I am writing this on Saturday, 8/23. There is one pic.

After a week of really nice weather, we had a week of continuous high humidity and rain. Temperatures weren’t that hot, with highs below 90. But it was either raining or threatening rain all week. To air out the house, we open the doors to the deck. We can’t do that when it rains, because it’s so easy for rain to soak the floor. After several days of this, I got tired of the humidity and turned on the A/C. The rain should end tonight. Then we’ll be able to turn the A/C off and open the house.

Life sure is easy these days. Our toaster died this morning. I went upstairs and turned on the computer. Danita chose “2 slice” over “4 slice”, and “silver” over “red” or “black”. I clicked the button, and the toaster will arrive on our doorstep no later than Tuesday. No sales tax, no shipping, huge selection, and a price that’s competitive with any store in town. How did we ever get by back in the day?

School’s starting. Danita had 4 days of meetings this week. UMBC has a 2-day retreat at the beginning of each school year. Danita has worked herself into a position of status and respect, and has been invited for the last several years. It’s nice to be invited, but it took up much of Tuesday and all of Wednesday. Thursday was the UMBC opening meeting. Friday was interviews for a new position on campus. When UMBC wants to hire a new professional, they form a search committee. As a highly respected member of the UMBC community, Danita is often invited to be on the committee. Interviews for this position took most of her day Friday. She’s going to work Monday, her desk piled high with work, and she didn’t even get a vacation! Just to show how much influence Danita has at UMBC, she helped hire all but one of the people on this search committee.

Off To School

“Back to School” even impacted me this year. I took a ride Friday and met three high school BFFs who were leaving to attend college in two days. They were out for a little last-minute fun together, and asked me to take their picture. I was surprised to find they had a Polaroid camera. I thought the technology was dead. But here I was, taking this picture while they thought they had to explain this rad new technology for me. Polaroids are both the same and different than they were back in the day. The camera is much smaller and support lots of LED lights. But it’s still dead-simple to take a pic. Look through the little square hole and push a button. The film ejects and starts developing. Polaroid pictures are a lot smaller than they used to be. They’re a little larger than the wallet size snapshots we got from our school photos as kids.

I was quite impressed by these young ladies. They were going to 3 different colleges to study 3 different areas of technology — mechanical engineering, computer science, and computer engineering. The young lady on the right is attending UMBC. Into hands such as these we place our future. I must have appeared quite old to these young people. They kept calling me “sir”, and were surprised to find that I had my phone with me, and knew how to use it to take a picture.

It’s a quiet week. Bud’s coming over for dinner and we’re going to watch a DVD somebody lent him. We have a neighborhood party tomorrow.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

I am writing this on Sunday, Aug 17. There is one picture.

This week’s theme is travel. We spent the week working on two trips. The first is a conference Danita will attend in Coronado, an island right outside San Diego. I’m tagging along. The trip will be Oct 19 – 25. The conference reserved rooms in several hotels, all upper-class resorts. The kind where it’s such a bargain to get a room for $300/night that nobody should mind paying the extra $50/night fee that adds such amenities as parking and WiFi. (But not breakfast. The brunch is about $30/person plus tip and tax.) UMBC is paying for the conference days, but we’re paying for the extra days. And even if UMBC were picking up the entire tab, I would have trouble sleeping comfortably in a bed that costs that much. The issue was resolved when Danita found all the conference rooms were already taken. We got a room in a Best Western hotel about a mile away. It’s close enough that if I get hung up in San Diego one day, Danita can easily walk to the hotel from the conference. As a bonus, UMBC will pay for the rental car on conference days. Both we and UMBC will save significantly, compared to what we would have paid for an official conference room. And the breakfast, parking, and WiFi are free.

