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how lindsey vonn spoiled my day in interlaken
The morning started out like any other morning, up at 7:00, a light breakfast, then hop on the bus to the ski slopes. OK, maybe not like every other morning, but a pretty desirable thing to aspire to anyway.
To get to the ski slopes from Interlaken requires a bus ride, to Winderwil, followed by a train ride to Lauterbrunn, followed by a different train ride to Wengen, followed by a trip up the Mannlichen Gondola. Unfortunately after all that trouble the quality of the snow was pretty bad. The weather here in Interlaken the past couple of days has been unseasonably warm, so the snow is really icy in the morning, turning to slush by mid-day. Most of the students that followed me out the door of our Hostel (Backpackers Villa Sonnenhof) were beginners. By the end of the day they were calling themselves the Blue Crew because they were only taking the blue runs. Note to U.S. skiiers, in the Alps blue is easy, red is intermediate, while black is for experts. Somehow I got separated from the group right away and ended up doing the first run by myself. It turned out that they had all skiied a ways ahead of mebut had stopped to contemplate their options in terms of which run to take. Even after that contemplation they ended up taking a red run, which was not what they wanted to do. It was during this first run that Aaron took a spill, and tore the ACL, and MCL ligaments in his knee.
Even though I waited at the bottom and top of the lift hoping to find the group again I was unsuccessful for several runs. Maybe an hours worth of skiing. Finally I did see the group coming off the blue run and the first thing I heard was "have you seen Aaron?"
No I said, why?
He fell and hurt himself on the run. He told us to go on to the bottom but now we're too scared to ski back down to him.
So, I took my board down the run and found him sitting all by himself by the side of a snow making machine. Only one person had stopped to see if he needed help, and due to the language barrier apparently determined he was fine. Meanwhile, I had talked to a couple of ski instructors and managed to locate a ski patrol on a snowmobile. He joined us on the slope and made the assessment that Aaron was going to need to go to Wengen for some X-Rays. As we were waiting we decided that we needed a better cover story than falling during the first run of the day. Hence the Lindsey Vonn reference. Our story is that she was on the slopes practicing for the world cup race next week and decided to flirt with Aaron, this distracted him momentarily and caused him to crash. Sadly she did not stop to help or he would probably feel just fine.
After wrapping Aaron up like a Papoose on the sled behind the snowmobile the patrol took off for the Gondola, and I was supposed to ski down and take the lift back up and meet them there. By the time I arrived the Gondola had already taken Aaron down, so I had to wait for the next one. Down in Wengen Aaron got a ride in a taxi to the doctor's office and was awaiting an X-ray by the time I arrived. It only took about an hour and a half at the doctors office to get the X-Ray with the preliminary diagnosis of a torn crucial ligament. They scheduled a followup appointment the next day so the other doctor could read the X-ray and weigh in. They outfitted Aaron with a pair of crutches that included flip down spikes for the bottom to aid in navigating through the snow, and we were off. Aaron with one ski boot on and his crutches, me carrying the other ski boot, his poles, helmet, skiis, and my own board, it was kind of a sad sight to see us slowly trudging through the narrow streets of Wengen back to the Bahnhoff. Remember all the train and bus stops it took to get to Wengen? Well we had to do the whole process in reverse loading and offloading skis, boards, etc. at each change.
Aaron and I made it back to the Hostel, where we began the process of calling our travel insurance company, Luther Study Abroad folks, and Aaron's parents. As I write this we are in "insurance-limbo" waiting to hear from our company whether they will cover an MRI in Laussane. The MRI is critical because it appears that in addition to the torn ligaments there is also a small bone chip. If the chip is too large or in the wrong place then He'll have to go home and get ready for surgery.
day 2, or is it 3?
I can't believe that I actually slept until 8:00AM. After waking up at 3 AM I was afraid I was done for, but I dropped back to sleep and slept hard until 8. After a quick breakfast at the Hostel it was time for some Munich touring on our own. A few of us were going to go to the Deutches Museum, but most of the group was headed to Dachau. I really enjoyed the museum, I went straight to the Math, Computer Science, and Astronomy exhibit, where I discovered that they had an actual Enigma machine, in the cryptography area.
