chopstick goes for a sail
10-29-2014
, 08:04 PM
Quote:
I thought I understood what the phrase "curse like a sailor" meant before, but it wasn't until that tuna escaped right off the deck only to fall into the mouth of that shark that I had my zen moment of awakening and attained full "curse like a sailor" understanding. The ocean actually turned black for about 6 meters in all directions around me, such was my stream of profanity.
So, so tilting.
So, so tilting.
In Washington Crab traps MUST be red/white. They are pretty easy to spot.
Was one of the words you uttered "Gaff"?!?
11-03-2014
, 02:12 PM
11-03-2014
, 06:01 PM
11-20-2014
, 04:12 PM
Arrived in DC about a week ago, the around the world without a plane thing is now officially complete. How lucky!
I'll be in DC through the end of December, with a possible sailing trip thrown in there for a week or two. Then it's off to Vegas again on Jan 1, most likely for the first three months of 2015. Then sailing from Panama to French Polynesia if I find a sailboat I want to be on.
But enough of the future, let's pick up where we left off, which was in Milan.
After spending the afternoon in Milan, I headed over to the train station and took one of the regional trains up to Stresa. Stresa is a small town up in the mountains on the coast of Lake Maggiore which is an enormous lake that stradles the northern part of Italy and the southern part of Switzerland. It's a popular vacation spot for euros:
and you can see why. Lakes up in the mountains are pretty sweet.
A friend of mine lives near Stresa, so we went out for dinner after I arrived. This was the first time I recall seeing horse on a menu, though I'm sure I must have seen it in France at some point:
One of the highlights of the region is a little island in the lake named Isola Bella. You can take a ferry to it, which I did. Here's a photo on approach:
Not really my thing, as I tend to avoid most tourist attractions due to the number of people that show up. The island has a tiny village (left side of photo) with a tiny castle and some enormous gardens (right side). They did have some pretty cool little walkways in the village:
some disturbing art (this was a tapestry) in the castle:
(otter vs some kind of eel? who knows?)
and some wonderful flowers in the gardens:
The flowers and the garden were my favorite areas. That photo doesn't really do the flowers justice. They were lush and all over the place. There was also a peacock just kind of wandering around the grounds.
I'll be in DC through the end of December, with a possible sailing trip thrown in there for a week or two. Then it's off to Vegas again on Jan 1, most likely for the first three months of 2015. Then sailing from Panama to French Polynesia if I find a sailboat I want to be on.
But enough of the future, let's pick up where we left off, which was in Milan.
After spending the afternoon in Milan, I headed over to the train station and took one of the regional trains up to Stresa. Stresa is a small town up in the mountains on the coast of Lake Maggiore which is an enormous lake that stradles the northern part of Italy and the southern part of Switzerland. It's a popular vacation spot for euros:
and you can see why. Lakes up in the mountains are pretty sweet.
A friend of mine lives near Stresa, so we went out for dinner after I arrived. This was the first time I recall seeing horse on a menu, though I'm sure I must have seen it in France at some point:
One of the highlights of the region is a little island in the lake named Isola Bella. You can take a ferry to it, which I did. Here's a photo on approach:
Not really my thing, as I tend to avoid most tourist attractions due to the number of people that show up. The island has a tiny village (left side of photo) with a tiny castle and some enormous gardens (right side). They did have some pretty cool little walkways in the village:
some disturbing art (this was a tapestry) in the castle:
(otter vs some kind of eel? who knows?)
and some wonderful flowers in the gardens:
The flowers and the garden were my favorite areas. That photo doesn't really do the flowers justice. They were lush and all over the place. There was also a peacock just kind of wandering around the grounds.
11-20-2014
, 04:28 PM
After exploring the Stresa area for a day or so, mostly walking around the lake, it was time to move on to Geneva. I'd always wanted to go there strictly to play the enormous life size chess sets in the parks I had read about. That probably sounds like a pretty silly reason to want to go to Geneva, but it was probably 80% of my motivation.