The other travel we’ve been working on is next year’s vacation. I’ve long wanted to visit Greece. Danita is willing, but she only wants to go once. She advised me to make a list of all the things I want to see while we are there. I did. Key items on the list are at the end of this post. We found a cruise that covers all but one the important locations on my list. Then we found that they are running that cruise this year, but not next year. No other cruise or tour we can find comes close. We are not willing to do a “roll your own” trip to Greece because we think English is not very well known in Greece, and there’s not much chance we can figure things out by recognizing a few key words of Greek. So we decided to put Greece on hold for a year and go to China instead. For China, we looked at the tours and picked the one we like best. It turns out there’s not really all that much choice. The core of all China tours is pretty much the same. Once outside the major cities, there’s not a lot of choice of accommodations and restaurants. The tour we’ve pretty much settled on includes a visit to Tibet. I like that because not many people can start a sentence with “When I was in Tibet …”. Helpfully, the hotel in Tibet sells oxygen for those who need it. The tour we picked out has several possible dates. The next step is for Danita to talk with her boss about when we will be gone. Next year is an important year for Danita because UMBC will apply for an extension of their research contract with NASA. Danita has a pretty good idea of what’s required to write the proposal, but this is a big enough issue that she should get approval from her boss first.

Deer – taken from our back porch yesterday

That’s plenty of excitement, but wait — there’s more! My body was advising me to make major adjustments to my bike riding. Last week I felt better and started building back up. I am pleased with my progress. We had a neighborhood crab feast yesterday. I’m not big on crabs, and the party was kind of expensive. Danita went to the crab feast and I got a hamburger. We enjoyed very unusual weather for August. We had a huge amount of rain Tuesday — over 6″ in one day. This was a record for that day of the year. The most amazing thing was that as late as Monday afternoon, the forecast was for 1 to 2 inches. The drainage system in our neighborhood held up pretty well. So far as I know, nobody got flooded out, although most everybody’s sump pump got a good workout that day. I spent most of Tuesday sitting on the porch under our recently renovated deck, totally dry and enjoying the view. Other than Tuesday, it was cool, sunny, and dry all week. It was so cool that I had to wear a sweatshirt in the mornings and didn’t go barefoot until after lunch. We also completed several of our walks. We’re just one walk away from finishing the set.

That’s certainly a lot of excitement for one week. I hope this finds everybody doing well. My “Greek list” is below.

Things to see while visiting Greece

Athens, the Parthenon, and the Parthenon Museum. This is pretty obvious, be there are tours that do not include Athens, or do not give it enough time.

Constantinople (also called Istanbul). Capital city of the Eastern Roman Empire (also called Byzantium), which lasted for 1100 years. Hagia Sophia, built by Justinian 1400 years ago, has a dome that was the largest in the world for 1000 years. Also has the Topkapi Palace and Hippodrome.  Believe it or not, there are tours that skip Constantinople entirely. One needs at least three days to see this city.

Delos is one of the most important mythological, historical and archaeological sites in Greece. 1000 years before Greek mythology, Delos was the birthplace of Apollo.

Rethimnon, Crete contains an amazing restoration of an important palace. While modern archaeologists heartily condemn the restoration, it is the only site where one can walk around and get a true feel of what the palace was like and how it functioned.

Volos contains the famous Byzantine monasteries built atop the rock towers of Meteora. These monasteries were an essential part of the Eastern Christian Church, and would be well worth visiting even without the amazing surviving frescoes and icons.

Çanakkale, Turkey contains an archaeology site that holds 9 civilizations, including Troy.

Delphi, site of the prehistoric Oracle, a major temple to Apollo, and site of the Pythian Games. Apollo talked to mortals through the Delphic Oracle, which exerted considerable influence throughout the Greek world. Sadly, we cannot find a tour that includes this site that was so important to the early Greeks. This is the one site I will not see.

I am writing this on Sunday, 8/10. There are 2 pics.

Friday was Danita’s birthday. She’s not been one to be upset about birthdays, but having her 60th birthday, combined with the retirement planing we’ve started, made this one a little traumatic for her. We had a 3-part celebration. Thursday, we went to the Highland Inn, an upscale restaurant. It was a bit of a drive, but the food was fabulous and the price was quite reasonable for what we got. Friday we had a neighborhood “Chill and Grill”. I picked up a birthday cake as our contribution to the desert table. Lots of people stopped by to wish Danita a happy birthday. There were lots of jokes about how hard I worked on Danita’s birthday cake. It took me all week! (I ordered it Monday, picked it up Friday.) It was like inviting 150 people to a birthday party, but a whole lot cheaper. Today after Church, we drove up to Baltimore and had breakfast at First Watch Cafe. This is a breakfast-and-lunch only place with the specialty of using only fresh ingredients. It’s a bit of a drive, but the breakfast is fabulous and we had a great time.

