John and Tessa Roper

Here's a little bit about Tessa and I.

Our house is in Whitton, which is 10 miles to the west of central London, England.
We are both vegetarians and have dogs and cats .
We got married in a hot air balloon over Orlando, Florida, USA in 1991.

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Were we live

We live in an end of terrace house with 3 bedrooms. We have been here for eight years and every inch of the house has been filled.

We haven't made too many improvements to the house, although we did have the front windows replaced. We weren't wasting our money doing this either, as one of the old windows nearly fell out whilst the surveyor was measuring up to get the accurate size for the windows!

The garden (in the picture above, towards the left) was quite mature when we arrived, with plenty of trees and a rather imposing Yukka plant, which has decided to start flowering in recent years. Yukka in flower

However we have spent quite a lot of time improving the garden. We've:-

Laid a path.
Built a 16 foot by 8 foot shed.
Planted lots of roses and shrubs.
Extended the patio and have a lot of plants in tubs and troughs.
Cleared the end of the garden.
Shoved rubbish down the end of the garden.
Cleared the end of the garden.....
Put more rubbish down the end of the garden.
Nearly set the neighbours shed alight with one of John's bonfires! [Whilst trying to clear the end of the garden!!!].

Nearby we have a lot of interesting things. Apart from London itself, there's:- Hampton Court Palace

Hampton Court Palace (above) - home to King Henry VIII and his wives.
Kew gardens - a very large botanical gardens with beautiful Victorian glass houses.
Windsor Castle - one of Queen Elizabeth's homes.
Twickenham Rugby Football ground, "the home of Rugby football", is less than a mile away.

Heathrow airport is only 3 miles away, so it's both convenient and noisy. We are lucky that most of the time the aeroplanes are only coming over our house in order to land, so their engines aren't on full power.

Our Wedding

Tessa and I got married in October 1991. We decided to be a bit different and arranged to be married in a hot air balloon flying over Orlando. We booked this up through Virgin Atlantic Holidays. We flew to Miami and drove to Orlando.

We had to be up at 5am as the balloons had to fly when there weren't many thermals. The day was just dawning when the balloon was ready to be released. They kindly waited for me to take this picture before lift-off - I suppose it would have been a funny wedding otherwise!

We were in the air before 7am and married not long afterwards. John thoroughly enjoyed the flight, but Tessa thought the sides of the balloon basket were too low and that she might fall out! As a result, all the pictures of us in the balloon show her hanging on for dear life (which is why she wouldn't let me put any here!).

We landed in a school playing field. The landing was quite gentle, although the wind did drag us along for a few yards.

Afterwards we went to Rosie O'Grady's for a champagne breakfast and an Ice-cream cake!

Because of the early start it was all over by 10am, so we headed off to splash about at Disney's Typhoon Lagoon. We spent the rest of the week in Orlando, before moving down to the Florida Keys for the second week of our honeymoon.