There were many other great exhibits, the aeronautical area had a cross section of an Airbus A320 and several other interesting aircraft, there was a really amazing mining exhibit as well. The nautical area was equally amazing with replicas of ships both large and small. You could easily spend a whole day at the museum, but my mind was pretty overloaded by 11:30. The plan was to head back to the Viktalien Markt for a street lunch of sausage and bread, unfortunately everything was closed, it turns out that Epiphany is a national holiday in Germany, so we really had to work to find a street vendor that was open. I had to try the Currywurst, which was a sausage in a sweet sauce with curry powder sprinkled over the top. It was a delicious German meets Indian fusion street food kind of thing.
With lunch behind us we met up with the rest of the group to head back to the airport to meet with Sebastian, a marketing guy, from Lufthansa. He gave us a great presentation on Lufthansa and their support of the Munich 2018 bid. The Lufthansa folks had very generously provided us all with Munich 2018 stocking hats and scarves. After the meeting we took a group photo with everyone wearing their new gifts.
After the Lufthansa meeting we returned to the Hostel for some group discussion and to get ready for our dinner at the Hofbrauhaus! We were not in the main hall, but were upstairs in their groupdining area. I had a fantastic dinner of veal ragout with Spaetzel, and a good size dark beer.
Dinner was pretty calm until a huge group of Canadiens came it. It was a group of ninth grade hockey players and their parents. Things really started to heat up when the parents started singing Canadian drinking songs and chugging their beers. This brought on a resounding L-U, L-U, L-U-T-H, T-H, T-H, T-H-E-R from the Luther crowd and soon we were all friends.
Back at my room, sleep was hard to come by in this second night. I mostly drifted in and out of sleep until my alarm went off at 6AM, we needed to be out of the hostel and headed for the train station by 6:45. As I write this I am on the train to Mannheim and then Interlaken.
in praise of the two fat ladies
dear apple
Dear Apple,
You lost a sale today. I know its just one less iPhone you are going to sell, and in the grand scheme of things does not amount to anything. I suppose its not really your fault, and as a loyal Apple customer its much easier for me to blame AT&T than you. Still, it makes me sad to have to tell you this. I waited as long as I could for AT&T to expand their network in my direction. I’ve hung on every Verizon rumor for two years. Finally after enduring a year of carrying my iPod touch in the same pocket as the mind numbingly horrible Motorola Crush I bought an HTC Desire yesterday. Android!! I never thought I would see the day.
Here’s whats even worse, I like it! It has some great apps Gmail, Calendar, and many apps that I already love on my iPod Touch and iPad: Dropbox, Evernote, 1Password, Kindle, Facebook, Twitter, Weather, Stocks, and a 5, yes 5, megapixel camera! I already love the gps, so the location aware apps work, I love the WiFi and the Bluetooth.
I’m going to miss OmniFocus, but I carry around my Ipad almost everywhere I go so I don’t think I’ll miss it that much.
So Apple, I’ll remain a loyal customer, at least for now. I’m going to continue to develop my app for the iPad, I still love my iMac and my MacBook Pro. But if US Cellular comes out with a decent family data plan in the next month or so you may lose two more sales as the rest of my family follows me into the smartphone world.
ebook man is cleaning out the library
So today I sat in my office and looked over at my library of books, probably about 700 books all together. The top half of the library contains my cookbook collection and lots of other non-fiction books. The bottom half is largely science fiction, some paperbacks that I’ve had for 30 years, The Lord of the Rings trilogy for example. There were also several large stacks of books on the floor because the shelves are full. Jane is wanting me to do something to get the books off the floor. Even though she doesn’t spend that much time in my office so I don’t know why it bothers her, but she’s right the piles have been accumulating and its time to do something.