Rouse Rock

We continued our Columbia walks. We visited a wetlands area. It was one of the shortest walks, but it was a nice one. Much of it was boardwalk, which let us get up-close-and-personal to the wetlands. It was very nice except for one short section. There was a gazebo in the middle of a small pond connected to the trail by a section of boardwalk. It was very pretty, but impossible to reach. A couple of geese had taken up residence on the connecting boardwalk. This was their territory and they weren’t budging for anybody. One would have to be quite determined in any event, given the quantity of bird poop on that section of the boardwalk. Our other walk was in the most popular recreational park of the area. It’s called Centennial Lake. The trail is a little over 2 1/2 miles. The park is always jammed with walkers, runners, cyclists, kids, boaters, and fishermen. The highlight of this walk was two more “Rouse Rocks”. These were much smaller, and “in memory of” instead of a “gift to”. I continue to be amazed.

I consider the “Rouse Rocks” to be one of my Columbia stories. These are stories about things that are a little off beat, humorous, and illustrate how life in Columbia is different than life anywhere else in the known universe. From our unique street names, to the amazing obsession about the street sign format, to the commercial underbelly, to the complete lack of straight roads, to see-saws; they make quite a collection of stories. But I have lost my favorite Columbia story. You might remember that the bus routes in Columbia are denoted by colors, the buses are painted green, and the bus route is displayed by a yellow electronic sign. This gave me my my story about the green bus with the yellow sign that says red. But I can’t use that story any more. Columbia, Howard County, and parts of Arundel County regionalized their buses. They changed the bus route names from memorable colors like “red” to bland numbers like “407”. And the buses aren’t necessarily green. And they don’t all use yellow electronic signs anyway. The world just keeps on changing. Uniqueness keeps on disappearing. We keep moving from the interesting to the bland bourgeois. What is an old grouch to do but observe and complain?

Power Up 3

I invested in a Kickstarter project! These are companies that use the internet to find the funds to develop interesting things. This project is a remote-control paper airplane, controlled by your smart phone. It sounds like a great idea that would be a lot of fun. It’s called Power Up 3. For my $30, I got an electronic module that looks like a high-tech cockpit, a piece of carbon-fiber rod, and a propeller / rudder assembly. (the propeller goes behind the rudder at the back of the plane.) Just fold a piece of paper into an airplane (the template is on the web), clip on the Power Up 3, download the app, and have fun. It turned out to be more funny than fun, and the joke was on me. On my very first flight, the plane nosed down towards the ground, then flew towards my neighbor’s deck, climbing sharply to an altitude of about 25 feet. After almost literally hitting the deck, it staled, rolled, and headed back towards the ground. It recovered briefly then nose-planted into the grass. The  propeller quickly began chewing its way into the grass. What made the flight so funny was the pilot, because about the time the propeller started buzzing along the ground, I finally realized that the plane was climbing too steeply and would soon stall if I didn’t do *something* to my smart phone to correct the flight. The abrupt landing must have misaligned the plane in a way I couldn’t detect, because that was by far the best and most interesting flight I ever had. Although the time it rolled and flew upside-down for 30 feet before crashing was kind of interesting also. And to think my main concern is that it would fly out of range of my smart phone and I would lose control. Ha! I never once was able to provide any correction, either good or bad, while the plane was still in the air. Having exhausted my patience, I went back to the you-tube video of the plane in flight. This time I noticed how unstable the plane is, and how it needs frequent and timely corrections just to keep in the air. Oh, well. Live and learn.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

I am writing this on Sunday, 8/3. There are no pics.

We had a quiet week. Danita worked. I took some short bike rides.

