Rodeo!

We are city folk. Theresa and I were both born and raised in Washington, D.C. and worked there for our police department careers. We hardly know which end of a horse to pet, so when Chris suggested the rodeo we were very excited. Cloverdale had a great rodeo, maybe 2nd only to the Calgary Stampede and it's only25 minutes away! Hey, horses, bulls, corn dogs... we're in!
 

As you know, I'm not a real cowboy but a borrowed hat and thirty two Canadian dollars was enough to get into the fairgrounds for some genuine, Western style entertainment. They had lumberjacks log rolling and climbing and sawing. They had a lady lumberjack that could log roll at what seemed impossible speed, until she slipped and landed hard on her... um, lady parts. Note the facial expression...
 
 
 

Lady Parts Will Be Sore!



 

Fast Climbers!
 

All this lumberjack stuff was fun to watch but we were see to see a rodeo, so off to the bleachers where we were treated to greats feats of daring, speed and skill.

 

This horse jumped so high, twisting, turning, bucking and diving, I thought the rider must be glued to the saddle! This cowboy would not be ejected until the full 8 seconds had expired. Then he simply let go and laid back on the horse to let it do the work of gently depositing him on the ground. It was beautiful! 

 

 

I'll attach some of the better shots below:





 

 

Towards the end of the day, these two lovely ladies spotted me and said, "Isn't that Harry Hanbury, the famous blog photographer? Take our picture please!"

 

I'm such a soft touch, I had to oblige.

 

Vancouver

This week we are staying with Chris and Bud in beautiful White Rock, near Vancouver.



Chris and Bud



The pier in White Rock

We met them on a cruise out of Ft. Lauderdale, two years ago and became good friends. Since then we've also traveled the British Virgin Islands and the French West Indies with them on the Tere Moana... another great cruise. Next week, we all head for the South Pacific to cruise on the Paul Gauguin. How smart of us to become friends with an event planner who knows about everything in British Columbia! Chris is a genius at filling our days with the coolest things to do, while we tool around mountain roads in Bud's M Series BMW Convertible!

The town of White Rock is near the US and we often see a Coast Guard boat patrolling the boarder which is about a half mile off shore.

We overlook the row of restaurants on the waterfront street and have our choice of some 40 eateries within walking distance. This is a great place to live. Last night we had a fantastic meal at Cielo's, a top notch Italian Tapas place. The bruschetta was by far, the best I've ever had.

To start the visit we went to the grand opening of the new Sea to Sky Gondola where we climbed Squamish area mountain the easy way.



View from the Top!

We watched three bald eagles soaring at our mountaintop level when two of them started fighting. They locked talons and fell like a rock until they thought better of it and decided the fight better end quickly or they would both lose. Would you say they were playing chicken? Not very dignified for eagles says I. They were still very interesting to watch and we were relieved they lived to soar again. I'm guessing they were fighting over a lady eagle. You know how they can provoke and boys will be boys...

Tease...

I found myself a bit frustrated having to carry two lenses up the gondola when Tamron had just invented the nearly all purpose lens of my dreams. My problem was leaving Florida on May 14th and the lens becoming available on the 15th. Bad timing. No matter; it will be available somewhere in North America and Fed Ex was conveniently created to solve this problem. It will be mine! The lens covers the range of 16 to 300 mm and is compact and light. One lens will cover most circumstances... I'm going shopping.

Here are a few pictures of our first day of sightseeing.




Girls Hiking the Mountain

 

 



Bud's Toy



Bud, Chris and Theresa in Gondola

 

South Pacific, Here We Come!

I know the blog has been dormant for a while, but now I have a new ultrabook to create your sleeping pill substitutes. Therefore, I will try to regularly inform our family and friends that we are alive, having fun, and probably someplace interesting. In short we plan to zig-zag our way to Australia via Canada, New Zealand, Fiji, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia. We have plans to count the kangaroos from Cairns to Sydney, dive on the Great Barrier Reef, eat exotic foods. Anyone have a good platypus recipe?