Suddenly it hit me, I could let all of the paperbacks go. I’ve been saving them for years because they are my favorites and maybe I’ll read them again, or maybe I just like to look at the shelves and see my old favorites sitting there. I’m not sure what the precise reason is, whatever it is I’m over it. I just realized that if I did want to read them again, I would no longer want to do it by holding a real book in my hand. I realized that just like all of my old ’80s music that I had on cassette tape these are relics of my past, and if I did want to read them again I would be happier to download them to my iPad and read them in the kindle app or iBooks. But, fat chance that the iBooks store would have any of these old favorites. I prefer the iPad over the dedicated Kindle because it saves me one device. Plus until now the kindle required cell coverage that I don’t have.
So, here, for posterity, and maybe to remind me in the future if I come back and read this post instead of staring at bookshelves, is a random walk through the lower half of my library. If you have suggestions for what I can do with the paperbacks let me know. If you read this list and have suggestions for other authors you think I would like, definitely let me know.
- Rober Sawyer, every book ever written by him except for the current WWW series which I bought in electronic form from the beginning. Factoring Humanity, Calculating God, the Hominid Series, great ideas
- Isaac Asimov, The robot books, and the entire foundation series. These books took me through college.
- Stephen R. Donaldson, the Thomas Covenant Chronicles. Covenant is still one frustrating guy whenever I think about these books. Although I notice that there are some new additions to the series that are out in eBook form…
- Dan Simmons, the Hyperion, Endymion series. The Shrike was one scary monster.
- David Brin, Despite the absolutely dismal movie the Postman is still a favorite in how it forshadowed the web. I also have some Brin on the upper half of the library, The Transparent Society is an excellent book to get you thinking about privacy in the digital age.
- Orson Scott Card, the Enders Game series… I loved all of these books, and I even like some of the more recent ones where he goes back and fills in some missing pieces from the perspective of other characters.
- Connie Willis, The Doomesday Book is awesome as are many of her other stories although none have captivated me as much as that one.
- Frank Herbert, The Dune series of course.
- Robert Heinlien, Stranger in a Strange Land and others.
- Mary Doria Russel, The Sparrow. This is one of my all time favorite books, in fact I even made my Paideia students read it last year. I’m sure they thought I was off the deep end for making them read Science Fiction in a serious class like Paideia but Oh well.
- Robert Russo, not science fiction but a great writer. I like all of his books, but teaching at a small college, I get tears in my eyes from laughing so hard when I read Straight Man.
- And speaking of non-science fiction books, Jon Hassler, this guy captures small town midwest living so well. From Staggerford to Rookery Blues they are amazing. I miss him, and I miss Connie Helgen who recommended him to me. After our trip to Ireland this summer I’ve been longing to go back and read a Green Journey again, but I just checked and its not available in the Kindle store. Horrors!
- James Halperin, The Truth Machine, and I just read an article this morning about a group out in california that is using MRI as a new lie detector. Anyway, read this book.
- Roger Zelazny, the whole Amber Series, kind of a disfunctional family but the whole series is fun to read.
- John Grisham, hmmm why did I save all of these??
- Carl Sagan, Contact. I read this way before the Jodi Foster movie. That was just a bonus for a young geek who loved her in the after school specials.
- J. R. R. Tolkien, a boxed set of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. I don’t think I can part with these. I still remember reading these late at night with a flashlight under my blanket. I’ve still never been able to make it through the Silmarillion though.
- Douglass Adams, such a loss, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series. I swear I can open up any of these books to a random page and start reading and I’ll be laughing in no time.
- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon. I’ve never had the energy to make it through the Quicksilver books, but I have Anathem on my iPad so we’ll see.
- Gordon R. Dickson, Dorsai, the Chantry Guild, The Final Encyclopedia
- Larry Niven, the Ringword Books, and other books with Jerry Pournelle (a Mote in God’s Eye) I still remember looking forward to reading Pournelle’s Chaos Manor column in Byte magazine every month
- Robert Charles Wilson, Spin, Darwinia, The Chronoliths, and others.
- Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep, a Deepness in the Sky
- Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed, and the Earthsea books.
- Mary Stewart, The Crystal Cave series that retells the legend of King Arthur.
I also discovered a rather interesting section on the shelves devoted to historical fiction, but I’ll leave that for another time. I just wanted to mention it in case you’ve concluded that I’m hopelessly one dimensional.
I would also say that I’ve discovered that computer science reference books work very well as ebooks. I’ve been teaching myself to program my iPad and I have several good references in electronic form. Its nice to have them open on my big screen, and its easy to find examples when you can search.
google app engine service login
So I’m working on an app during my sabbatical that has an iPad component and an online Google App Engine component. The Google App Engine part is half web based and half web service based. Of course this means that the local client part has to be able to authenticate itself to the Google App Engine before it can communicate and do useful stuff. Finding good reliable examples of how to do this is surprisingly hard. For the Objective C code I’m working on I found a nice set of classes that do the trick for you here: On Github For Python I found some example code on stackoverflow. However it was not really in a reusable form.
The basic outline of what you have to do is as follows:
1. Login to https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin This will give you an auth token.
2. Use the token you gained in step 1 to login to your Google App engine application or service. When you have successfully logged in to your service google will set an ACSID cookie for you to use when you make subsequent requests to your service. This prevents you from having to login each time you make a web service request.
I’ve taken some ideas from both places mentioned above and have created a Python class for logging in and accessing app engine services from Python. To use this module you just need to import it and create a GoogleAppEngineLogin object. Once the object is created you can use the open method on the object to access further services. The open method is just a convenience wrapper around urllib2.urlopen but it also makes sure that your cookie has not expired before it makes a request. If you have comments or suggestions for how to improve the code please let me know via email or leave a comment.
The code is reproduced below, but you can also just download the file from git clone git@gist.github.com:36b1c45ed39298178907.git
import getpass
import urllib
import urllib2
import cookielib
class GoogleAppEngineLogin(object):
“""
Logging in to an App Engine Account (when you use google users) is
a two step process: First you must login to Google generally. This
gets you an auth token. The auth token is used as part of a
request to login to your app/service During the login process for
your app/service the server sets a cookie with the name of ACSID,
it is this cookie and its value that serves as the authentication
token for your own service/app. So, for future requests you need
to give the server the cookie as part of your request. Handling
cookies can be a bit tricky if you haven’t had some experience with
it but luckily Python’s cookielib module makes it all pretty
automatic.
This class takes care of the whole login process for you, and then
gives you a simple helper to access the URLs for your service.
The helper function makes sure the cookie is still valid and
passes on the request along with the cookie. Technically you
would not even need to use the helper function, you could use
urllib2 directly to access your service but this seems a bit
neater to me.
Some of this code was inspired by and lifted from an example on
stackoverflow.com, but that was all in-line code my contribution
is to add some error handling and encapsulate the whole thing
inside a class to make it easier to include in my/your own
programs. Here’s a link to the original thread on stackoverflow
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/101742/how-do-you-access-an-authenticated-google-app-engine-service-from-a-non-web-pyt
“""
def init(self, user_email, user_pw, uri, source):
“""
Create a Google App Engine Object.