Wednesday evening we went to another retirement financial management seminar. This one was at one of the local restaurants. It included a free dinner — appetizer, entree, and desert. The dinner was quite nice, but the presentation wasn’t. The guy wouldn’t accept questions. Most of what he said was designed to scare us into setting up an appointment with him. Many of the things he discussed we heard at the seminar last week. The difference is, last week we heard actual information. This week, there was so little information that if we hadn’t attended the first seminar, we wouldn’t have known what this guy was talking about.

Saturday evening, we went to the community college in Essex to see the musical “Legally Blond”. They did a nice job. The female lead was perfectly cast. The UPS man was hilarious.

We also got a couple of walks in. We completed all the walks from the Columbia Association. I picked up our prizes – $2 off any fresh produce at Wegmans, and a water bottle. We have five more walks for Howard County Parks Then we can enter a drawing for $100 worth of free groceries for Wegmans. We’re enjoying the walks, seeing parts of Howard County we haven’t seen, and the prizes are kind of fun.

It’s coming up on dinner time. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

I am writing this on Sunday, July 27.

What a busy week:

• Monday – Columbia Trail hike.
• Tuesday – Yoga.
• Wednesday – The threat of rain made us blow off the outdoor concert. We went out for pizza and had an Amazon Prime Streaming evening. I definitely do not recommend the series “Deadwood”.
• Thursday – Financial Planning Seminar.
• Amazon Prime Streaming Evening. The series “Rome” is not as bad as Deadwood, but how do they manage to make it all seem so boring? I’m glad we haven’t been paying for HBO all these years.
• Saturday – Outdoor concert.
• Sunday – Columbia Trail hike.

Besides all that, the contractor came back and put the trim on the deck. He worked Thursday and Friday. I cleaned the deck Saturday. Now it’s all done. We like the new deck quite a bit, but I find it has one disadvantage. I didn’t used to care very much what the birds dropped on the deck.

The trash men didn’t put the recycle bins back where they found them. A neighbor decided he had been given our recycle bin, which is much nicer than the standard neighborhood bin. I looked at where the leftover bin was, took a guess, knocked on the door, and got our bin back. Today I got some paint and some stencils and painted our street address on our bins.

Most of you probably know this, but in case you don’t, “Aunti Dani” has given herself the challenge of hiking the 100 mile wilderness (part of the Appalachian Trail in Maine) in 10 days. She’s hiking with a friend, and using a GPS tracking device. If I have it figured out correctly, she made 5 miles yesterday, and left camp early this morning. Way cool, Dani!

See Saw

Sometimes the grumpy old men are just right. You see here a Columbia playground. These are sprinkled around the city on the walking paths. This is a nice one, but boy did they ever butcher the See-Saw. The See-Saw is one of our civilization’s great inventions. Plant two posts in the ground. Run an iron pipe between them. Notch a beam and sit it on the pole. Because we are adults and need a sense of order, there is generally a platform on each end with notches for the legs that kids can use as a seat. A T-handle for the hands provides the finishing touch. It’s very simple. Very Cheap.

And it’s a load of fun. Kids start by dutifully sitting properly in the seat and going up and down. Then they start leaning back to hold the partner in the air. After holding a partner in the air for 3 hours (in 6-year old time), one can suddenly lean in, give a push, and give that other kid a good “bump”. After a couple of those, the other kid will let the beam bounce on the ground and give the kid in the air a bigger “bump”. Or even a good double-jiggle. Can the kid in the air stay in his seat? When this gets old, kids can play with leverage, sitting on the beam and moving in and out. Or a third kid can stand on the beam in the middle and throw the game against the odd-man-out, who generally changes unpredictably every so often. Or a bunch of kids can sit / stand at various places along the beam. Or one kid can walk on the See-Saw, using it as a movable balance beam.

The See-Saw in the picture is 100 times better looking than the old fashioned kind. It’s 1,000 times more expensive. No T-handle on this one — each child has ergonomically correct hand holds. And it’s no fun at all, because the springs and design don’t even permit a mild bump. It even has foot rests! Every person my age knows that you can’t even think of using foot rests on a See-Saw. You never know when the other kid will jump off. You’ll have to think fast to catch yourself, and your feet better darn well be at the ready.

