Category: General

Kelly and I spent this past weekend in Astoria, Oregon. Our aunt recently bought a vacation home there and let us stay a few nights. The weather was absolutely fantastic (I have the sunburn to prove it too).

We arrived in the evening on Friday, had enough daylight to pick up groceries, unpack, and start walking into town for dinner. We quickly discovered that things shut down pretty early in town and there’s nowhere to get a meal past about 10pm. So we sat at a local brewpub called Wet Dog Cafe (part of Astoria Brewing) and had chips and salsa and tried a couple of their brews. The only really bad part was that the place had what they called ‘club night’, so it cost us $3 to get in and hear really terrible music from a cd changer. Oh well.

Saturday we drove to Fort Stevens State Park where my parents happened to be camping the same weekend, so we visited with them for a while before heading to the Buoy 10 Brewfest in Hammond, which was a pretty fun time. There weren’t too many different beers there (32 total, most of which I’d had) but there were a few really excellent ones that I’d never had before such as Pike’s Naughty Nelly’s Ale and Racoon Lodge’s Ring Tail Pale Ale. And both the weather and view were great, there was a tent and outdoor area with a great view of the Columbia River (and Astoria in the distance).

That evening Kelly and I had a very nice meal at Baked Alaska, which sits on the pier. Kelly and I sat outside on the deck and watched a magnificant sunset (seen in the photo above) and shared three crab dishes; crab cakes, dungeness crab fettucini, and Alaskan king crab legs with butter. Yum!

On Sunday we walked back down to town for the craft fair before driving up to (and then climbing the 164 steps) of the Astor Column. The photo to the left, taken from the top of the column, is of Astoria, showing the mouth of the Columbia River looking out towards the Pacific Ocean, and Washington (the dark land mass you see to the upper right). Another spectacular day, and a great weekend. 

Had some friends over tonight for a BBQ over this 4th of July weekend. Since I was given a reprieve from work today, and have tomorrow off, today is sort of like Saturday part 3. Hooray!

After spending several hours in the heat yesterday working on the yard I took it pretty easy today, not doing very much but picking up my buddy Ghost Dog and running to the Beer Heaven of Portland (also known as John’s Marketplace) to pick up some unusual and imported beers for the night. I love the place, the store has racks divided by country, German, English, Belgian, Polish, Russian, etc. The beer selection is something to marvel at. I do wish there was a bigger British beer selection, but the store can only get what is imported and distributed to Portland, so what can they do?

The BBQ was a blast; cooked loads of meats, drank loads of beers (including some porter that our friend Miranda brought from Laurelwood Brewery, which is delicious), and had a fantastic time.

Man, what a crazy month. I know, my posts have become a great deal less frequent. I sort of knew that would happen once I started my new job at SuperSweetCo, though it’s been extra crazy due to the fact that I started the job in the midst of a big software release. That has meant that I have spent pretty much every bit of my computing energy working on it and ignoring my blogging duties. Shame on me. 🙂

Tonight the company celebrated the launch of the project I was involved in, and took everybody out to local pubs and such for drinks. My wife joined me and we had a fantastic time. Afterwards we met up with our good friend Ghost Dog for his birthday at Rose & Thistle for a while before we moved on to Moon & Sixpence.

K and I just got home a little while ago, and we had a wonderful  Overal it’s been a craxy month, but really great.

For those of you who don’t live in the Portland Oregon area, it’s hot here right now. Really hot. Really Really hot. The past few weeks have been a bit cool and damp (upper 60’s to low 70’s, with rain here and there) but yesterday and today it shot up to 100+. I don’t care for extreme heat like this, and I never really have. I sort of figure that when it’s cold you can always bundle up. But when it’s this hot you can’t take enough off to make a dent. Urgh. Fortunately the heat wave is supposed to be on it’s way out, dropping to 80 by Thursday. Whew!

Today I spent the day getting the photos from the recent trip posted to the photos site. Check ’em out!

Since returning from the trip last week and having a couple final days of not working, I’ve begun my new job. It’s been really good so far, except that starting Sunday I came down with a horrible cold, so for the first week of my new job I’ve been a coughy, snotty, achy, sweaty mess. It’s finally starting to fade a bit, but I fear this one will hang on for a great deal longer than I’d prefer. Oh well, it’s almost Friday already. 🙂

Kelly and I returned from our trip last night. We had a fantastic time, and it both felt like a long and short trip. I both wanted to stay longer and wanted to get home as I was heading to Gatwick airport yesterday morning. 🙂

Since my last post, Kelly and I left York (Sunday, May 28) and drove south / south-east to Canterbury. We arrived about mid-afternoon, and after driving in circles through the maze of the town we found our hotel, and had time to check out the massive Canterbury Cathedral. The town itself (at least, the old part) reminded Kelly and I of York, only on a much smaller scale. It has a charming main street (High Street), with quite a few shops, pubs and restaurants. We could have easily spent another day here, but up until two nights before we left home we weren’t even planning on coming to Canterbury at all. We’re both glad we did and would like to go back someday.