Arguments:
-user_email: your google username
-user_pw: your google password
-uri: The url of your google app engine service
-source: The unique name of your google app engine service
“""
self._user_email = user_email
self._user_pw = user_pw
self._uri = uri
self._source = source
self._authtoken = None
self._auth_cookie = None
if not self.google_client_login():
raise RuntimeError(“Could not login to Google”)
if not self.app_engine_login():
raise RuntimeError(“Could not login to your application”)
def google_client_login(self):
#
# get an AuthToken from Google accounts
#
auth_uri = ‘https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin'
authreq_data = urllib.urlencode({ “Email”: self._user_email,
“Passwd”: self._user_pw,
“service”: “ah”,
“source”: self._source,
“accountType”: “HOSTED_OR_GOOGLE” })
auth_req = urllib2.Request(auth_uri, data=authreq_data)
try:
auth_resp = urllib2.urlopen(auth_req)
auth_resp_body = auth_resp.read()
except:
return False
# auth response includes several fields - we’re interested in
# the bit after Auth=
auth_resp_dict = dict(x.split("=")
for x in auth_resp_body.split("\n”) if x)
try:
self._authtoken = auth_resp_dict[“Auth”]
except:
return False
return True
def app_engine_login(self):
#
# Get a cookie
# we use a cookie to authenticate with Google App Engine
# by registering a cookie handler here, this will automatically store the
# cookie returned when we use urllib2 to open
# http://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin
self._cookiejar = cookielib.LWPCookieJar()
opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(self._cookiejar))
urllib2.install_opener(opener)
serv_args = {}
serv_args[‘continue’] = self._uri
serv_args[‘auth’] = self._authtoken
full_serv_uri = “%s/_ah/login?%s” % (self._uri,urllib.urlencode(serv_args))
serv_req = urllib2.Request(full_serv_uri)
serv_resp = urllib2.urlopen(serv_req)
serv_resp_body = serv_resp.read()
for i, c in enumerate(self._cookiejar):
if c.name == ‘ACSID’:
self._auth_cookie = c
return True
return False
def open(self,url,data=None):
“""
url should be a properly encoded url ready to go. data is
optional and should be used to provide parameters to pass
along with the URL when you want to use POST instead of GET.
If you provide data it must be properly encoded just as if you
were calling urlopen directly yourself.
“""
if self._auth_cookie.is_expired():
if not self.google_client_login() or not self.app_engine_login():
raise RuntimeError(“Cannot get proper authorization for this request”)
serv_req = urllib2.Request(url,data)
return urllib2.urlopen(serv_req)
if name == “main":
user = raw_input(“User: “)
pw = getpass.getpass(“Password: “)
service_url = “http://myapp.appspot.com”
service_name = “myapp”
gae = GoogleAppEngineLogin(user,pw,service_url,service_name)
h = gae.open(“http://myapp.appspot.com/my/service")
print h.read()
polk county biking
Here’s a quiz for you… What do deer, old cars, a saw mill, and black bears all have in common? These are all things I regularly see on my rides around polk county. The countryside by our cabin is some of the best riding around, every road is paved and very lightly travelled. I can ride around any number of lakes and have all kinds of flexibility to make a route that is anywhere from 12 to 50 miles long. Bone Lake, Half Moon, Pipe, Balsam, Little Blake, Butternut, these are a few of the lakes that I loop in and through on a regular basis.
So, the other night I took my camera for a ride and focused more on the picture taking that the riding. Here’s my favorite shot from the night and you can find the rest of them here:
Incidentally, this picture illustrates where the bear comes in to the picture. This little pond is at the bottom of a little hill and around a nice little corner. One morning a came coasting down the hill and around the corner to see a black bear, he would have been right in the bottom right corner of the picture. I don’t know which of us was more surprised! The bear took off one way and I took off as fast as I could up the hill and past the pond. We’ve never seen each other again.
a beautiful last day
Well, today is our last official day of vacation. Tomorrow is a day of travel back to Dublin and then we wake up and head to the airport to see Kaia off to France and the rest of us to Chicago.
After our rain soaked day yesterday we were thrilled to wake up to see the sun and big puffy white clouds today. What a difference the sun makes! Our departure this morning was slightly delayed as we were still drying shoes and clothing from yesterday, and (I suspect) because most of the group was in Roundstone partying at the pub until late last night. The Miller family stayed and had dinner at the castle last night as we are all showing the wear of nearly four weeks on the road.
I can’t imagine what the maid must have though when she came into our room this morning. I had been sitting on the floor drying 3 pairs of shoes with the blow drier; the shoes I’ve worn every day for the last 3 weeks, Josh’s tennis shoes, and Jane’s walking shoes. The smell was indescribable.