Theresa and I enjoy skinny-dipping, and this trip will incorporate the ultimate in tanning venues. We will be sailing with our friends from Bare Necessities for two sun drenched weeks from Fiji on the Paul Gauguin. See https://www.cruisenude.com/index.php/fiji-itinerary for details.



Have you ever heard the cliché, that something is, "the most fun you can have with your clothes on"? Well... this is more fun. Ninety of us went on a smaller Paul Gaugin ship, the Tere Moana, for New Year's trip around the Eastern Caribbean and had a blast. This ship is larger, 332 passengers and boasts a crew to guest ratio of 1 to 1.5! We even have a retractable water sports marina for the zodiac, wind surfers and kayaks!

I'll fill you in as I get Internet service, assuming I'm not too worn out from the activities. We must try to stay out of the soup pot on the smaller islands. It hasn't been so long ago when an invitation to dinner meant something different from what we usually think. Many tasty missionaries got the invitation and became what the islanders called, "long pig"!



We fly to Vancouver in the morning and I'm still packing, and re-packing, and tossing things out of the suitcase and re-packing again. Only 50 pounds per suitcase... oh the humanity!

More about Ireland...

Today is the first chance I've had to catch up on the blog so here is a data dump of the last week or so.

Ireland is a wonderful place to visit; beautiful, friendly, and very entertaining. The Irish know how to enjoy life, maybe not quite as much as the French, but close. Our days have been filed with sightseeing, good food and every evening a pint at the local pub where we enjoy some traditional music and maybe some step dancing. Things are a little more expensive than in the U.S.A. but heck, we're on vacation and I expect to be dead a long time, so let's have another pint and please strike up the fiddle!

We loved Dublin and stayed an extra day to see the Book of Kells and get a full 8 hours of sleep. Then we pointed our rented Ford towards the beautiful crystal factory and tour at Waterford. We watched skilled craftsmen melt and blow glass into wooden or cast iron forms to make the shape of a vase, trophy, or some other thing. There is a wood craftsman who makes the molds that shape the soon to be object of art for which Waterford is famous. After the object is formed by blowing into a molten lump of glass inside the mold, another artist grinds, and cuts the intricate designs into the surface. They have machines, into which they mount the object, turning and stopping at index points that are exactly the right number of degrees of rotation for marking with a felt tip marker. Off to the next station where another artisan grinds the pattern into the glass with a spinning wheel coated with an abrasive carborundum slurry. Many stages later another work of art emerges, gets the Waterford name etched on the base and a price tag is applied. The price reflects the huge number of hours by highly skilled people and if you can afford it, you may find it reasonable to buy.

I must warn you however, that in one part of the factory there was a computer guided machine, grinding patterns into the glass, just like the skilled craftsmen. Call me a cynic, but I suspect the fancy handmade stuff will soon be replaced by fancy computer machine made stuff and the only way to tell them apart will be the human made piece won't be as perfect. How then will a price be set?  Is the buyer paying for the craftsmanship of an artist, or the perfection of the finished piece? Which should be perceived as having higher worth? I won't have to worry much about an answer until I win the lottery... and then I won't worry much, but it does beg the question about how we assign value to objects. Should a perfect, machine made, mass produced thing be worth less than a pretty good similar thing that gains value because it is considered art? I'll answer my own question with the observation that there is art in the engineering and computer design and programming that allows a machine to make a perfect Waterford Class thing at a tiny fraction of the labor cost. I am more interested in the function of the finished product and don't need the bragging rights that it took x hundred man-hours to make it. I guess I'm just a tough sell when it comes to art.

I'll add to this instalment and insert the pictures when I have more time... it's midnight now and we are going to the races again in the morning. I seem to be having too much fun to write, but I will try to catch up soon.

More later...

Blogging is tough when you are having fun!

It's only May 28th and now, for the first time on the vacation, I have a little time to write. I'll try to catch up as quickly as possible.