The train ride from Stresa to Geneva was great. Unfortunately, the windows in the train were pretty terrible, and so it was almost impossible to capture what it was like to travel through the Alps. Imagine tons of tunnels, rugged cliffs, grape fields, and little villages. Also lots of old stone buildings that must have been part of tiny villages at some point, but have long since been abandoned to time and are slowly crumbling to dust. Here's the best photo I was able to take:
It doesn't really capture the ruggedness of the landscape, damn those train windows.
I had picked a hotel in the center of the city near the train station, so it was only a short walk away. When I saw that Geneva has these:
I immediately decided I would like Geneva. I'm not much of a bicyclist but I love when cities have dedicated bicycle lanes. Dedicated bicycle traffic signals are even better!
The street art was also pretty solid:
and of course since I was in Switzerland I had to eat cheese fondue:
This fondue is real fondue, much different than the Americanized version. This one was very, very heavy on the wine. So much so that I didn't really like it that much, as I'm not much for wine. Glad I tried it, but I won't need to order it again.
There were different kinds of street performers around the city. This guy was my favorite:
Yes, those are tiny little cows.
Eventually I made my way to one of the parks with the chess sets:
They have more than just chess, there were lots of checker sets as well. The boards are painted into the asphalt, and the pieces are all heavy duty plastic. The pieces were a little smaller than I was expecting, and I was surprised that the bases were not weighted down with sand or anything, they were just hollow thick plastic.
I wasn't sure about the how the etiquette worked, so I just set up an empty board and stood behind the black side until someone showed up. Played two games with a 1-0-1 result. The draw was due to the 6 year old opponent needing to go. He assured me that I was going to be crushed if he was allowed to stick around, but accepted a draw instead of a forfeit. The win was over a UAE guy who wanted a rematch after a tense even game quickly turned into a bloodbath due to me flipping the unbridled aggression switch when we were stalling out. I declined and retired undefeated!
The train ride from Stresa to Geneva was great. Unfortunately, the windows in the train were pretty terrible, and so it was almost impossible to capture what it was like to travel through the Alps. Imagine tons of tunnels, rugged cliffs, grape fields, and little villages. Also lots of old stone buildings that must have been part of tiny villages at some point, but have long since been abandoned to time and are slowly crumbling to dust. Here's the best photo I was able to take:
It doesn't really capture the ruggedness of the landscape, damn those train windows.
I had picked a hotel in the center of the city near the train station, so it was only a short walk away. When I saw that Geneva has these:
I immediately decided I would like Geneva. I'm not much of a bicyclist but I love when cities have dedicated bicycle lanes. Dedicated bicycle traffic signals are even better!
The street art was also pretty solid:
and of course since I was in Switzerland I had to eat cheese fondue:
This fondue is real fondue, much different than the Americanized version. This one was very, very heavy on the wine. So much so that I didn't really like it that much, as I'm not much for wine. Glad I tried it, but I won't need to order it again.
There were different kinds of street performers around the city. This guy was my favorite:
Yes, those are tiny little cows.
Eventually I made my way to one of the parks with the chess sets:
They have more than just chess, there were lots of checker sets as well. The boards are painted into the asphalt, and the pieces are all heavy duty plastic. The pieces were a little smaller than I was expecting, and I was surprised that the bases were not weighted down with sand or anything, they were just hollow thick plastic.
I wasn't sure about the how the etiquette worked, so I just set up an empty board and stood behind the black side until someone showed up. Played two games with a 1-0-1 result. The draw was due to the 6 year old opponent needing to go. He assured me that I was going to be crushed if he was allowed to stick around, but accepted a draw instead of a forfeit. The win was over a UAE guy who wanted a rematch after a tense even game quickly turned into a bloodbath due to me flipping the unbridled aggression switch when we were stalling out. I declined and retired undefeated!
11-21-2014
, 06:33 PM
Glad you guys are still enjoying this. As long as I keep doing things or going places that I think you may find interesting, I'll keep updating the thread. Will probably skip over the Vegas stuff like I did while living there earlier this year, but if I find a boat heading to French Polynesia in the spring, you can be sure there will be some updates from that adventure. Also if I do another 1 or 2 week sail to the Caribbean in December.