When we did take off we headed out toward Roundstone, a beautiful little seaside village which is becoming very popular among the well to do here in Ireland. When you come into town you go right past the house of the guy who wrote the original River Dance. From Roundstone we made our way along the coast toward Ballyconeely where we had our first ‘table stop’ of the day. Padraic was busy setting out a table with fruit and granola bars and juice for us.
We only had a little further to go to get to Clifden, so we decided to do the Sky Drive loop before lunch rather than after. That turned out to be a great decision as the weather cooperated perfectly and we were treated to magnificent views of the sea. Based on the color of the sea you would think that you were in the Caribbean not Ireland! As you might guess the Sky drive was a bit of a climb but it takes you right out to a point where you can see ocean in three different directions. Here’s the Miller family at our stop on the point.
Of course by this time our guides had already schemed to set up another table stop. They had gone to the store in Clifden and bought some more Bulmers cider, this was the new berry flavor that Padraic had not had before so he was even more excited than usual for us to give it a try. We toasted a great trip and all of our new found friends.
The ride back into Clifden was mostly downhill, but by this time we really were ready for some food. We ate at E.J. Kings pub, Jane and I had the chicken curry, Kaia had ravioli, and Josh had a club sandwich. I think Padraic was a little disappointed that we had strayed from traditional irish fare but by this time our palate’s were ready for something a little more spicy. We all had to laugh at Josh during lunch because we were talking about the weather and how lucky we were that it wasn’t raining like it was yesterday. I said yes, it only rains in Ireland on days that contain a ‘y.’ Jane and Kaia laughed and the conversation moved on. Suddenly, from out of the blue, Josh says, “wait every day has a ‘y’ in it.” We still love him.
By the time we finished lunch it was almost 3:00 and it was time to head back to the Castle. The Miller family took off a little ahead of the pack, and then Josh and I separated from Jane and Kaia, we made it back in record time. It was our flattest ride yet. The interesting thing about riding through the bog is how similar it looks to the prairies of Southern Minnesota, except where the glaciers flattened all the granite in Minnesota there were no glaciers here so the granite still stands in small hills and big chunks of rock sticking up out of the landscape.
Josh and I were so fast that I missed the last table stop. A little bit of Jameson Irish Whiskey to toast our final ride. Not being a whiskey fan, that did not hurt my feelings except that Padraic insisted on pouring me a glass in the parking lot of the Castle when he caught up to us.
Tonight we have our final group meal in the main dining room here at the castle. Based on the look I had at the menu last night it will be a feast. This has really been a great way to finish up our vacation. The people in our group have been a lot of fun, and DuVine really lives up to their motto, Bike, Eat, Drink, Sleep. In the photo above we have in the front row, Dan, Craig, Kaia, Laurie, and Joanna. In the back row we have Patty (Dan’s wife) Bobby and Brian, Brad and Jane, Josh, and James (Joanna’s fiance)
Not in the picture are our two amazing guides for the week Padraic and Kirk. These guys are amazing and made for a really fun week. Its easy to forget that every time we were having fun and sitting around enjoying ourselves they were tending to every minute detail to make sure that our trip was a success.
Location:Ballynahinch Castle
connemara and castles
We are staying in a castle! Ashford castle to be precise. It’s about an hour outside of Galway and it’s absolutely beautiful. We arrived yesterday afternoon with our DuVine Adventures guides Kirk and Padraic. Yesterday was mostly about checking to the room, getting our bikes fit, and getting to know our fellow cyclists. There are a total of 12 of us on the trip and everyone is really nice. There are no other young adults on the trip but so far everyone has been very welcoming of Josh and Kaia.
This morning we woke up to what the irish call a soft rain, we might call it a mist but I like the irish term better. It really is so soft that you forget about the precipitation until you are totally soaked by it. We had a nice breakfast here at the castle and then Josh and I went golfing at the nine hole course, and Jane went along with some of our fellow cyclists to a falconry class. It was amazing, they got to wear the leather glove, and the falcon would take off and land from their arm. Meanwhile Josh and I were sharing a set of clubs and getting soaked while playing some golf in Ireland. The course was not too hard, and on the par three I almost got a legitimate hole in one, see my previous post on St. Andrews!