In the early morning of May 23 we drive to Miami airport to board our flight to Newark, then Dublin. All went well until we were ready to board; then the United Gate Agent said there was a "ground stop" due to bad weather in Newark. We might as well sit and read for a couple of hours. No problem, thinks I, we will have a three hour wait after we land for our connection to Dublin. Wait in Miami vs. wait in Newark... I'll take Miami. We board the plane a couple of hours later, settle in, open our magazines, buckle up, prepare to nap, when the gate agent comes on the plane and gives us the news that Newark is stopped again and it will be hours before we leave. We must de-plane.   :-(   OK, I was sad we might miss our connection to Dublin, but we would at least not be landing in a storm. I prefer being late to crashing and being dead. Now we have to wait for several hours to finally get to the agent who re-defines our flight plan. We will spend the night in the very comfortable Double Tree Inn at United's expense, dine as lavishly as the two $10 meal vouchers allow, and try again on the 24th. Actually, our travel insurance kicked in with an extra $150 per day each of additional funding of our pastime of eating and drinking. Yeah insurance!

After good sleep and much food we repeat the process, this time through Newark, London Heathrow, then Dublin. we arrived in the late afternoon of the 25th. One and a half days late, but OK.

We had reserved a car from EuropeCar and when we tried to pick it up, our $172 price quote had grown by another $270 for insurance! I politely told the lovely rental agent that we had insurance through our regular car policy and the Collision Damage Waiver by way of our exalted status in the credit card world. Not so fast says she. Many cards don't offer CDW in Ireland and we must have a letter from our credit card bank saying we do. Slightly irritated, but not defeated, I walked over to my favorite rental counter, Hertz, where a helpful agent said he only knows of one card that worked for sure in Ireland and it was the rare, Bank of America "World Card". Well, being worldly travelers, and with a slightly smug smile on my face, I quickly produced said plastic from a dark recess of my wallet. Oh joy! How much will your car be Mr. Hertz man? The reply; only a little more than double what the first car would have been! Drat! Curses! Foiled, like other mice and men's best laid plans. I checked with Alamo too; no Joy.   :-(

Then I saw Darren Byrne smiling behind the Budget counter. For the sake of completeness, I might as well be tortured by him too; but no! Darren had a heart of gold! He appreciated my predicament and offered help. Not only did he call my bank and allowed them to send the requested letter to his fax machine, he even suggested I take it back to EuropeCar as he was afraid I would lose my deposit with them. All charity! The letter came and I learned after a second call to my Capital One Visa Bank, that not all cards work, Band of America did, Capital One's Spark Card did not. I asked if any money had indeed been charged by EuropeCar and it had not. I had only reserved. So I went back to Budget where a still smiling Darren not only rented me a car, he beat the price of EuropeCar! I will sing his praises for a long time. Darren, if you are reading this blog, thanks, I really mean it.

Next stop, the Leeson Bridge Guest House, http://leesonbridgehouse.ie/ where Emma and Mary delivered superb service. If you want a nice place to stay in Dublin, with a great location, breakfast, and service that rates 5 stars, this place won't dissapoint. They even had secure parking, the better to protect our coveted Budget rental car! I'm looking forward to writing a glowing review in Trip Advisor. When we didn't have any euros for bus fare, Emma even dug into her pocket to help us get to some proper Irish Pubs for dinner and drinks. We love Emma!

Dublin has a very cool bike rental system.

For a 150 euro deposit, on your credit card, you can rent a bike for almost free. OK, the three day contract is 2 euros or only 10 for a whole year and when you use the bikes for more than 30 minutes, there is a modest hourly fee, but it is cheap. I thought this would be a great way to get around so I put my American credit car into the machine only to find that our cards don't have the little chip embedded in the plastic that the European cards have. My cards would work in the ATMs and restaurants, but not the bike machine. Oh well... we walked; burning enough calories to justify a pizza, several beers, an ice cream and a bottle of wine. Pretty good deal if I did my caloric math right.

