London

Much has changed since I first came over to London for an 18-month experience. I've been able to do quite a bit of travel, explore Europe, meet some new friends, find a great client where I've been working, and substantially settle into life here.

Over the summer, I slowly realized that the stability of traveling only for fun rather than weekly for work was great for my sanity. It's allowed me to settle into a city and have a more consistent and sane life than when I'd been spending 100+ nights/year in hotels for work.

After much debate, I decided to stay here in London on a more-permanent basis, rather than returning to New York in January 2010. In making this decision, I've also resigned from my firm and accepted a job with the primary client I've worked with for the past year.

Assuming my application for a new work permit goes through on the expected timetable, my last day with my current employer is going to be 23 October, and I'll be continuing on my current project as a permanent London-based employee rather than as a consultant from 26 October.

Oktoberfest

Last year, a few of us had looked into going to Oktoberfest shortly after we arrived in London, but it was ridiculously expensive to do it last-minute. Instead, in January this year, we booked a weekend trip that we took two weeks ago.

Friday night, the group of us sharing two hotel rooms were on the same 5:30 flight to Munich. We crammed into a cab, dropped everything off at the hotel, then went to the Hofbrauhaus. We found an open table in the beer hall, stood up on the benches and got right into the experience!

Despite a late Friday night, we were up at 7am Saturday for breakfast and into town by 9, to buy our outfits for the rest of the weekend! As you can see in the photos, we all ended up getting authentic outfits for the weekend!

We spent the afternoon outside at a Paulaner tent, where you can see the next set of photos. A few liters later and after an amazing half-chicken for dinner, we ended up moving over to the Hofbrauhaus tent -- the one with the green roof with all kinds of stuff hanging off of it -- and taking that in for the evening.

Let's just say that Sunday morning was a bit of a challenge to get up and about. Eventually, as I got a few glasses of water and some coffee into me, I felt better. Two hours later, we were back at it, with 20 of us sitting at two adjoining tables in the Hippodrom tent.

Now, the other tents that we'd seen had completely rowdy and out of control people everywhere, whereas this was a bit more sane -- table service, a full menu of amazing German food (you can see me with the wienerschnitzel in one of the photos) and the like.

I left midafternoon, as I had a flight back to London late Saturday evening. I went back to the hotel for a shower and to change out of the lederhosen before the flight, and then went to the airport a bit earlier than I normally would have. I figured I'd find a corner somewhere with a bottle of gatorade and a book, read a bit, and maybe get in a quick nap before the flight.

I cleared security at 6:45 or so and saw a sign directly in front of me at a gate: "BA 955, LHR, 1730 flight, delayed departure 1840." As the door was still open, I walked up to the gate agent and asked if he'd let me on it. He said yes, gave me a new boarding card, then closed the jetway door behind me. About 30 seconds after I sat down, the plane pushed back and was airborne. This absolutely shocked me and has to qualify as one of my very few "I had a good flying experience" stories... I got home more than two hours early!

All in all, a great weekend! My voice is slowly recovering from the experience, but just about back now!

Budapest

I’d gotten a text from Cecilia a few weeks ago asking “want to go to Budapest?” Needless to say, I was interested in hearing more, so I called. That night, Cecilia, Mike and Trine booked flights for the bank holiday weekend (this weekend) to Budapest. I did the same…

We left this past Friday morning, spent the afternoon exploring the town and a few of the key tourist sites, then found a restaurant recommended by one of my colleagues for dinner.

Saturday morning, Cecilia and I explored a market near our hotel, then met up with Trine and Mike at a bath house. Apparently Budapest is known for its thermal bath houses, so we figured we had to give it a try.

For the equivalent of about £10, we got day-long admission to a bath house. Now, there are some that are traditional with separate male and female facilities and an expectation of being, ahem, “natural.” This was (intentionally) not one of those. We relaxed through the different pools, each had a 30-minute massage for about another £10, swam a few laps, and eventually dragged ourselves out in late afternoon.

After a night out on Saturday, we spent Sunday touring the sites of Budapest. We went to the national gallery, toured a church overlooking the city, rented a four-person bike on a small island in the middle of the Danube and found the Parliament building on our explorations of the city.

The goulash, also, was amazing!

My photos from the weekend are posted here.

I’m now back in London and have a few weeks here before our trip to Oktoberfest in late September… I’ve definitely been trying to take advantage of the travel opportunities nearby here, but it’ll also be good to spend some time in one place for a change!

Northern Ireland

Two weeks ago, I spent Sunday night at Chris’s flat in Greenwich. We woke up at 4am, drove a rental car I had to Heathrow, returned it and hopped a 7am flight to Northern Ireland. There, we met up with John for a week of camping and boating.