Geneva was a lot of fun, but I needed to move on so I could get to the UK and get my Chinese and Russian visas, so after a hotel breakfast that included a full kiwi:
it was time to hop on the high speed TGV train from Geneva to Paris. This was the TGV Lyria:
I've been on TGV trains before, and Shinkansens as well, but it's always a blast to ride these things. The Lyria tops out at about 300km/hour so while it's difficult to take photos through the windows and have them remain in focus, it's a cool experience to be move that fast in such a stable vessel.
We arrived at Gare Lyon, which is one of the major Paris train stations, and I immediately took a photo of this vending machine:
because I don't think I'd ever seen a pay-with-SMS vending machine. Where am I, Japan? Living in the future is great.
I had decided to take the bus from Paris to London because it was about 25% of the cost of a train due to my not buying a ticket earlier. It used to be that the train ticket prices never really changed but now they follow the airline model of gouging last minute travelers.
This meant I had a little time to kill in Paris, so I went to the grocery store and picked up some supplies while taking some photos of interesting stuff:
and settled down in a random Paris park to enjoy some croissants and some French yogurt. French yogurt is not like American yogurt. It is infinitely better. It comes in glass containers:
and has a ton of whatever fruit you selected in the bottom. This was a raspberry one. I don't know how to describe the difference, but it's both taste and texture. I almost never eat American yogurt because it's usually pretty blah. I'd eat French yogurt all the time if I had consistent access to it. The yogurt texture is significantly smoother, and the taste is much creamier. The fruit is also actual fruit, instead of whatever the fake fruit mush is that we get in the States.
If you get the opportunity, I recommend it.
So I spent the afternoon walking between various parks, some of which were connected via these sweet overpass walkways:
and enjoying my croissants and yogurt.
Geneva was a lot of fun, but I needed to move on so I could get to the UK and get my Chinese and Russian visas, so after a hotel breakfast that included a full kiwi:
it was time to hop on the high speed TGV train from Geneva to Paris. This was the TGV Lyria:
I've been on TGV trains before, and Shinkansens as well, but it's always a blast to ride these things. The Lyria tops out at about 300km/hour so while it's difficult to take photos through the windows and have them remain in focus, it's a cool experience to be move that fast in such a stable vessel.
We arrived at Gare Lyon, which is one of the major Paris train stations, and I immediately took a photo of this vending machine:
because I don't think I'd ever seen a pay-with-SMS vending machine. Where am I, Japan? Living in the future is great.
I had decided to take the bus from Paris to London because it was about 25% of the cost of a train due to my not buying a ticket earlier. It used to be that the train ticket prices never really changed but now they follow the airline model of gouging last minute travelers.
This meant I had a little time to kill in Paris, so I went to the grocery store and picked up some supplies while taking some photos of interesting stuff:
and settled down in a random Paris park to enjoy some croissants and some French yogurt. French yogurt is not like American yogurt. It is infinitely better. It comes in glass containers:
and has a ton of whatever fruit you selected in the bottom. This was a raspberry one. I don't know how to describe the difference, but it's both taste and texture. I almost never eat American yogurt because it's usually pretty blah. I'd eat French yogurt all the time if I had consistent access to it. The yogurt texture is significantly smoother, and the taste is much creamier. The fruit is also actual fruit, instead of whatever the fake fruit mush is that we get in the States.
If you get the opportunity, I recommend it.
So I spent the afternoon walking between various parks, some of which were connected via these sweet overpass walkways:
and enjoying my croissants and yogurt.
11-21-2014
, 06:44 PM
One of the other neat things about Paris is that there are a fair amount of designated charging stations for electric vehicles:
I got a kick out of the graphic they use on the asphalt. I guess adding the cord to the plug makes it even more obvious.
A few hours of wandering Paris gardens, and it was time to head back to the train station to pick up my bags from the left luggage locker:
which was about 8 euros or something like that for 4 hours, and head to the bus station a few blocks away. Found another movie poster:
which I haven't compared to the US version, but seems like it wouldn't be that different. The name is still the same, so it's no American Nightmare.
The bus I was on was the same company I used to get from Marseille to Milan, IDBus:
and lucky me, this time there would be no Italy transit, so the wifi was pretty stable the entire ride to London. The downside was that this bus was completely full, so I had a seatmate the entire time. On the plus side, I had a window seat and my seatmate was cool.
