, fortunately managed to shoo the cat off, & the pigeon  flew off minus quite a few feathers. GRHHH!
Took Mum shopping in Asda ... It's half term, not a good time to shop in an unfamiliar supermarket. Mum far too polite, we'd still be stood outside the entrance/exit if I had'nt told her to "just go for it". Never a problem at the Coop. They staff would have apoplexy if they had the same number of customers in their store. Quite  often the tills are unmanned that will give you a clue to how busy they get lol!!! It took us an hour to both do our shop .. a tad stressful. I did have a problem with the parking meter, then a problem with the car park attendants attitude before we had begun our Asda retail experience. GRHHH!!!! number 2.

Made my best ever Toad in the Hole for dinner.

Thanks to mindful_life for hosting Tiny Tuesday