Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

While in Dublin, we stayed at StayCity Serviced Apparents, so I thought I would share my thoughts on them.

When I originally tried to book online with Laterooms, it told me they had run out of available rooms and I had to call the Laterooms call centre. I did, and they confirmed there were no more rooms available, but suggested they could book me in at another StayCity just a few minutes away – and offer that I accepted.

Having turned up at said location, I was then told that we had actually been put in the original location. They were very nice about it and put is in a free taxi to the original location, where we found they had allocated a two bedroom apartment to us (couldn’t make use of it though as Elina insisted on sleeping in the same bed).

It was a bit run down, but when the serviced apartments I have to compare against it are Warwick and Oxford, you probably can’t expect the same standards. I can’t help but feel they were falling a little too much into stereotypes though by not providing any tall glasses, yet providing several types of wine glasses.

It was rather cold at first too as they had most of the windows opened when we arrived, so it took a while to warm up (and was never overly warm). It was also rather nosier than I was expecting when it came to trying to sleep.

The location was fantastic though – it was literally over the river from Temple Bar, so for the price and location, it still comes up as a good deal. Their wifi was good too. You do need a pass per device, but I had no problem streaming high-quality video.

To make the most of the bank holiday weekend, we headed over to Dublin. Despite having been all round Europe, I had never been to Ireland, so it seemed like good choice for somewhere to visit.

While there we made it round the Tall Ship Festival, Trinity College and the Book of Kells, Christ Church, Dublin Castle, the Wax Museum and the National Library. Unfortunately, we didn’t make it to the National Museum or Natural History Museum as they are closed on Mondays (it wasn’t a bank holiday in Ireland).

We also took in the nightlife at Temple Bar with a few different restaurants and pubs around that area, as well as the street artists. We eventually settled in at really cool place named the Bison Bar that had saddles for stools and bison and dear heads on the walls, as well as a superb range of whiskey (not that I benefited from such a collection).

Best moment? Definitely meeting SpongeBob at the wax museum!

It’s a great city, and well worth a visit, though given it has a flight time comparable with Paris, and I found Paris more beautiful and about the same price, I think I would opt to head back to the continent for a short break.

Now that I am self employed, I hate holidays. It’s fine to say, well I budget for that in my earnings, but when it actually comes to taking time off and doing the maths surrounding it, it’s very hard to make that decision.

Therefore, given I was forced to take a four day weekend for the Jubilee, we decided to fit in a cheeky trip to Finland to go see Elina’s family.

As if I didn’t hate flying enough, it turns out Finnair were running a new programme trial in which instead of feeding us, they didn’t feed us. Rubbish,

I had previous met her mum who provided us with a warm welcome and some amazing cooking. Indeed, she cooked so much that we ended up having beef and chicken for breakfast the next day too! I’m hoping it will become the new traditional Finnish breakfast.

It’s a really beautiful country and not called the land of a thousand lakes without good reason.

We had to drive through quite a bit of forest to get to the lakes. No wonder Finland produces so many rally drivers, it was ace.

On Monday we went to Turku, one of the larger cities where Elina went to university. It was mostly full of sex shops that offered live shows and a river that you would never want to drink from, but was nice never the less.

Then, in the evening, we travelled up north to Rauma so we could eat at a restaurant that served reindeer steak.

It was a lovely traditional restaurant, and the food was excellent.

After a long day of adventuring, Moomintroll was very tired.

Thank you so much to Elina’s mum and brother who put us up for the three days.

As a belated Valentine’s Day present, I recently took Elina to Paris for four days. We took a plane there.

Needless to say, it was incredibly stressful, but once you put aise the horror of travelling it was a fantastic place to be – these two extremes balance the entire trip out to an average response of “it was ok.”

Also, my “translator” girlfriend, refused to speak to anyone on the trip, so I had to do all the talking, despite not speaking a word of French for over a decade. Another lie in her backstory is revealed. But anyway…

Paris is a gorgeous city. We were fairly central – just five minutes walk from Notre Dame Cathedral, so we spent our nights walking the banks of the Senn and listening to groups of jazz musicians freestyle by the river. Not that you have to be central – the beautiful buildings seem to go on for miles and miles, all in the same Parisian style.