I liked that the sign at the bus stop differentiates gender not just by pants / dress, but also by short hair / ponytail:
I got a kick out of the graphic they use on the asphalt. I guess adding the cord to the plug makes it even more obvious.
A few hours of wandering Paris gardens, and it was time to head back to the train station to pick up my bags from the left luggage locker:
which was about 8 euros or something like that for 4 hours, and head to the bus station a few blocks away. Found another movie poster:
which I haven't compared to the US version, but seems like it wouldn't be that different. The name is still the same, so it's no American Nightmare.
The bus I was on was the same company I used to get from Marseille to Milan, IDBus:
and lucky me, this time there would be no Italy transit, so the wifi was pretty stable the entire ride to London. The downside was that this bus was completely full, so I had a seatmate the entire time. On the plus side, I had a window seat and my seatmate was cool.
I liked that the sign at the bus stop differentiates gender not just by pants / dress, but also by short hair / ponytail:
11-21-2014
, 06:53 PM
The bus is pretty comfortable. Not as nice as a train, but the seats are decent and you aren't really squished in there:
Pretty uneventful ride to London. We did have to get out at passport control when entering the UK:
and the lady grilled me pretty hard about why I was coming to the UK, how long I was going to be there, how was I going to support myself, etc. Seemed like the rest of bus was entirely euros and they shot through just with a flash of the passport. I always treat border control people super nicely but she was definitely pushing it. Maybe they are still mad we ran away from home.
The way the bus crosses the Chunnel is by entering a large train car and parking, then the train car moves across the Chunnel once it and the other train cars are full of smaller vehicles. They don't let you get out of the bus during transit:
but the inside of the train car is lit up, so it's pretty bright inside:
After we got to London proper, the bus took to the roads again and let us off next to Victoria station downtown:
which wasn't running any Underground service as it was something like 0430 when we arrived. I hung out in the station until the Underground started up around 0600 or so, and headed out to my hotel in NE London near the visa place. One thing I thought was hilarious was that Victoria Station has little painted lines on the ground showing you which direction to go for various things. If you've ever read the book Ender's Game, this is how the students find out where to go on the space station. That's the first thing I thought of when I looked down and saw these:
Pretty uneventful ride to London. We did have to get out at passport control when entering the UK:
and the lady grilled me pretty hard about why I was coming to the UK, how long I was going to be there, how was I going to support myself, etc. Seemed like the rest of bus was entirely euros and they shot through just with a flash of the passport. I always treat border control people super nicely but she was definitely pushing it. Maybe they are still mad we ran away from home.
The way the bus crosses the Chunnel is by entering a large train car and parking, then the train car moves across the Chunnel once it and the other train cars are full of smaller vehicles. They don't let you get out of the bus during transit:
but the inside of the train car is lit up, so it's pretty bright inside:
After we got to London proper, the bus took to the roads again and let us off next to Victoria station downtown:
which wasn't running any Underground service as it was something like 0430 when we arrived. I hung out in the station until the Underground started up around 0600 or so, and headed out to my hotel in NE London near the visa place. One thing I thought was hilarious was that Victoria Station has little painted lines on the ground showing you which direction to go for various things. If you've ever read the book Ender's Game, this is how the students find out where to go on the space station. That's the first thing I thought of when I looked down and saw these:
Great trip report as always.
11-23-2014
, 09:02 PM
Oh, and never can have too many Vegas updates, imo.
12-18-2014
, 05:47 PM
Will definitely being doing the charity rOOTlette thing again, that went really well. No planned date yet, most likely in late January or February.
Got back from the STT sail this weekend. Was a long one, ended up taking about 12 days and the third person dropped out the day of departure. That meant it was just two of us, which resulted in 4 hours on / 4 hours off shifts. Not sleeping for more than 3 hours at a time for almost two straight weeks sucks, I don't recommend it.
Anyway, let's make another dent in the trip report. When we last left our hero, it was after arriving in London at 0430 from Paris on the bus at Victoria station.