After leaving Canterbury (this would have been Monday morning) we drove about 30 minutes south-east to view the magnificent White Cliffs of Dover. If the weather hadn’t have been so poor (it would pour down rain, and then get sunny for brief periods) I’d have loved to walk out further than we did, but as it was the trails were muddy (this pale clay like mud from the chalky ground) so we only walked a short distance. We did get some great photos though. After spending some time at the white cliffs we drove on to Brighton. The weather was nice as we got into town and found our hotel with little trouble. The hotel was just off the waterfront, and just around the corner from the Brighton Palace Pier, and walkable to the Brighton Pavilion and an area known as "The Lanes" which are filled with shopping, restaurants, and of course, pubs. We both relaxed yesterday and got our bags packed ready so we could leave early yesterday morning for Gatwick airport.

The flight to Newark was good and the 6 hours 40 minutes went pretty quick. After a couple hours wait in Newark we boarded the flight for home, and as the plane got out on the runway the pilot announced that due to a thunderstorm brewing off to the west we would have to wait a bit. Well, we ended up waiting nearly 2 hours, in the plane, before finally taking off. The thunderstorm from the sky however was really impressive… large masses of white and grey and black clouds all in different layers, and frequent lighting bolts inside. We arrived in Portland at about 10:30pm, and got home after 11:00pm (thanks to our friend Miranda who picked us up), unpacked a bit and had a great sleep in our own bed again.

That’s it for now. I’m working on getting photos copied off of my iPod so I can sort through them all. Hopefully I’ll get a page built for the trip and posted to my photos site shortly. 

Well, we’ve been in York for the past couple days now, and it’s really a wonderful city. Beautiful, ancient, and fun. The York Minster (the big cathedral in the city) is amazing, and you can walk along the medieval city walls around the city. It’s been a lot of fun, and the weather hasn’t been bad either (cloudy, but not very wet).

Tomorrow we head south to Canterbury and then on to Brighton. Can’t believe we’ve been here for nearly two weeks already. Anyway, hopefully more to come from Brighton before the long flight home.

Been in Edinburgh for the past few days, and met up with my brother and sister-in-law as planned. Been having a good time, though it’s been pretty wet and rainy here (and cold! guess it’s been unseasonably cold the past couple days than it normally would be, figures).

Since I last wrote we’ve been all over. We never made it to Land’s End like I’d hoped, the time to get there and the weather were against us. After leaving our ‘second home’ with our friends Jo and David we spent a couple nights in Bath. It’s a great place, but driving into it was rough, got turned around a lot and there’s very few road signs telling you what street you’re on. The Roman Baths are very cool though, well worth seeing. After we left Bath we drove north to Bowness-on-Windermere, which was a very nice change from Bath. Very nice lakeside town, bigger than we’d expected, but much more relaxing than Bath.

Since being in Edinburgh we’ve toured the castle and St. Giles cathedral, as well as driven north to Stirling to tour Stirling Castle, and for me, the most important thing, we went to Doune Castle, the castle that was used pretty heavily in the Monty Python film, Holy Grail. I was excited to go anyway, but wasn’t expecting the castle to be as cool as it was. Much bigger than I’d thought, and not full of people so it felt like you were on your own exploring the place.

Today is Kelly’s birthday (Happy Birthday!!!) and she’s out with our sister-in-law shopping, while my brother drools over swords in this sword shop up the street. Tonight we’re all going to go out for the last time before my brother and sister-in-law leave for Austria, and Kelly and I head south to York.

Hope to write again from York.

Been in England now for the past two days, and it’s been wonderful. We got in yesterday at 7:30am UK time (so just before midnight Sunday) and have done quite a bit so far.

The flight to Newark, NJ wasn’t too bad, and while there we got to meet up with our friends Sean and Charmian for all of a half hour during our layover. Once we got onboard the next plane we we knew we’d be happy… when we booked our flights with Continental we were given an option of choosing our seats. We chose the last row, to the far right, which means unlike the rest of coach, we there were only two seats. With nobody behind us we didn’t have to worry about putting the seats back and leaving them there. The only problem with that flight was that somebody decided at the last second they had to leave the plane, which meant a 30 minute delay while the airport sent people to rummage through the luggage hold for the persons luggage. Since that delayed our takeoff we were put at the end of the line of jets, 14 in front of us, which resulted in another 30 minute wait. Oh well, the flight itself was fine.

We got here and wandered through the maze that is Gatwick airport to get to our car rental pickup and get our car. Thankfully I’d driven in Ireland so it wasn’t too jolting to be on the other side of the car and road, and we got on our way. Got stuck in some bad Monday morning traffic jams on one of the big motorways that go all the way around Londong (the M25), but finally reached our exit and after another hour or so made it to Stonehenge, which was really pretty impressive to see.

After that we drove another couple hours to our friends (Joanna and David) house in the town of Newton Abbot. Spent the past couple of days with them, letting them show us around this part of England, which is very pretty and it’s be a lot of fun seeing them again. They’ve been taking us to really great (and small, off the beaten path) pubs, and today we went to the city of Exeter. We wandered around most of the afternoon and got to see the big cathedral. Tonight we had dinner at what was a farmhouse built in 1437 and is now a very nice hotel and restaurant called Sampsons. Very charming old building with a thatched roof and thick wood beams, and a very good menu.

Tomorrow we’re considering a 3 hour drive to Land’s End, though from what we’ve been told it’s not that impressive, so we’re not quite sure what we’ll end up doing tomorrow. Anyway, that’s all for now, more to come I’m sure.