Short list of what we have done so far:

Hop on Hop off tour of city for two days
Visited Trinity College and the Book of Kells http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Kells
Ate and drank in many Temple Bar area bars... big fun
Had a good dinner and saw a great song and step dance show at the Arlington Hotel
More eating and drinking and singing and pub crawling... great fun, walking off the calories between pubs!
Did the factory tour for Waterford Crystal. Very cool and a great place to take pictures!
Now we are in Kinsale for an evening of dining, singing and drinking... we walked so it's OK.

I should warn you of some deceptive marketing we encountered. Yes, I fell for the free beer trick. Always read the fine print. You know what the lawyers say..., "The large print giveth and the fine print taketh away".

I could go for hours writing about Ireland and the nice people we met, however, it's almost 1 AM and I have to drive to Blarney tomorrow to kiss some rock or something so I'll try to improve these musings at the next opportunity, add some photos, and tell more tales of our adventure. For now, goodnight.

Packing Again!

Ok, I've been very bad about keeping the blog up to date. Since the last post we went on a couple of cruises, a couple of trips to Las Vegas, did a week on a houseboat in Lake Meade, ate a lot of crabs and in general had a wonderful couple of years.

The trip we are starting now, however is a biggie! Our friends at Bare Necessities are letting us join them on a fantastic sailing ship cruise around the Baltic! Since we are flying to Europe and have more time than money, we don't want to use the airfare on just one cruise, so we will start this trip in Ireland on June 24th and do a circle around the country until June 3rd. then, we will be staying with new friends John and Joan Ryder on the Isle of Man to see the world famous TT Motorcycle Race, see: http://vimeo.com/53551115 for a taste, then on June 8th we will fly to Manchester, England to rent a car and motor around Scotland until June 13th. Stockholm will be next for a couple of days, then we board the Star Flyer for a ten day cruise to Sweden, Russia, Estonia, and Finland.

I don't know how much Internet access we will have, so much of the writing and pictures be added to the blog when we get back. Watch this space for updates as time and access allow!

Bon voyage to us!

Athens, Greece

Day four of our adventures and I still can't post my own pictures, and boy do we have pictures! The problem is the snail slow connection I get on my netbook PC, (where the pictures are), and the lack of a card reader on the fast hotel PC I'm using now. I will get some posted... eventually. For now, I'll snip some from the Internet so you get the idea. We have enjoyed the Acropolis Museum Boutique Hotel. Especially the lovely staffers, Andreea, at the hotel desk and Inni, who serves a wonderful breakfast.

Since the 18th when we arrived, we have toured Athens from top to bottom. This morning, before it got too hot, we walked up to the Acropolis. Imagine a slippery, rocky, inclined path to the top of the Washington Monument. Dusty marble gets very slick after a couple of thousand years of polishing by millions of shoes and sandals. Sometimes it was like walking on ice. The lack of OSHA Supervision on the site ensures that your slipping and sliding will be unencumbered by those pesky handrails and view blocking guardrails. The danger just adds a little excitement to the long climb. Risks aside, the views are spectacular. The Parthenon, on its high perch looks magnificent but the view of the city is just as impressive and beautiful from the Parthenon. The sights are unlike anything I've seen in America. The streets were designed for a time when a chariot was the large vehicle and only a few streets in the Plaka section of town are wide enough for two way chariot traffic. Speaking of the Plaka, just a few minutes East of the Acropolis, is full of shops, restaurants, and the most scenic bar I've ever seen. Brettos serves their own brand of ozzo, a licroice flavored drink that goes down very easily.

This afternoon we board the Star Clipper. Here is a photo from their web site and a link. http://www.starclippers.com/eu/explore-star-clippers/photo-gallery.html . They say this ship will not only be beautiful, but the food and entertainment should be four star too! This is our first small ship cruise. The previous 21 trips were on ships that ranged in size from 800 to 2,400 passengers. In my experience the food gets better as the ship gets smaller. The Star Clipper carries only 170 guests with a crew of 72. Here's hoping my past experience continues.