When Robert Fulghum wrote “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”, did he talk about See-Saws? If not, he should have, because See-Saws offer lessons in fairness (the world is not), how to negotiate when you are at a disadvantage (i.e. when the other kid is heavier), how to turn a disadvantage into an advantage (by thinking outside the box), and many other lessons every child should learn before they are 8 years old. None of which is provided by the beautiful abomination on this Columbia playground.

Is the world going to Hell? Are modern kids not developing character? Do today’s kids prefer to play computer games instead of going outside? To understand the root causes behind these important issues, look no further than the modern playground. Grandparents of the world, unite!

We’re off to look at one of the neighborhood open houses, then it will be time for my power nap. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

I am writing this on Sunday, 7/20. There is one pic.

After all the excitement lately, we were shooting for a quiet week. The weather has been much cooler than normal lately, often coupled with low humidity. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to enjoy the weather on the road all that much. My sore back refused to cooperate. However, I did get a few shorter rides in.

They started a program to encourage walking in Howard County. They published a small, free booklet with 16 walks in it. Each walk is on paved trails, usually about 2 miles long. Walk enough trails and you can collect a small prize. To prove you’ve walked the trail, they mounted a post on each trail. The post has a metal plate with raised letters. The book has the address of the walk’s starting point, a map of the trail, and a space to do a crayon rubbing of the post. It’s a fun thing to do. So far, Danita and I have done 5 trails. Three more and we get a prize. (Probably a cheap foam sleeve for a Coke can, but hey! a prize is a prize.) We’ve seen parts of Columbia we wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

Rouse Rock

The strangest thing we’ve seen so far is “Rouse Rock”. The late James Rouse was the CEO of the company that developed Columbia. He had the opportunity to design a city from scratch. He implemented a lot of novel ideas, like a mixture of light industry, retail, and housing in each neighborhood. A mix of different income levels in each neighborhood. Lots of green space (including the walking trails). Etc. This rock was given to Rouse for his forward-looking ideas and vision. I swear, I am not making this up.

The trail with Rouse Rock goes around Wilde Lake, which includes one of the oldest and richest areas of Columbia. Many of the houses are easily worth more than a million dollars. A few of the houses are right on the lake, complete with private docks. In this area, the trail has to follow a residential street on the other side of the houses. I found this amazing for several reasons. “Wild Lake” is small for a lake. Some might call it a very large pond. The trail that circumnavigates the lake is less than 2 miles. The largest boat you would want to take out would be a canoe. That hardly requires a dock. The next amazing thing was that many of these very expensive houses with a private dock had car ports, not garages. They were very nice, but they were still just car ports. The last amazing thing is that the lake stank. There was lots of decaying plant growth. The water was so bad that even the ducks and geese won’t stay there. That *has* to be a downer — build a million dollar house on the lake, then it turns out the lake stinks. I’m glad I’m not that rich.

Other than that, things have been pretty quiet. We had a neighborhood party last night. The room was packed. We had a pot luck dinner and a guy who sang Beetles songs. In a little while, we’ll leave to go to a free concert in Catonsville. We’re taking a picnic dinner.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

I am writing this on Monday, 7/14.

New Boooks

We spent the weekend at Julia’s. We went down Thursday because we needed an extra day. Of course, there were new books. Brian got his first Encyclopedia Brown books. Danita found a set of 4 books in a box, each with 10 mysteries. Brian got a little overwhelmed, thinking he had 4 books with 10 chapters each. Jul got everything cleared up, but it took a couple of days. Elizabeth got a book without words. It was quite clever, how it managed to tell a clear story without using any words.

New Bike

The Reeds are in their new house and house warming presents were in order. The old house had a driveway with a killer hill. Wheeled toys for the kids were not permitted for safety reasons. The new house is on level ground, making it an obvious opportunity for the kids. Elizabeth wanted a scooter. Brian wanted a bike. It’s easy enough to order a scooter on Amazon. But a bike has to fit the child. We took them out Friday to get really cool helmets, then a bike that fit Brian. Brian took to it right away. Elizabeth decided she wasn’t ready to ride the scooter, so we set it aside until she’s ready.