We got the open top bus tour tickets that they sell everywhere Рeven Leeds Рso we could just hop on and off, allowing us to work our way round the Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower, Place de la Concorde and do some shopping on the Champs Elys̩es as well as seeing the Louvre, Notre Dame Cathedral and the Panthelon, which were all only a short walk away.

I wasn’t expecting a great deal from our hotel room given my experiences in other capitols, but it turns out we had got one of their “executive suites” (LateRooms FTW) so it turned out to be massive, with an en suite that was bigger than entire hotel rooms I have stayed in in London, and a balcony overlooking the streets below.

I was also shocked at how cheap it was to eat out – the restaurants in the Latin quarter offer three course meals for €10 and there was more food than I could eat! On the last night I treated myself to the €15 menu (which is still half what I would expect to pay in Leeds!) and had an amazing duck in orange sauce (or a Canard a l’orange if you will) as well as snails, muselles and some beautiful desserts.

Earlier this month, I was invited to a wedding reception over in York. Due to the medication I’m on, I can’t drink, so I figured the most convenient thing to do was drive over. I didn’t want to arrive dead on 7:30 in case nobody else turned up at that time, so I decided to set off at 7:15, allowing 45 minutes to drive there, get parked and find the venue, thereby arriving a fashionable 30 minutes after the start time.

So I set off at 7:15 and got as far as the roundabout by the big Tesco when I ran into road works which had closed off the A64 entirely, so I followed a badly sign posted diversion route which took me up to Weatherby Road.

They seemed to disappear at this point so I kept driving as far as village which I believe was called Cottingham, at which point my sat nav finally provided me a route which was something other than make a U-turn and head back to the A64.

This involved joining the A1, and heading back down the motorway towards Leeds until I got back to the A1/A64 junction. By now I was massively behind schedule but I thought hey ho, at least I’m now on a dual carriageway all the way to York.

So I carried on down the A64, and suddenly saw a bunch of cars with their hazard lights on ahead of me. Next thing I know both lanes have come to a standstill and I can see some flashing emergency lights up ahead of me.

Apparently someone had been run over.

After being sat there for a while with an increasing feeling that I was going to be trapped on the A64 all night, the traffic eventually started to move again as a police officer started directing cars to take it in turns to make a U-turn and drive the wrong way down an on-ramp to the A64 which lead us into a village that was either near, or was, Weatherby.

By this point I had been on the road for almost two hours and didn’t really know what roads there were into York without the A64, so I just gave it up as a bad job and gave up. That meant that not only had I missed my friend’s wedding reception, but I was also now forced to buy dinner from McDonald’s because I had missed out on the buffet. Is there some kind of compensation fund I can claim that back from?

Last Tuesday, I headed down to Nottingham to present a talk to Nottingham Skeptics in the Pub.

Nottingham seems to be a lot like Leeds – a reasonable sized city with a confusing one-way system running through the middle and a few gems hidden away inside it, such as our venue, Fellows Morton and Clayton, a traditional Victorian pub, with a traditional Victorian fruit machine by the door.

I got down there in plenty of time to grab some food beforehand (and because you never know with the M1) and found the place easily enough. The food was OK, the grilled chicken was excellent though the ribs were somewhat disappointing. However, given the last time I had ribs was at Cattle Grid, my standards are probably simply still tuned too high.

I also met Andy, who runs the group and is an absolutely lovely guy. He also works with computers so we managed to squeeze in a few minutes of geek talk before the event!

The talk itself went pretty well, at least from my perspective lol, and I hope the audience enjoyed it too. I think the questions and discussions afterwards lasted until nearly 10pm, which from a 7:30pm start is quite a lot of discussion.

In general, I think the talk was well received by the audience. They certainly weren’t as critical as when I spoke to Hull Humanists – not that I didn’t very much enjoy the tough questions I took there!

In general, a really enjoyable evening and a big thanks to Andy for inviting me down.

With the BHA Reception to welcome in new president A. C. Grayling taking place at a very convenient time to converge with mine and Elina’s six month anniversary, I decided to take a trip down to the capitol with her.

