Travelling and trying to create a buzz by dancing

 

So, I've just come back from a week in Bordeaux in France, and it was lovely.

But hot.

Now, for those who aren't aware, I'm from the UK, and not even the southern bit.  I'm from the north, where twenty degrees Celsius (68 in Fahrenheit) is getting hot.  So me choosing a place where it was regularly in the thirties - and on the day of us leaving, was due to hit 41 - wasn't the best idea.  Nor was it booking a hotel without air conditioning, fortunately I rectified that on arrival and got upgraded, otherwise sleep would have been a faint hope.

But France was great, the people were great, and we saw so much cool stuff, like the Museum of Illusions, which is full of optical illusions, allowing for photos like this:

It's interesting though what things you take for granted which turn out to just not be a thing in different countries.  Getting fresh, not UHT milk from a supermarket or a corner shop was seemingly impossible.  And the amazing french bread that was provided along with meals never came with butter unless you asked for it (which seems like an oversight bearing in mind how much french butter is).

Nevertheless, it was a great experience.

Onto my second subject of the post, which is that I need to rebuild an audience.  Not that I ever had a huge one, but letting my blog and YouTube channel atrophy for several years didn't help.  And you see, I'm writing a book that I want to release by the end of the year.

It's not a clever book, or a sensible book.  It's a bunch of short silly stories that make me laugh, and hopefully if you share my sense of humour, will do the same for you.

But if I'm to make my fortune selling a book, I need several hundred thousand willing fans waiting to buy it.

I thought that I might hop onto social media trends to build my audience - now, if you're not aware, Deadpool & Wolverine is in cinemas at the moment, and one of the dances, to NSync's Bye Bye Bye, is quite popular on TikTok right now.

Oh god no.  I'm not posting that video for people to see.

Anyone want a cheap Deadpool mask? Barely used?

It was suggested to me, that as Ryan Reynolds had a body double do the dance in the film for him, that I perhaps need the same.  Applicants do feel free to reach out.

Dublin!

To take my mind off the current threat of world destruction, I decided to report on mine and my dad's recent trip to Dublin!

The flight to Dublin from Leeds Bradford went very smoothly, I have to in particular recommend the Viking car park system - you park your car a couple of minutes away from the airport, they take your key, and give you a lift in a mini bus to the airport, and then on return they monitor the flights so that as you leave the airport the mini bus pulls up again to take you back to your car, and this happened flawlessly.

Once in Dublin we headed for one of the oldest drinking establishments in Dublin, Mulligans.

It may not be obvious from the photo, but of the 25 or so beer pumps behind the bar, no less than 4 of them were devoted to Guinness, and as we walked in the barman was pouring pint after pint of the black stuff.  We wasting no time in ordering two pints for ourselves and finding a seat.

Then, I remembered one of the other excellent drinks available in Dublin (any many other places I'm sure) are hot whiskeys - whiskey, hot water, a slice of lemon with cloves placed carefully within, and an optional spoon of sugar.

Hot whiskeys are quite small though, and we found that it was more sensible to order a hot whiskey with a pint of Guinness, so that we didn't have to go to the bar quite so often.

For some reason after a few hours in Mulligan's we went to the hotel and slept for 16 hours or so.

The following morning we happened upon a cafe called Metro that did a decent breakfast, that somehow managed to make us feel halfway human again!

So the second day was spent at a more relaxed speed, visiting the Guinness Storehouse but apart from that catching up on the Commonwealth Games.

I did experience one of my pet hates that evening when, going out for some dinner, I ordered a pie.

For the avoidance of doubt - the photo above does not depict a pie.

A pie should be fully encased in pastry (ideally shortcrust).

What this meal consisted of was a bowl of stew, with a hat on.

The last day we went to several museums - the "National" museums of archaeology, natural history, The National Gallery of Ireland, and Book of Kells are all sited quite close to one another.  I have to say that the free options (aka not the Book of Kells) are definitely the better ones to experience.

Massive skeletons of gigantic deer in the natural history museum

Of course, no trip would be complete without one awkward experience, and that would be the flight back to the UK. When it was time to get to the plane, we obediently boarded two buses that would take us there, which then sat and didn't move for a while.

Then they drove us to the plane, but didn't open the doors, they just showed us the plane for a while. Eventually they told us that we couldn't board, because the crew for the plane hadn't shown up yet. If only we'd had some kind of paperwork, or card, that told us which seat we were supposed to sit in! Maybe you could call it...a boarding pass?

Eventually the crew arrived - it turned out that the normal crew wasn't available so it was a standby crew that had been brought into action - and we took off.  Very soon after lift off they advised us that conditions at Leeds Bradford Airport were extremely bad, and that there was a good chance that we'd end up at Manchester Airport instead - not ideal, when my car was at Leeds Bradford.

Despite this, they did manage to land at Leeds Bradford even though as far as I could see the fog was such that there was no sign of any lights, runway, or even where the ground was for that matter. The landing was a little rougher than the one at Dublin (which was in the middle of the day in good weather) but we were just happy to be down, in one piece, and even better, where we were supposed to be.