At noon we took off on our first true ride of the tour. We cycled up the road a bit to stop for lunch in a small pub. The only problem was that the soft rain had not abated, and according to our head waiter at the castle, “If its still raining at 11, its probably going to keep raining all day.” It really was a soft rain and although we were all quite wet at our lunch stop we dried out rather quickly as well. Our destination for the afternoon was Joyce Country Sheepdogs. Here we Met Joe Joyce who is a sheep farmer and breeder of working dogs. If you have seen Marley and Me, you have seen Joe’s sheep and one of his dogs (not Marley – Its the scene where the sheep are blocking the road)
Joe showed us how the dogs herd the sheep and how they respond to his verbal or whistled commands. He lives in a beautiful stone house, and his sheep roam the mountains across the lake from his home. When he needs to bring the sheep in for something, which happens five times a year, he brings his dogs across the lake and he commands them using his whistle from a boat where he has a better view. These dogs are amazing, they WANT to work so hard for him they go crazy when its not their turn to herd the sheep. I should say it rained on us the last couple of miles to Joe’s house so we were all like drowned rats when we got their. Thankfully while we were there the rain let up and the sun started to break through.
The ride back was even more beautiful than the ride out, thanks in large part to the lack of rain. Its amazing how green and beautiful the Irish countryside is. The mountains go directly down to the lake shore and the lakes themselves are incredibly beautiful. Tonight we had our second amazing dinner at the castle, this dinner was much less formal than last night’s sport coat and tie affair, but my seafood chowder was to die for, the fish and chips were good, and then the desert, a white chocolate rhubarb tart was amazing.
Tomorrow we have about 40 miles to bike to our next destination and another delicious dinner, I’m already looking forward to it, and I hope we will have sun all day tomorrow.
world cup disappointment in galway
The other night on our pub crawl, Eugene told us a story about the Irish people and how they would conquer the world. He started with the excuse that Ireland has been invaded by just about everyone else on the planet, and how Ireland has a hopeless military; but went on to describe their master plan. According to Eugene when you go into a bar in Ireland you are likely to be ignored for a while, but if you stick around eventually someone will come up and start talking to you. This is not because they are especially friendly, but because the are especially nosey. “Within 15 minutes they will have your name, your parents names, your grandparents names, and your home address.” This information is useful he says because sometime in the future, when you least expect it “this person will show up on your door with a sleeping bag in hand.” They’ll find a quite place to settle down and sometime later fifteen of them will emerge! And this is how Ireland will conquer the world. We all laughed.
Last night at Fagan’s pub we experienced part one of this scenario. We were watching the USA versus Ghana match having a nice time, enjoying a pint and some appetizers, and being cheerfully ignored by all the locals. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned around awkwardly to find a red-haired man in a gold and green striped jersey wishing the USA good luck. He wanted to know if we were on holiday here in Ireland? If we were football fans? How long we were staying? What we were doing in Galway? What was our surname? Where were we from? (city and state) As this very friendly irishman took a break of his inquisition to get another pint, Josh leaned over to me and said “Dad he’s going to show up on our door with his sleeping bag!” I just about fell on the floor laughing!
Partway through the second half the whole scenario repeated itself with two different guys. It was all great fun, especially when Donovan tied up the score on his PK and the whole pub was cheering. Sadly that all came to an end early on in the overtime period when our world cup hopes for USA were dashed. Now we are left to wonder who to cheer for and whether our enthusiasm for watching world cup will wane after this defeat. We have watched a lot of football on this trip, its been a fun constant for us in a sea of daily change. Its forced us to sit down and relax at 4:00 or 8:30 most days rather than continuing to tour and walk. Its revived my taste for a good pint of beer.
Location:Galway, Ireland