John had taken his car across to Northern Ireland on the ferry several days earlier with our camping gear, so he met us with that and we headed off into the wilderness.

Our first two nights were at a campsite near a National Trust historical mansion 40 miles or so south of Belfast. We set up camp, did some hiking and explored the area a bit.

We started the trip eating well and continued throughout… our first night’s dinner consisted of chicken fajitas, rice, refried beans and all the fixings, prepared on a single burner camp stove. We subsequently successfully did eggs and bacon for breakfast with that stove, before moving our cooking to a boat.

On our third day, we drove across to the west of Northern Ireland to pick up a 22’ boat with a small diesel motor, to go exploring the locks and rivers throughout the area. We moored it near an Asda (Walmart’s UK brand) in the nearest town and picked up food for the remainder of the week.

It was a great time to just catch up with two friends without any computers, phones or other distractions, out on the open water. Each of the three nights we had the boat, we moored at public docks on the rivers, with no other people within sight anywhere.

One day, we moored at a four-star hotel for a quick 9-hole round of golf. It was a great time, but we had a bit of a challenge with the “quick” part of the round… I’d been on a golf course maybe twice in my life and to a driving range only a few more times. Chris had taken lessons at a driving range. John had never before driven a golf ball on the range, a course or otherwise. Between the three of us, we had respectable scores… had it been an 18-hole course.

To continue the food thread here, we prepared steaks, sausages and barbecue ribs on disposable charcoal grills. We had pancakes for breakfast, cooked in the galley. We had apple pie, cheeses, and plenty of tasty beverages to last us for the three nights on the water.

After a quick drive to the rope bridge up near Giants Causeway along the northern coast of Northern Ireland, we spent the last day in Belfast and returned back to the UK late on Sunday.

A few of my photos from the week are here.

Race the Train

A few months ago I’d been talking with a few people at the pub after a Wednesday night run with the running club, when Race the Train came up as a good idea for a weekend trip. This was the first I heard of it, but what I heard was interesting, so I ended up signing up along with Christie and a friend from the Serpies.

We committed to running the race before actually working through the logistics of lodging. Christie spent a decent amount of time researching B&Bs, hotels and other options within a reasonable drive of Tywyn, mid Wales, where the race is hosted. She found a few great places, but they were near larger towns, at least an hour drive from the race start.

This was about the time we realized “uh oh, there are some rural areas in Wales… this looks like it is a REALLY rural one.”

As a last-ditch effort to see if there were some secret lodging options that weren’t readily visible on the web, I sent a message to the Serpentine club email list asking for any suggestions. A runner responded saying he was planning to do the race as well, and that he has a vacation home in a town about 10 miles up the coast from Tywyn, where we could stay in the spare bedrooms for free!

Needless to say, we were quite excited by this option!

I managed to get out of work at about noon on Friday, went home to change, then we met at Kings Cross, picked up a car and pointed north up the M1. It was the better part of a six-hour drive, as it’s a 220 mile trip with very urban streets until you get outside the M25, then very rural narrow roads for the last 40 miles or so as you approach the Welsh coast. This was also my first time driving a stick shift right-hand-drive vehicle. The clutch took a bit of a beating as I got used to the feel of it and yes, the car might have stalled a few times (through no fault of my own, of course… whistle…) but overall it worked well!

We actually met Adrian, our host for the weekend, for the first time when we showed up at his place at 7pm or so on Friday. He was in the kitchen preparing a chicken, turkey and pasta dinner for the four of us… quite the reception and much more impressive than the “simple pasta dinner” he’d alluded to when we talked through the preceding week.

On race day, Christie did the 5-mile run, followed by Adrian, Desiree and me running the 14-mile route in the afternoon. It was overcast at race time, but had been raining rather heavily overnight. As the name of the race suggests, we runners were on cross-country style tracks as we raced a narrow-gauge train up and back down a hill.

The train finishes the course averaging about a 7’30” pace… something I could definitely do over that distance on flat surfaces, but which was well beyond my reach on the actual course. There were narrow sheep trails cut into the side of hills, with runners following each other in single file, and with footprints trailing off to the side where some of us had slipped in our attempts to navigate the mud.

There’s a great video of a prior year’s experience, from a spectator’s view, here.

Sunday, we drove up to Colwyn Castle along the northern coast of Wales, before driving back to London. Rather than returning to reality on Monday morning, though, I had another trip lined up: a week of camping and boating in Northern Ireland. I dropped off Christie and Desiree, unpacked my muddy stuff from the race, and threw my stuff for a week of camping into the car, drove to Chris’s flat in Greenwich and slept there before the beginning of the next trip.