I was surprised that Victoria station was so empty:
and that the Underground wasn't running. For some reason I thought that the Underground was 24 hours. Since it wasn't, I settled down to wait, then caught the first train out:
The place I had decided to stay the night was near the place I was getting my visas processed, north of the city center. It was just off Seven Sisters Road, also near what I assume is the home of the Arsenal Club:
Not being the slighted interested in sports I'm not playing myself, the novelty of this was entirely lost on me. Took a photo anyway as I know a lot of people go nuts over that kind of thing. There were a lot of Arsenal vendors and Arsenal-focused mini-shops around the tube entrance.
Of far more interest to me was the existence of pay toilets:
I've seen these before in other parts of Europe. They are all over the Netherlands. They exist in the USA, but are pretty rare, thanks to the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America. If you haven't seen one, it's exactly what you are thinking - a toilet that costs a small amount of money to use. You put some coins in, the door unlocks, and you take care of your business. That one costs 10 pence, which is about 16 cents.
Having been to London a few times, I wasn't expecting to be surprised by anything, but I either never noticed the plethora of fried chicken places, or there's been a recent surge. It seemed like everywhere I went, there was a fried chicken place somewhere on the street:
with most of them advertising "American style" fried chicken as a specialty. That one above was also selling kebabs. There was another one directly across the street selling the same stuff. Have these places always been there and I just never noticed them? They were literally on every street I walked down.
Got back from the STT sail this weekend. Was a long one, ended up taking about 12 days and the third person dropped out the day of departure. That meant it was just two of us, which resulted in 4 hours on / 4 hours off shifts. Not sleeping for more than 3 hours at a time for almost two straight weeks sucks, I don't recommend it.
Anyway, let's make another dent in the trip report. When we last left our hero, it was after arriving in London at 0430 from Paris on the bus at Victoria station.
I was surprised that Victoria station was so empty:
and that the Underground wasn't running. For some reason I thought that the Underground was 24 hours. Since it wasn't, I settled down to wait, then caught the first train out:
The place I had decided to stay the night was near the place I was getting my visas processed, north of the city center. It was just off Seven Sisters Road, also near what I assume is the home of the Arsenal Club:
Not being the slighted interested in sports I'm not playing myself, the novelty of this was entirely lost on me. Took a photo anyway as I know a lot of people go nuts over that kind of thing. There were a lot of Arsenal vendors and Arsenal-focused mini-shops around the tube entrance.
Of far more interest to me was the existence of pay toilets:
I've seen these before in other parts of Europe. They are all over the Netherlands. They exist in the USA, but are pretty rare, thanks to the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America. If you haven't seen one, it's exactly what you are thinking - a toilet that costs a small amount of money to use. You put some coins in, the door unlocks, and you take care of your business. That one costs 10 pence, which is about 16 cents.
Having been to London a few times, I wasn't expecting to be surprised by anything, but I either never noticed the plethora of fried chicken places, or there's been a recent surge. It seemed like everywhere I went, there was a fried chicken place somewhere on the street:
with most of them advertising "American style" fried chicken as a specialty. That one above was also selling kebabs. There was another one directly across the street selling the same stuff. Have these places always been there and I just never noticed them? They were literally on every street I walked down.
12-18-2014
, 06:04 PM
Staying in the Finsbury Park / Seven Sisters area was OK. The area has a large middle eastern population, so there were kebab places everywhere. That was great, because I love kebab and hate almost all regular English food. The area also had some cool artwork, both on the shops for functional purposes:
as well as just art for art's sake:
Note the size of the door there to get an idea how huge that bird was.
Speaking of English food:
special vegetarian breakfast indeed.
While I ended up staying in the area a couple of days, I bounced between a few different hotels. One was a hostel/hotel with pretty tiny rooms. I don't care about stuff like how large the room is, but this one was like living in a doll house. Only spent a single night there. Here's the sink, complete with measurements:
That's right, 6 inches. I think the shower was 28 inches square. It was almost like a cartoon. I'm not picky about stuff like this, so I found it more amusing than inconveniencing.