All in all I certainly had a great time, and I'm renewed in my desire to work out just how to make a hot whiskey!

Thanksgiving!

The traditional Thanksgiving breakfast curry.  Well, it is when the night before Thanksgiving you have a takeaway.

I have a bit of a fascination with Thanksgiving, as a British person it always sneaks up on me a bit by surprise.  I think it's the combination of being near Christmas (in the UK we have NO holidays anywhere near Christmas, there's a day off in August and then a long, long stretch without public holidays until Christmas) and also being on a Thursday - with the exception of Christmas and New Years Day, all of our public holidays are on Mondays and Fridays.  The idea of having a holiday on a Thursday this close to Christmas is just a little hard to imagine.

We in the UK have got our heads around Black Friday, although it also seems wrong to me - In November and December, when we're buying presents for Christmas, we expect our retailers to gouge us on prices, and not have a day of big sales a month beforehand.  We believe that we deserve to pay over the odds for trinkets that will appear in massive sales on the 26th of December, because if we were REALLY organised we'd buy all of our presents in the January sales, wrap them up then, and then put them away in the attic for the following Christmas (just like that one relative/friend that we know that we would emulate if we weren't so disorganised)

At any rate, if you are celebrating Thanksgiving, I hope you have a great day, I'd love one year to experience (aka eat) a traditional Thanksgiving dinner and afterwards fall asleep in a chair while watching TV! If you're celebrating Thanksgiving let me know in the comments what's planned for your day :)

If you'd like to watch something funny, my wife's channel trailer for her YouTube channel is now live :)

Return to Robin Hoods Bay

So yesterday I went to Robin Hood's Bay with my dad.

Robin Hood's Bay, or RHB for acronym lovers, is a touristy fishing village in North Yorkshire in the UK, which I actually recently got to guest blog about.

Bearing in mind that we visited on the last day of September, we were extremely lucky with the weather, I had a jacket in the car but that's exactly where it stayed!

I first visited Bay I think when I was about 12 or 13, and for several years Bay was the family holiday.  I even went to stay by myself when I was about 20, with the notable memory of cooking a pizza with the polystrene base still attached (I was under the influence of alcohol at the time), and then not being able to turn the gas oven off so spending all evening with the oven door open to let the heat out.  In the morning I had no trouble whatsoever turning off the oven, it's very strange.

Since then we generally try to go every year, if even for only a day.

The mist was rolling off the hills opposite, which I tried to capture with various settings on my phone camera, but all I managed to do was make it brighter, so here's one of the automatically optimised pictures.  Which is quite nice.

We ventured down onto the bay itself for a little while, as you can see in the photos it was really nice, with just a touch of breeze.

My dad declared that he was going to have a paddle, and by the time he realised just how cold the water actually was it was too late, he was committed!

 

And of course no trip to Bay would be complete without a visit to a couple of pubs for some good quality beer!

My pint of Old Peculier, absolutely delicious.

I think the only problem was that we didn't get enough time there - I'm hoping to sort out something to get a day or two in the village, RHB is possibly one of the best places in the world to relax and unwind, but to do that you need the time to do it, so I hope to be able to get perhaps a cottage for a night or two in the low season.

Do you have a favourite place that you like to return to?

For more about Bay, why not check out my dad's post about the folklore of the village :)

Mike is on Holiday and Life Explained Takes The Reins

While I'm doing the holiday thing, my good friend Tim from Life, Explained has stepped up to write a guest post.  Take it away, Tim!

My friend Mike is on a holiday. I am not sure where he went, and since I am writing this now (not now, like at the present time, now like weeks ago, probably) I am not even sure when he went. Still, Mike is my friend, we have been blogging friends for quite a while.

Which makes me wonder why he didn’t tell me where he was going, was he worried I would show up at his hotel. “Hey, Mike, here I am with my family, and the people I work with. And the guy who runs the donut shop where I get my “coffee.* We just stopped by to see what you were doing.” Would that be so bad?

Of course he didn’t even tell me when he was leaving. Perhaps he thinks I will go to his house and drink all his beers, and tea, and eat all the pastries and cakes. Which might not be a bad idea considering how little Mike thinks of our “friendship.” If it weren’t for all the flying over all the ocean (two of my least favorite things) to get there.

Still, good friends are hard to find, particularly when they live in the UK and don’t want to be found. Then it approaches impossible. And Mike is one of my oldest blogging friends.

Mike, we are going to go to the Smoky Mountains in a southern state in the fall. Beautiful country, moonshine liquor, boiled peanuts,** a peaceful cabin nestled deep in the forest, Friendship Falls and their version of Loaded Fries, and the comfort of an evening rain shower every time we light the barbecue grill. It is almost heaven. Why don’t you stop by. It is just location redacted.