My photos from the weekend are posted here.

Matt's Visit

Several weeks ago, a friend from CMU visited me as part of a ten-day trip through Europe. The first weekend, we toured London: On Saturday, we walked south across Tower Bridge, along the South Bank, then back over to St Pauls Cathedral and the West End. We came back up to Angel for dinner at the Narrow Boat along the canal, before crashing for the evening.

That Sunday, we met a few others for brunch in Angel, before heading off to the Shoreditch Music Festival and then onward to the Proms. Talk about two different experiences! The Shoreditch festival was a large outdoor venue with all the normal fried foods, expensive drinks and the like, occasional rain, a university-aged crowd and music that was a bit too edgy for all of us, I think. Afterward, Matt, Christie and I met John and Laura at the Royal Albert Hall, where Laura performed with the BBC National Orchestra in the evening’s Proms concert. We got last-minute, £5 tickets for standing immediately in front of the orchestra… definitely a different way of experiencing it, and a great time!

Matt was back for the following weekend and had suggested doing something outside of London to get a taste of “the rest of England.” On Friday that week, I saw someone on the DLR with a copy of The Times, featuring the 100 best walks in the UK. I found that article online and found one of the hikes in the Cotswolds, about 60 miles north from London.

I’d committed to meet Matt at Heathrow when he landed early Saturday afternoon, but needed to finalize a plan beforehand. At about noon Saturday, I picked up Rick Steves’ UK travel book and started calling down the list of B&Bs in the Cotswolds. The first five places I called said they were booked for the night. I was starting to think through other possible alternatives when one of the women I’d called ended up calling me back. She said she “just remembered” that they had space for the night, if we were interested.

Matt and I met at Heathrow, picked up a rental car and drove up into the Cotswolds. We showed up at the B&B in the late afternoon, then went back to the “Ducking of the Mayor” in a nearby town. We’d seen a huge banner sign over a pub on the way through the town earlier and wanted to see what we were missing! By the time we got there, we’d missed whatever the ceremony was… apparently it’s an annual festival where a mock mayor is selected from the village elders and dunked (yet it’s the “ducking” of the mayor… don’t ask) into the river that runs through town. We stayed for a bit as a band started the evening’s entertainment, then headed back to the town near our B&B for dinner and an early night.

Sunday, we did an 11-mile hike through the rolling countryside. We had a few challenges at first understanding that yes, it really is okay to walk over the steps near fences, to walk past sheep and other livestock in active fields, and to open gates as long as they weren’t actually padlocked.

The original Times article is here.
As we deviated slightly from the intended course, we mapped our our actual route on MayMyRun here after returning to my place that evening.

It was great to get away and see a bit more of England, outside of the cities… definitely a weekend we couldn’t have experienced as fully without a car and willingness to venture off the motorways!

Edinburgh

As a graduation gift, my brother Dave ended up visiting for two weeks. We spent the better part of a week together in London and he also did an 8-day trip through the UK to visit a friend at Oxford, see other parts of the country and meet me for a weekend in Edinburgh.

So, last weekend, I left work a bit early on Friday and headed to Luton for the flight up to Edinburgh. I need to do another post at some point about my first (and possibly last) experience with EasyJet, but that's another post for another day...

Dave and I found a pub with a singer / guitar player after I got into town on Friday night. It's the first I've heard a guy with a synthesized backing band, where he actually had talent! Any other time I've heard someone do that, he tried to hide behind the synthesized recording and more or less failed... but this guy was good!

Saturday, we explored town, toured the castle, did the whiskey tasting experience, and ventured up to the top of Holyrood Park. A few of Dave's photos are on http://picasaweb.google.com/trenshaw/... I never actually took my camera out with us.

Saturday night, we met up with three of my friends from London who had also traveled up to Edinburgh for the weekend. We did dinner together, then a ghost tour through town, and then found a few pubs. It seemed like every single pub had live music... and they were good!

We toured the National Gallery on Sunday morning and then did an underground tour of the old city in the afternoon, before heading off to an airport and back to reality. Definitely a great weekend and an amazing opportunity to catch up with Dave!

Now, this weekend, I'm back in London and have little planned, for the last time in a while. A friend from New York will be here the next two weekends, I'm doing a 14-mile race in Wales after that, then a week in Northern Ireland, then have two other friends from the States visiting for a weekend. The next free weekend at this point is in mid September, the weekend before going to Oktoberfest. Where's the time going?!?