Peace and Meditation Bench

The new house has a way-cool screened porch. A porch needs an outdoor table and chair set. We all went out Saturday morning to pick one out. It wasn’t as simple as we thought it would be. In the afternoon, Jul and Pat went to some more places while we took the kids to the Reed Gold Mine. I’m not very interested in going into mines, so E escorted me around the mine while Danita and B went through it. Then we went on the trail which included a working stamping mill and other neat stuff, like peace and meditation benches.

New Patio Chairs

When we got back, Jul and Pat had decided on their patio set, so Pat and I went out to pick it up. Pat and I assembled the 6 chairs, 2 ottomans, and side table Saturday evening. It was getting a little late, so we waited until after church Sunday to assemble the table. I spent some time relaxing on the porch. I can say from personal experience that the chairs are quite comfortable.

Belk’s Department Store at the Museum

Sunday afternoon we took the kids and the Levine Museum of the New South. Julia hadn’t been there yet and came along. I lucked out big time. The museum was free for the day, plus they validated my parking ticket so we got free parking. The museum presented the history of the Charlotte area from the Civil War to the present day. The topics were presented in such a bland, non-controversial way that it sometimes took me several minutes to figure out what they were trying to say. The funniest moment was at an exhibit that was a sample of a typical house for a textile factory worker in 1918. It had a wood stove, an ice box, etc. They had a video display near the front porch to play some personal stories from the time. E said “This is where they could watch their TV.”

At Reed Mine Stamping Plant

The only down-side to the trip was my body, which was pretty sore by Sunday. Everything was sore, but especially my back. Was it the time in the car? A change in diet? Or just one of those things? I seem to be doing a little better. Whatever’s left tomorrow should be chased away by our Yoga class.

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Fun in a Flat Back Yard

At Reed Stamping Plant

I am writing this on Saturday, July 5.

Mark & Danita

Somebody hit Danita’s car, and they didn’t leave a note. The damage was to the rear quarter-panel on the passenger side. She didn’t notice the damage until she got home. It’s nothing earth-shattering, but it’s big enough that the person who hit her had to know what they did. We feel a little disgusted at whoever did the damage. We called the insurance company last week, took the car into the body shop last Monday. While it was there, we got a few other bumps an bruises fixed. We got it back Thursday afternoon. The car looks good. It turns out that it’s pretty easy for us to live with one car these days.

I wrote a book. It’s titled “Riding in Traffic Safely”. I’ve been playing around with it for well over a year. I thought E-Publishing the book would be easy. It’s not. There’s a web site called “Smashwords” that distributes E-Books to just about every outlet except Amazon. They use a program they call “Meat Grinder” to generate all the various formats required (E-Pub, Apple iBook, etc.) It’s pretty easy for fiction. Just submit a Word document, making sure all the formatting is defined by styles. Unfortunately, it gets more tedious for non-fiction. All references (table of contents, footnotes, etc.) have to be entered and linked by hand. Figures, pictures, text boxes, etc all require extra work. It’s not very exciting.

Waiting for Fireworks

Here’s something that’s more exciting. Mark made it back from Saudi Arabia. He came over for the 4th. Danita made pulled-pork, then we went to the Columbia fire works. We got there a little earlier this year and found a great spot. It was an amazing show — the best they’ve had so far. We used one of the Bob Evans BOGOs to take Mark out to breakfast before returning him to Hopkins earlier today.

I’m still riding. Sometime last week I rolled through 20,000 miles.That’s a lot of hours on the bike.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Friday, June 20

Newcomen Engine

We spent the last day of vacation in Edinburgh,and what a wonderful day it was. Edinburgh may not inspire a lot of photography, but it’s a very nice city. We spent the morning at the Botanical Garden. It’s an excellent garden – over 70 acres. We didn’t even have time to see it all.

For lunch, we left the gardens and had high tea. This was the nicest tea we had. Everybody knows that some words have different meanings in the UK. Normally, it’s not a real issue. But if you’re in the UK and you want a biscuit, you better order a “scone”. Because if you order a “biscuit”, you’ll get a cookie. I don’t know whether they have what we call scones in England.