Kebabs weren't the only thing I ate. Here's the one English food I enjoy:
Picked that up from a little neighborhood joint a few doors down from the hotel. They had a large selection of pies as well, including both kidney and steak & ale. I've had steak & ale pie before. Kidney pie does not sound appealing. Wolfed this down with some cider from a Sainsbury's, after discovering that they sell cider in 2 liter bottles as well as 24 pack cases. There's even a Stella Artois cider!
as well as just art for art's sake:
Note the size of the door there to get an idea how huge that bird was.
Speaking of English food:
special vegetarian breakfast indeed.
While I ended up staying in the area a couple of days, I bounced between a few different hotels. One was a hostel/hotel with pretty tiny rooms. I don't care about stuff like how large the room is, but this one was like living in a doll house. Only spent a single night there. Here's the sink, complete with measurements:
That's right, 6 inches. I think the shower was 28 inches square. It was almost like a cartoon. I'm not picky about stuff like this, so I found it more amusing than inconveniencing.
Kebabs weren't the only thing I ate. Here's the one English food I enjoy:
Picked that up from a little neighborhood joint a few doors down from the hotel. They had a large selection of pies as well, including both kidney and steak & ale. I've had steak & ale pie before. Kidney pie does not sound appealing. Wolfed this down with some cider from a Sainsbury's, after discovering that they sell cider in 2 liter bottles as well as 24 pack cases. There's even a Stella Artois cider!
12-18-2014
, 06:55 PM
After a day or two of chilling out in London, I headed over to the agency that does the visa processing. They also sell tickets for most of the Russian trains, so I decided to buy my tickets through them as well. There's a markup of about 20% for doing it that way, but it's a lot tougher to buy them directly when you don't speak Russian and because of the way that train ticket sales work in Russia. What happens is that the Russian railroad system allows the travel agencies to buy tickets before the general public for the most popular routes, and the agencies buy almost all of these tickets way in advance in order to resell them at a higher price. I didn't want to mess around with getting stuck somewhere, so I decided to buy through an agent.
Went over to the agent's office one afternoon, filled out a bunch of forms and finalized my itinerary, then handed over my passport. Scheduling was a bit of an issue as I had to buy the tickets for specific dates, as well as fill out visa information indicating specific dates of exit/entry. For the Chinese visa, they wanted specific dates and specific locations where I'd be staying every single night. The Russian visa was much less restrictive, though they did have a form just for Americans to fill out. There was a visa requirement for Belarus that I purchase Belarussian health insurance, even though I already have worldwide health insurance and was going to be in Belarus for all of about 8 hours or so. Just another money grab. Luckily there was no visa needed for Mongolia.
After lining up the itinerary, buying the tickets, and paying for the visa processing, I handed over my passport and had a few weeks to kill, despite expediting 2 of the 3 visa processing requests. London is not one of my favored cities, so I decided to get out of it. Didn't really have a plan other than not being in London, so I headed out to Heathrow, rented a car (manual, steering wheel on right hand side), and started driving west.
Having lived in St Thomas for a while, I was completely OK with driving on the other side of the road. What I wasn't used to was having the steering wheel on the other side. I spent about two weeks opening the passenger side door to get in, never really got used to that. Also went through more roundabouts in the first 48 hours than I've gone through total in my entire life. There are roundabouts everywhere in England. I was kind of ambivalent about them before, but now I'm a full convert. They are super efficient. Driving stick was also fine. I prefer automatic for convenience, but have no problem with stick. It's almost impossible to find a manual when you rent in the USA, but once you go outside, it's the opposite.
England does have one major redeeming factor - they love cider and it is very popular all over the SW. This is great for me, because I'm not a beer drinker, but love cider. A little bit of research convinced me that the proper way to kill a few weeks stuck in England would be to drive around the SW countryside visiting cider farms and putting a dent in the English cider supply.
My first stop was somewhere in Somerset at a place named Lilley's Cider Barn:
Each of those boxes has a bag of cider inside. You buy a plastic jug, then fill it with the cider of your choice.
Here are the jugs:
There were many like it, but this one was mine:
The 7.5 indicates the % alcohol level. Ciders are a lot stronger in England than the crappy sugary stuff in the USA.