Next stop, Santorini. If you don't see an update soon, it means we didn't get a good Internet connection. We are off to the ship now... more later.

Packed!

I'm writing this post in the Ft. Myers Airport, waiting for Delta Flight 1458 to Atlanta, where we change planes to go to Athens Greece. Our rough itinerary follows: August 17th (now), we fly to Athens Greece and explore until The 21st when we board the Star Clipper for a 15 day cruise to the Greek Islands, Egypt, Cyprus, and Turkey. On the way home we were scheduled to change planes in Paris and we figured you can't just say in Paris for two hours so we will rent a car and travel through Western Europe for 18 days. We expect to visit Normandy, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Southern France, and Paris before flying home on September 23rd.

I'm ending this first post in Athens, Greece at the Acropolis Museum Boutique Hotel where we finally have Internat again. So far we have been walking our feet off seeing the Acropolis Museum, the Plaka, and riding a sightseeing trolly around the landmarks of Athens. We have taken plenty of pictures but Internet upload speeds here set a new record for slowness. The nice receptionst in our hotel gave me the secret password for their fast administrative network, but I can't reach that from our room. I'll post pictures the next time I have some speed.

Post Script

I found a very nice tool in Vista to snip and post a rough outline of our trip. It's called "Snipping tool" and it allows you to convert any part of a page into a .jpg file. Very handy. You can click on this image, and most images in the blog, to get a larger view.

I wanted to correct an earlier post to say we had declared the big trip to have begun last October, while at the Southernmost Point of the U.S. That adds a few days and a few hundred miles to the totals posted before, so we can round off the distance to about 9,000 miles and three months of travel. We sure had fun.

I've enjoyed writing this blog so much I will try another. See http://newpc4me.blogspot.com/ which will try to show you how to build a new computer. It will get technical so it may have the added virtue of curing insomnia. Your comments are welcome.

End of a Great Trip

I was going to call this blog entry something like Home Sweet Home, but I don't want to give the impression that it was sweeter than any other day of our trip.

The big highlight of the day was meeting our friends Dave and Wally at Peace River Seafood in Punta Gorda. We pigged out on a couple of dozen huge crabs, I think all were larger than 8" point to point and they were heavy and sweet! Cold beer made it a perfect meal, although we had to go to the nearby Dairy Queen for the requisite ice cream finish. And so, our trip ended as it began, with a belly full of crab! How could life get better?

We rode the last 60 miles together down I-75 to Exit 111 and to our house where a mountain of mail waited. We were pleased to find our dwelling was devoid of squatters, human or animal, and everything worked except for my car battery and two UPS batteries. Not bad for an 83 day trip.

The ending odometer reading was 56,090 for a total trip of 8,739 fun filled miles. We felt a bit sad it had ended. Fun was had every day, even the ones spent in the hospitals. Our costs averaged about $180 a day when we were not paying Blue Cross Blue Shield co-pays. I suspect our insurance coverage will cover all but the deductibles. Depreciation on the trailer may add another thousand or so to the real cost. All things considered, we got our money's worth for an experience we will carry to our graves. I just wish our budget had allowed for one of those beautiful stuffed jackalopes.

Sunday we rewarded the Honda for its great service with a day of rest, and a thorough washing. An oil change and waxing will soon follow. I found a few cracked parts and some missing plastic, a legacy of the Wyoming accident and I'll order replacements this week. I like the bike to function and look like new, and it will. I've owned many motorcycles in my life but none come close to the comfort and reliability of this Gold Wing. The new ones are even better and it's rumored that the 2011 model will be made in Japan. That will probably set the new high water mark for quality motorcycle cruising and if we hit the lottery, I may be tempted to revisit the idea of a new bike. I'm due to hit anytime now. For years I've instructed Theresa to buy a lotto ticket whenever it gets above $200 million. So far, no hits. Be we are optimists and with our gaming investments approaching the $50 mark I'm getting ready to receive our funds, making plans, spending a little in advance, I mean, how long can it take? If any of you readers have any influence with the lotto gods, please put in a good word for us. I don't think anyone enjoys spending money more than we do, therefore we are deserving, and if this unfruitful trend continues another 10 years, we may squander another $50 on loosing tickets. I'd hate to do that, I hope we break the trend soon. For now, I'm more than happy with the 1993 mount. In Gold Wing terms, 56,000 miles is in the prime of it's life!