Watt Engine

Then it was off to the National Museum of Scotland. We enjoyed an excellent introductory tour. The highlight for me was the steam engine exhibit. They had a Newcomen (atmosphere) steam engine. These were used to pump water out of coal mines, and were the size of a small house. They also had a James Watt – Boulton engine. The Newcoman engines were used without significant improvements for 50 years. Watt’s improvements made steam engines three times more efficient. When he was done, engines went from 1% to 3% efficient! A couple of their steam engines were “running” (they were driven by a hidden motor). Well, they can hardly fire up a boiler in the museum building. One could see the valves being switched on and off, and get an excellent idea of how the engines worked. The man running the exhibit was quite knowledgeable. He pointed out all of Watt’s major improvements and explained how each improvement made the engine better — even the unique planetary  gear that Watt invented to keep from paying for somebody else’s patent!

Saturday, June 21

We spent the entire day on the plane. Our first flight from Edinburgh to London was half an hour late. That was no big deal because we had a 2-hour layover in London, and because our flight home left over an hour late. We finally made it home about 9:30. Too bad the airlines can’t be as on-time as the trains. It felt strange to see it was dark outside already. It was a wonderful vacation. We had such a good time, we are already talking about where we will go next year.

Amazing Things We Encountered

The shower in our guest house in S-U-A had a control box mounted to the wall. It had a dial for temperature, a dial with 5 positions from “low” to “high”, and a push button marked “Power”. Our first morning there, I was turning dials and pushing buttons, but no water was coming out of the shower head. It took me over 10 minutes to figure this thing out. Converting a residence into a guest house means adding lots of bathrooms. If the hot water heater can’t handle all those showers, one can install an individual electric water heater and run just one cold water pipe to the heater. The British love to have cut-off switches everywhere. In the US, a typical electrical power outlet has two plugs. In the UK, it has two plugs and two switches. This shower heater also had a cut-off switch. It was a pull string hanging from the ceiling, far away from the shower.

It’s common for rooms in the US to have a drip coffee maker. If a guest wants tea, there are often tea bags, but the hot water comes from the coffee maker. Some people claim the hot water always tastes faintly of coffee. The UK has more tea drinkers, so rooms provide a water heater. This is a pitcher with an immersion heater coil in the bottom. Those who want coffee have to make due with instant. What’s amazing is how quickly these things bring water to boil. A US outlet can provide 150 to 200 Watts. The UK uses 220 V and the outlet hardware looks like it’s designed for at least 15 A. I figure they can get 400 W or more from their outlets. They use it all. These water heaters bring 4 cups of water to a full boil in less than two minutes.

In the US, complaining about our ISP (Internet Service Provider) is a national sport. But at least some of us have a choice. If I don’t like Comcast, I can use Verizon FIOS. I realize that not everybody in the US has a choice, but eventually I think many will. In the UK, people can select from many different ISP companies. But all ISPs rely on British Telecom for their data lines. If one doesn’t like the service provided by British Telecom, one can move to France. (Or so I was told. I don’t have a lot of personal evidence, but what I saw doesn’t contradict this.) What’s amazing is that I have seen several articles containing a list of quality of Internet service for different countries. The US is always near the bottom of the list, below many 3rd world countries. I don’t know how these lists are compiled, but our home Internet is superior to anything I experienced in the UK.

Tuesday, June 17

Edinburgh Castle

Our train didn’t leave Windermere until 1. After our pre-breakfast hike, there wasn’t much more we could do, so we took it easy in the morning. This was the first time we were on a train that was late. Our first train was on time as usual. Our second train had only four stops. The penultimate stop was in the outskirts of Edinburgh. For some reason, they held us up just before we pulled into the station. As a result, we were a few minutes late on arrival. I wish transportation in the US could be this good. We made a wrong turn walking to our guest house and walked an extra block. But we were checked in by 4:30. Our plan was to visit Edinburgh castle the next morning, so we decided to walk up to the castle before going to bed. It turned out that we had to climb a significant hill. Poor Danita overdid the walks a little bit. We were crossing a street where the light was turning. I told Danita to hurry up. But her calves were so sore, she just didn’t have any “hurry up” left. We were both pretty tired by the time we got back to our guest house.