Your “friend”

Tim

*Secret wife fooling code for “Donuts”

**Whatever you do don’t eat the boiled peanuts, I am convinced it is a joke, and they just laugh at the Yankees as they take our money.

Note from Mike: For the record, I have little idea where we're going on holiday, it involves me driving and my wife giving directions.

Packing

Well, right now I ought to be gathering together about a quarter of the entire contents of my household, to fit into my car, as I leave fairly soon for an indeterminate period of time.

No, I'm not being kicked out, we're going on holiday, and the to do list looms.  But I wanted to do a quick post before we tackled the great highways of the UK.

Last night we undertook a good deal of the task ahead of us, that is cleaning the house and gathering all the things that we absolutely must take with us.

One of my "must take" items being this nifty keyboard that I can plug into my phone.  I won't use it, but it's critical that I take it with me.

But now we have to make the final push, before we attempt to leave.

It's not been bad to be fair - when clearing out the boot of the car I discovered a Toblerone from Christmas time.  I was worried that it might be inedible, but I ate a chunk of it for breakfast and now I'm feeling a little sick, so that sounds exactly normal.  If you're not familiar with a Toblerone it's a row of triangular "alps" of chocolate (see below pic) which are too big to easily bite off, you need to either gnaw and suck at an alp until it releases its grip on the other alps in the box, or you have to employ some violence to snap an alp off.

I elected last night to put the Toblerone in the freezer, because it's been warm here, just to make sure it wasn't soft.

It wasn't soft.

Those experienced Toblerone-eaters will know how easy it is to be hurt by a Toblerone.  You get a pointy bit jabbing you in the roof of your mouth, or knocking a filling out, or even up your nose.  These risks are not reduced when you harden a Toblerone by freezing it, you just make it even more dangerous.

So after tackling a chunk of frozen, possibly laden with bacteria, pointy wedges of chocolate, I need a holiday! See you all soon.

Going Away

As I write this, in about two and a half hours I'll (hopefully) be getting on a coach to take me and my wife off on holiday!  The blog has had quite a few guest bloggers (thank you all that have donated works) recently while we've prepared for a wedding, had the wedding, and then recovered from it, and I've got more guest blogs lined up while we're away for our honeymoon.

Before the house awakens and a frantic bout of last minute activity such as getting breakfasts, tidying up, collating a packed lunch etc takes place however, I popped on the computer.

I had an email from Tesco, my car insurance firm, saying that my latest insurance documents could be downloaded.  Whilst this wasn't an area of huge concern for me, I thought that it might be worth taking a quick look, mainly to see if they mentioned what I'd be paying for my insurance when it gets renewed in a few weeks

Unfortunately I was told "Sorry, but we are experiencing a very busy period right now".  So I didn't get them.

Man, I hated those 4.15am rushes for car insurance documentation, that's why I got out of the insurance industry.

See you all soon!

Vacation

Hi - I'm not nearby a computer for a few days, so fellow blogger Tim from Life, Explained has kindly volunteered to do a piece.  Tim's great and a very funny blogger, he's well worth checking out.

Take it away, Tim!


Hello.  Mike Raven is on vacation this week, and will not be able to return your calls.   Actually, I don’t know how long he is on vacation for, and whether he has a phone or not.  He seems to have some technical prowess, and sounds very bright, so he probably has some sort of communication device, but that is not what I am here to talk about.  I am here to discuss vacations (like Mike’s) and the best ways to get through them undamaged, sort of.

First there is the matter of diet.  It is too easy to overindulge while traveling.  Since you don’t have to clean up afterwards, or do dishes it is tempting to have three or four things at once.  “Give me a burger, a hot dog, a bratwurst, and pancakes, with a milk shake.”  That does sound good, but it will lead to an expanding waist line, and clothing budget, and unbearable ridicule from co-workers, friends, loved ones, and the people at the clothing store, smug, arrogant, thin philistines that they are.

A good way to counter this is to order a salad.  Green, leafy vegetables help keep the weight off, lower serum cholesterol, and help control hypertension.   Your rule of thumb should be one meal every day consists of a salad.  Following the one salad a day rule leaves you free to be a little more liberal with your other meal choices, steak, baked potato with extra sour cream and real butter, fried shrimp, and hot rolls fresh from the oven, steaming piles of noodles with melted cheese, and garlic butter, what an appetizer, I can’t wait for dinner, and dessert, oh man, could I tell you about desserts.

If you are a vacation veteran it is ok to call anything with lettuce a salad, a bacon cheeseburger, a bacon lettuce and tomato sandwich (lettuce and tomato that almost counts for two salads) a club sandwich, all of these are similar to the fountain of youth on bread.   You are getting younger by the minute.

With a little discipline there is no reason a smart person can’t come back from vacation healthier than when it began.  It just takes a plan and some will power.

In a spontaneous act of kindness and sympathy Mike has agreed to let me write a guest post for his blog.  The readers of my blog are so very grateful.  A little vacation for them as well, I hope they are enjoying the time off and eating wisely.