We got down there with only a slight delay and met up with Phillip and Linda from West London Humanists who are amazing people who have a lot of great ideas for community projects. They have a great vision for making a difference and I’m hoping I can help them develop their ideas based on what has and hasn’t worked for us in Leeds.

Afterwards, we wandered down to the National Gallery which was fantastic of course though it was a mission to find any paintings not about Jesus or some other religious subject matter. Luckily the Dutch artists finally came to the rescue, and there is currently an excellent exhibit on Swiss and Norwegian artists there too!

In the evening we met up with James and grabbed some dinner at a nice place called Canal 125. The food was good though I don’t think the salad I had turned out to be a light option after all once I had eaten all the dressing, cheese and chicken lol.

The hotel we stayed at was the Thistle City Barbican. It was mediocre, especially for the £150 we paid for it, and despite getting a family room we actually got three single beds and with Norm not having joined us after injuring his ankle, we ended up paying for three beds and only using one of them.

On the Saturday we headed over to the Natural History Museum which is always enjoyable though I’ve done a lot of it now (and yet I still go back even though I’ve never been to the Victoria & Albert Museum lol) and includes exhibits such as rocks and cooking pans that I’ve never seen before.

I would have liked to have had more time there as we didn’t get there until mid-afternoon, having spent out time walking over and stopping for lunch at Las Iguanas on the South Bank. That was very nice but it was directly under the Waterloo bridge rail track, so made for noisy intervals.

All in all we did around 13 miles walking, which is only half that of the Yorkshire Three Peaks Challenge! Still a good bit of exercise though.

We decided to take advantage of the long weekend by heading over to the beach. Flamborough seemed like a suitable choice because, given we’re in the UK, it seems a bit silly to go to a sandy beach to do some sunbathing when all you will get is wind and cold.

The drive over wasn’t too bad – most people seemed to be heading home from the weekend, so most of the traffic was going the other way. We got some sun in the morning but unfortunately, the tide times had changed quite a lot since I checked them a few days before, which I didn’t account for, so we arrived at exactly high tide.

Never the less, after a walk round the headland and some lunch we got down to the beach where we found a seal in one of the corners. Afterward we walked back round the headline, which was a good chance to get some photos.

I recently headed over to Hull to present a talk to Hull & East Riding Humanists.

The journey was reasonable, I was pretty starving by the time I got there but the only place I could find to eat was a Little Chef so I ended up going hungry 😉 . Having arrived with an hour to spare, I decided to have a look round Hull. Turns out some parts of it are quite nice.

The talk was fairly well received, there was a good mix of skeptics and believers though I perhaps didn’t answer the critics well enough – there was nothing suggested that wasn’t pre-answered by Kurzweil or De Gray and that perhaps prevented us from discussing the criticisms which actually do stand up in more depth. Still I found it a very much enjoyable talk to give.

The venue was the Plotting Room of Ye Olde White Hearte which is apparently where the English Civil War was started. It’s a hard act to follow to be honest, I feel a bit of a let down after I found that out.

Last weekend, we hit Edinburgh as part of Weekend Away 2010. It’s been several years since I’ve been to the city so it was great to see it once again and despite the snowy weather, our train was only delayed half an hour each way, which while arguably appalling in many places is a relative victory in Britain.

On the Friday evening we joined the Edinburgh University Humanist Society to watch the Blair Hitchens debate live. It was most entertaining, despite Tony Blair not bringing any arguments to the table though it was shocking to see how withered Christopher Hitchens now looks.

Saturday saw us take a look round Edinburgh Castle which was free entry (win), followed by some shopping and then heading our for a few drinks in the evening. We started the evening with dinner at Biblos which delivered probably the best steak I’ve had from a non-steak dedicated restaurant and then headed to Frankenstein but Angry Tom was all angry about the music so we ended up at a rock bar which while failing to live up to it’s early promise of Taking Back Sunday, delivered relatively good music.

Sunday saw us take in the National Gallery of Scotland and the National Museum of Scotland, both of which were great but as the museum was closing early because of the weather conditions (apparently they’re not prepared for snow in Scotland) we only got an hour in there. Finally we went round the Christmas Market before heading home.