Of Kilts and Haggis (Part 3)

OK, now we've come to the part of the trip where I get to make you jealous.

Although I was on my own for the first week, Rebeca flew out for the second week I was there and joined me for a bit of touring afterwards.

One of the interesting places we checked out was Camera Obscura, a fantastic museum dedicated to optical illusions and other fun things. I took a ton of pictures here and really have trouble deciding on my favorites.

One day we hopped on a bus and went up to Loch Ness. No monster was sighted, except for this one.

By the way, we highly recommend NOT taking a guided bus to Loch Ness. It's a long, uncomfortable drive and you see very little along the way because you're in such a hurry. Take your time and rent a car.

Finally, to wrap things up, we did a bit of a "movie tour". The first stop: Alnwick Castle. This castle is famous for being used for most of the exterior shots of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter movies! It has also been used in numerous other movies such as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

Second stop: Douane Castle - famous for being used in Monty Python and the Holy Grail!

And finally, the Glenfinnan Viaduct. This is best known as the bridge the Hogwarts Express travels over on the way to Hogwarts!

There are a zillion other pictures, and some of them are even good.

More pictures from Camera Obscura can be found here.
More pictures from Alnwick and Douane castles can be found here.
More pictures from the Glenfinnan Viaduct can be found here.

Of Kilts and Haggis (Part 2)

Edinburgh and Glasgow are the two largest cities in Scotland. Edinburgh is the government and tourist center; Glasgow is the business and cultural center. It's a quick one-hour train ride between the two cities, so I popped over to Glasgow for the day to check it out and to see a concert.

Here's a neat bridge just outside of Edinburgh on the way to Glasgow called the Forth Bridge.

More photos of Glasgow can be found here, and a few more bridge photos can be found here.

Of Kilts and Haggis (Part 1)

In my previous post I mentioned how my work had sent me to Austin a few times over the previous months. Well, they wanted me to do another trip, and this one a bit more adventurous - setting up a new environment in our Linlithgow, Scotland office!

Linlithgow is a small town a little ways outside of Edinburgh in the southwest of Scotland. The only hotel in town was no longer open, so I stayed in downtown Edinburgh and took the train in every day. It was about three miles of walking to and from the train station each day, so I got in a fair bit of exercise too!

This is Loch Linlithgow with Linlithgow Palace in the background. I walked by here every day on the way to and from the office and the train station.

I was there almost three weeks total. Of course we didn't have to work weekends, so that allowed for a bit of fun...

This is a cemetery in the courtyard of The Parish Church of St. Cuthbert. Edinburgh Castle is in the background. The cemetery was about a quarter mile from my hotel.

St. John's Episcopal Church. I like the crescent moon that was out at the time!

Edinburgh Castle at night. Loaded with tourists during the day, and completely empty once its dark!

Castlehill Road - the main drag leading up to Edinburgh Castle. Tourist touts galore during the day.

More pictures from the first weekend can be found here!

And now a word from our sponsor.

I've been sent on a few work trips the last couple of months. Three of them were to Austin, Texas - which admittedly was a nice break from the middle of winter. I dragged my camera along to take a few pictures during my off-time.

Texas State Capitol Building

This is a shot I really enjoy for some reason. The harsh shadows from shooting directly toward the sun, the sepia-look from the clouds, and Old Glory (with hints of color) contrasting against it all.

I drove down to San Antonio one of the days and bummed around. This is a shot of the Riverwalk, with a water taxi passing by.

Austin downtown skyline.

A few more shots can be found here and here.

Bali, Day 2-14

You know, I've just plain gotten bored of blogging.

Not just writing, either. Reading them too. I logged into Google Reader today and found that I hadn't read any blogs for over a month. And yet it didn't bother me that much.

Talking to a few other people, they felt the same way. Is blogging a fad that is slowly fading? Perhaps.

Here are some random pictures from the rest of my trip because I don't feel like breaking it out into individual days any more.


This is a water palace called "Tirta Gangga".


This is a water palace called ... hell I don't remember what it was called.


This is a war monument that nobody over there really seemed to know about. It was really odd - this huge gothic monstrosity among the nice beaches and such.


The monkeys over there are perverts.

Here are the rest of the pictures:
Bats, more water temples, and flowers.
More of the war memorial
The floating temple (not really floating)(and not appearing to be floating because it wasn't high tide), butterflies and bugs, waterfalls, other stuff
Trendy toilet paper, monkeys
FIRE

Bali, Day 1

So here's a little tidbit of info: Sometimes airlines sell more tickets than they have seats available. There are always a percentage of people who don't make their flights, and things usually even out by departure time.

But not always.

Sometimes enough people show up that they don't have seats for everybody. If you're lucky enough to have this happen to you, you can volunteer to give away your seat in exchange for some vouchers for a future flight (plus a seat on the next flight).

We managed to rack up $1600 in vouchers on a trip to Los Angeles back in March. If you have $1600 in vouchers laying around, what do you do? Go on vacation, of course!

We chose Bali as our destination. Bali is smack dab in the middle of Indonesia, directly north of Australia. We booked tickets there, flying via Tokyo and Singapore.

We hired a driver for the first four days of the trip to take us around the island and let us get a feel for it.

The first day started with a trip to Tegalalang, toward the center of Bali. There are some beautiful rice paddies there, and you are welcome to walk among them!