So yeah, basically I just drove around for a few weeks drinking cider and exploring the English coastlines and countryside. I steadily accumulated a lot of those plastic jugs. Mostly stayed at B&Bs, and had a wide assortment of the various Full English Breakfast options:
That's a pretty standard one. The scrambled egg was the only non-standard part, most of them were sunny side up, which goes with the theme of runny English food. The mushrooms were consistently the best part of any of the iterations.
Some of the cider farms like Lilley's were pretty decent joints. Some of them were just little rooms behind a barn on someone's farm:
Why yes, I will ring that bell, thank you.
The universal constant among all of these farms was that you bought a little plastic jug and filled it. Some places allowed mixing & matching. All of them allowed tasting. I tasted a lot of ciders. Usually it was just me and maybe one or two other customers. These places get a lot of regulars. I got to talking with one, and showed him a cider map I had picked up that included a few dozen cider farms. He spent about 15 minutes providing some guidance on which were worth going to and which I should skip. There were also a bunch that weren't on the map that I found just by driving around and seeing little signs that said "cider" with an arrow pointing down a road.
Went over to the agent's office one afternoon, filled out a bunch of forms and finalized my itinerary, then handed over my passport. Scheduling was a bit of an issue as I had to buy the tickets for specific dates, as well as fill out visa information indicating specific dates of exit/entry. For the Chinese visa, they wanted specific dates and specific locations where I'd be staying every single night. The Russian visa was much less restrictive, though they did have a form just for Americans to fill out. There was a visa requirement for Belarus that I purchase Belarussian health insurance, even though I already have worldwide health insurance and was going to be in Belarus for all of about 8 hours or so. Just another money grab. Luckily there was no visa needed for Mongolia.
After lining up the itinerary, buying the tickets, and paying for the visa processing, I handed over my passport and had a few weeks to kill, despite expediting 2 of the 3 visa processing requests. London is not one of my favored cities, so I decided to get out of it. Didn't really have a plan other than not being in London, so I headed out to Heathrow, rented a car (manual, steering wheel on right hand side), and started driving west.
Having lived in St Thomas for a while, I was completely OK with driving on the other side of the road. What I wasn't used to was having the steering wheel on the other side. I spent about two weeks opening the passenger side door to get in, never really got used to that. Also went through more roundabouts in the first 48 hours than I've gone through total in my entire life. There are roundabouts everywhere in England. I was kind of ambivalent about them before, but now I'm a full convert. They are super efficient. Driving stick was also fine. I prefer automatic for convenience, but have no problem with stick. It's almost impossible to find a manual when you rent in the USA, but once you go outside, it's the opposite.
England does have one major redeeming factor - they love cider and it is very popular all over the SW. This is great for me, because I'm not a beer drinker, but love cider. A little bit of research convinced me that the proper way to kill a few weeks stuck in England would be to drive around the SW countryside visiting cider farms and putting a dent in the English cider supply.
My first stop was somewhere in Somerset at a place named Lilley's Cider Barn:
Each of those boxes has a bag of cider inside. You buy a plastic jug, then fill it with the cider of your choice.
Here are the jugs:
There were many like it, but this one was mine:
The 7.5 indicates the % alcohol level. Ciders are a lot stronger in England than the crappy sugary stuff in the USA.
So yeah, basically I just drove around for a few weeks drinking cider and exploring the English coastlines and countryside. I steadily accumulated a lot of those plastic jugs. Mostly stayed at B&Bs, and had a wide assortment of the various Full English Breakfast options:
That's a pretty standard one. The scrambled egg was the only non-standard part, most of them were sunny side up, which goes with the theme of runny English food. The mushrooms were consistently the best part of any of the iterations.
Some of the cider farms like Lilley's were pretty decent joints. Some of them were just little rooms behind a barn on someone's farm:
Why yes, I will ring that bell, thank you.
The universal constant among all of these farms was that you bought a little plastic jug and filled it. Some places allowed mixing & matching. All of them allowed tasting. I tasted a lot of ciders. Usually it was just me and maybe one or two other customers. These places get a lot of regulars. I got to talking with one, and showed him a cider map I had picked up that included a few dozen cider farms. He spent about 15 minutes providing some guidance on which were worth going to and which I should skip. There were also a bunch that weren't on the map that I found just by driving around and seeing little signs that said "cider" with an arrow pointing down a road.