The trailer has been returned to new condition with a factory replaced tent and a unique accessory tray I had fabricated in Wyoming. The tray is home for two gallons of extra fuel, a 6 pack cooler, (sodas of course), and space for trash, oil bottles, and miscellaneous stuff. Welded up of diamond plate aluminum, it is light weight, functional and looks good.

Other than Daytona's Biketober Fest this October, we don't have any plans for the trailer for the next couple of years, so if any readers want to make us an offer on it, we could use the garage space.

Our next big trips will be a cruise to Hawaii in March and we plan to fly to Australia in 2011. We would like to re-visit Asia, Thailand and Vietnam in particular, and that would check the major travel items off our bucket list. We have a short, one week cruise to Fantasy Fest this October. That will help ease the shock of going back to work a bit.

This is actually a great time to be back in Naples and back to work. Microsoft will release Windows 7 on October 22nd and Intel has recently released a crop of much faster processors. That will make my computer building a lot more fun than it has been for the last couple of years. I'm planning to build our own next PC this month and for a geek like me, there's a wonderland of cool stuff available. I'm betting tech stocks will rally when the pent up demand for non-Vista PCs hits the market. Microsoft (MSFT) hovers at $24.65 a share today and Intel, (INTC) is at $20.32. Check here in a few months to test my powers of prognostication.

That's about it for this blog. Maybe my next one will be titled something like, Upside Down in Australia, or Scootering in Singapore. Time will tell.

Thanks for reading.

Homeward Bound

We are getting close now! Tonight we reached Gainesville, Florida and it looks like we are only 300 miles from home. Depending on the weather, we will eat crabs at Peace River and head home tomorrow or stay in Tampa for one night visiting friends. Either way, we will be home Sunday.

This is my first time seeing the Florida State Capitol Building in Tallahassee and I have to say it's an impressive sight. The building and grounds are beautiful. I'd have liked to have taken a tour or something but we wanted to preserve the option of driving to Naples Saturday if the weather turned bad so that meant driving till dark.

Hotwire came through again finding us a beautiful hotel for only $60! We are settled into the Paramount Plaza next to the Chop Stix Restaurant where we had a lovely Ginger Grouper dinner.

We drove longer than we like, but in all it was a pretty good day.

More History

Andersonville, Georgia was the largest prisoner of war camp in the South and at its peak held about 45,000 Union Soldiers. 13,000 of them died. We spent the day there watching a documentary movie and touring the camp and grave sites. It was fascinating but very sad. It reminded me of the German POW Camps of World War II. The conditions were horrible for the prisoners but it seemed to me that the Captain in charge could do nothing about it and probably should not have been executed for war crimes after the conflict. He too was a victim of the times.

See http://www.nps.gov/ande/index.htm for more information.

The veterans graveyard was so large and had so many grave markers, many labeled Unknown, that it is hard to imagine a country in such conflict that they would inflict this kind of injury upon itself. War is horrible, but civil war even more so.

We ate our lunch in the beautiful park, serenaded by locusts.

Going to and from Andersonville we visited Plains, Georgia, the home of our 39th President, Jimmy Carter. We tasted peanut brittle, fried peanuts, and peanut ice cream. It seemed like a very nice, quiet, neighborhood. Perhaps it was improved by the Secret Service vehicles. One of the small shops had enough jam and jelly to last for years. Empty Billy Carter Beer cans were $5 each, and every political button imaginable was available. I think the stock in Carter memorabilia is in decline, no doubt displaced by interest in younger, flashier presidents.

We also found an antique shop with more unidentified antlers. Could they be... jackalope?