Just up the road from Tegalalang is an organic farm that grows a variety of fruits, vegetables, and spices. More interesting though, is that they produce Kopi Luwak, which is the most expensive coffee in the world! Why is it so expensive? The production process:

1) The fruit of the coffee plant is eaten by an Asian Palm Civet, a small native animal that seems to be a cross between a cat and a rodent.
2) The stomach acids of the civet interact with the fruit.
3) The fruit is pooped out.
4) Yes, you guessed it: The Coffee Crap(tm) is gathered up, washed and dried, roasted, then shelled and ground up into coffee!

There are two layers of actual shells that are removed before exposing the coffee bean inside, so you don't need to worry TOO much about eating actual poop. Maybe.


Kopi Luwak coffee beans set out to dry

From there we traveled onward to Gunung Kawi, a temple built in the 11th century. It features 10 shrines cut into the cliffs surrounding the Pakrisan river, each shrine being over 20 feet tall!

The day we went there they were preparing plates of food to make as an offering. They also had a duck wrapped up in a palm leaf. He seemed blissfully unaware of his fate that would be arriving a few hours later.





Just a few miles away from Gunung Kawi is Tirtha Empul, which is one of the oldest sites in Bali. Sometimes known as Temple of the Holy Spring, Balinese travel from all over the island to bathe in the natural spring waters here.



We stopped for a late lunch overlooking Batur volcano.



It was now time to head back for the day, but with one more stop along the way: Goa Gajah, or the Elephant Cave Temple.





The rest of the photos from Day 1 can be found here.

A public thank-you.

After an exhausting day of physical work, I need a bit of a relaxer before calling it a night.

I would like to publicly thank Erica for posting about drinking a beer in the shower. Yes, the post was a year ago, or longer, but it stuck in my mind. Tonight I hopped in the shower with a Sam Adams Octoberfest, and it was almost perfect. A blowie at the same time would have completed the trifecta, but I will settle for the beer and shower.

So, thank you Erica for your wise suggestion. I owe you an almond pastry from Gourmandise next time you're down here.

Checking in.

So I am still here, and every now and then I think about writing something. But you know, you get busy with work and going out and walking the dog and all the sudden it's 1 am and you are way past your bedtime and it gets prolonged even more.

Not only that, I'm not sure anyone can relate. I mean, I think 90% of my blog readers have been busy having babies lately. How can you relate to a single guy who has nothing but Pringles for dinner?

OK, I'm not entirely single - in fact, I am quite happily dating somebody whom I may detail in the near future. Maybe. We are kind of private though, so maybe not. In fact, I think I'm done talking about that for now.

However, the two of us did take a trip up to Oregon with ernl and her Manzilla. Unfortunately I had to ruin the vacation by working half the time which kind of rained on everybody's parade, including my own. That said, I still had plenty of fun and even got a few photos that I'm happy with!


I LOVE COCAINE


One of the porch lights at our beach house kept arcing.





The rest can be found here and here and here.

Africa Adventures, Day 18-21: Kruger National Park

I'm tired of trying to describe everything that happened. Yes, even the rhino attack. So here's some more pictures so I can wrap up this trip and blog about other crap.


I love this. A print of it is now hanging by my kitchen table.















LOTS more here!

Africa Adventures, Day 16-17: The Road to Kruger

After returning to Jo'burg we headed up north to Pretoria, the "Executive" capital of South Africa. The day turned out to be rather rainy, so we didn't go out a whole lot. However, I bought the hottest striped shirt ever and that made up for the rain. It was so hot that when I put it on I had to get my own phone number.

From there it was time to head east. Kruger was a ways away - far enough that we would stop overnight twice before entering the park.

Luckily there are some interesting scenic areas to visit along the way. We took a route called the "Panorama Route", which has some of the best views in South Africa. I was quickly running out of memory on my cards and did not take as many photos as I wanted, so things are a bit sparse through here.


There is a trio of waterfalls outside of Sabie: Lone Creek (shown here), Bridal Veil and Horseshoe. We checked out all three. Lone Creek is extremely easy to access, Bridal Veil slightly more difficult and Horseshoe is a major pain in the you-know-where.


This is a shot from the Mac Mac Pools. A slow-moving stream in this area provides plenty of areas for wading and relaxing.


This looks like something you'd see in Utah, but it's actually the Bourke's Luck Potholes.

One thing I wish I had taken pictures of but didn't was "God's Window" - a wonderful view of the Mpumalanga province. Highly recommended if you're in the area.

We were running out of time and wanted to get to the edge of Kruger before dark so we headed out, only to encounter the worst rainstorm I have experienced in my entire life. I had the wipers on their highest setting and they couldn't keep up. I was tempted to pull over but I had the good fortune to end up driving right behind a bus, so I was able to follow his taillights all the way to Nelspruit. We stayed at a B&B there, where we heard the loudest frogs in existence. I could not believe how loud they were - it was almost deafening. I never saw one, but we were told that they're actually fairly small in size.

Africa Adventures, Day 14 & 15: Namibian Village Visit

Today we took a boat over to Impalila Island on the Namibian side of the Chobe River - we were going to check out some villages over there.

The villages seem to have become accustomed to westerners coming over to visit, as they had a wide variety of trinkets that you could buy that were identical to the ones you could buy just about anywhere else in Africa.



This is a rather large termite mound.



There was a boat that was no longer in use that some of the village children were playing on. I hopped on one end of the boat and the kids tried to rock me off of it. I played with them for a good hour or so.

Tonight is our last night in Botswana. I was sure to grab a sunset picture over the river before turning in for the night. Tomorrow: A bit of laundry and relaxing before heading off to Jo'burg again.