Summer for Polkadoodles

It was my turn to set the challenge over on Polkadoodles this week, and I chose a summer theme. This card is made with PD papers that I printed out from the CD All Around and Everywhere. The boat was cut from the New Arrival cartridge, and the sun from Doodlecharms. I printed the blue pattern onto white card, and tore it to form the waves.

Edited to say, I use the Georgia Pacific card available from Walmart to print out. If you want double sided card, well, just pop the cardstock back in to print the back

As so many of our friends in Florida are fascinated by the differences between Britain and the USA, I thought that if you are from North America you would be interested to see some of them here

It's a LOT more expensive to live here than the USA - gas is $9 a gallon, a good bottle of wine will cost you at least $10. Sales tax is a uniform 17.5% throughout the country, going up to 20% in 2011

Our climate is usually very moderate, we don't have extreme weather, no banks of snow in the winter, and the summer temperature is usually in the 70's, if we do have a hot spell, we all melt because none of the houses have air conditioning. Contrary to popular belief, it is not always raining here, and we don't have fog in the winter either - no hurricanes, or tornado's either, although there was a hurricane once, about 20 years ago, we still talk about it!

We don't have bugs as such, only house flies, bees and wasps, so in the summer you throw open all your doors and windows, and keep a can of fly killer handy to zap the invaders if they fly in.

We walk - unlike the USA where all the stores are generally in strip malls ours are all in town centers, so people wander down 'into town' on foot quite often, which is just as well, to park for an hour in my town centre costs around $4.50

A pub here is not really a bar, it's more of a social meeting place, you can sit and have a coffee in a pub, and pub grub can be really good, so a cross between a cafe, restaurant and bar really.

We don't consider anything to be old unless it has been around for at least 300 years - it is not uncommon for towns and villages to have a church that was built at least 500 years ago

None of our towns are built on a grid system as most towns in the USA, ours in the main follow no pattern, roads wind around all over the place, so you can't really go 'round the block'

The population of the UK is in excess of 60 million, all in a space not much bigger than the state of Florida, so we are pretty crowded, but once out of the towns, there are acres of green fields and country lanes with dog roses and queen anne's lace growing in the hedgerows, and yes, there are still thatched cottages to be seen.

We don't generally have 'afternoon tea' that tradition died out a long time ago, but if you are ever in London, be sure to go to Harrods, the Dorchester or Fortnum and Mason to sample a real English tea, including cucumber sandwiches and scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream

We can hop over to France for the day on a ferry or on a train if you don't mind being on a train under the sea (I do have a few issues with this and have never been on Eurostar)

Our stores don't have sales every weekend, and we don't have coupons in the Sunday papers either. We have sales to look forward to twice a year, January and July, in fact, they are on now, what am I doing sitting here waffling on about the UK when I could be bargain hunting....................see you tomorrow