Wednesday, June 18

Edinburgh from the Parapets

We spent 5 hours at Edinburgh Castle. They offer an introductory tour, which was both was amusing and informative. Then we used the audio tour to visit the rest of the castle. It isn’t one castle so much as several, that were built on top of each other, or were significant expansions or additions as the castle was used for different purposes over the years. The only complete building from the midevael castle was St. Margeret’s Chapel, which dates back to 1150 (not quite as old as the oldest part of the Tower of London).

Castle Great Room Roof

The most impressive building was the great room. This building was re-done in the Victorian era, with very predictable results. But the amazing part of the building was the oak roof trusses, which were original. It was a huge building. The roof was supported only by the walls. The beams were all hand-fitted and pegged. It is an amazing roof. The Tower of London was breached only once — by a bunch of peasants who were mad at the king and especially some bishop, who they thought was taxing them too much. (They ended up beheading the bishop.) In contrast, Edinburgh Castle was breached several times over the years, as the English and Scottish went back and forth over who ruled Scotland. The contrast between Edinburgh Castle and the Tower of London is huge, but no where larger than the Crown Jewels. The crown of Scotland is the oldest crown used by a monarch in Europe. But it has no significant jewels. They have a scepter and a sword, which were both gifts from England (given at different times). The only other thing they have in their Crown Jewels room is a stone, used by King Robert the Bruce as a throne when he was crowned king. (Think “Bravehart”, but without all the Mel Gibson histrionics.)

Sir Walter Raleigh Monument (I don’t have a lot of Edinburgh pics)

We spent the rest of the day wandering down the Royal Mile. We visited St. Giles Cathedral. Our last attraction was the Real Mary’s King Close. “Close” is the word used for a narrow street. We were able to walk down a couple of Closes later on. It’s easy to touch the walls on both sides of the Close at the same time. When Edinburgh built a new city council chambers building, they simply built it on top of the existing buildings in the area, effectively burying Real Mary’s King Close, using the walls from those buildings as a free foundation for the new building. There was no reason not to do this. The area was a slum at the time. Some enterprising individuals opened several of the buried buildings to show how the poor, middle class, and upper-middle class lived in the 16th century. I thought that 16th century life in Stratford-Upon-Avon was hard and lacking in conveniences, but not so bad overall. I would not want to live in a city in the 16th century. Apartments were very small. Limited land inside the city walls meant that houses were several stories high. Most people had to walk up and down several flights of steps to get to their apartments, of course carrying all their food, water, and other supplies up those stairs. And urban sanitation was absolutely abysmal. They said the average life expectancy was 40. Given the infant death rate, that meant a significant number of people lived to 60 or more. But given the living conditions, I don’t see how anybody managed to live that long.

Thursday, June 19

We spent our morning finishing the walk down the Royal Mile, then visited the Edinburgh City Museum (not much of a museum, but it is free) and Holeyrood Palace, the royal residence when the queen is in Edinburgh. It’s also where Mary Queen of Scotts lived when she was queen of Scotland, and where her son James was born. James went on to be the first person who was king of both England and Scotland (and also France, but nobody around here much cares about France). We heard a lot about Scottish history at the castle and again at the palace. Even the Scottish guides couldn’t make Mary Queen of Scotts look good.

Flowers growing out of the rock at Arthur’s Seat

The weather was so nice we decided to spend the afternoon outside. We walked up Aurthor’s Seat. This is an extinct volcano not far from the palace. It takes some effort to walk up, but the view of Edinburgh is the best you can get. While we were up there, we had a good view of Calton Hill. We saw Nelson’s column, then noticed something that looked like a Roman Ruin right next to it. We hadn’t read about this in the travel literature, so we looked it up. It turned out to be the National Monument for the soldiers that died in the Napoleanic wars. Unfortunately, they ran out of money and it was never finished. It is sometimes called “Edinburgh’s Folly”, and other times called names even less flattering.

Edinburgh from Arthurs Seat