Back to classes. I had a nasty shock today when I learned that I have 17 weeks till my final exams, not 27, as I thought. I don't know why, but I naively thought there were 27 weeks until the first week in June, but that's calendarically imposible.
The local library has closed and with it our access to DVD's (I know there's a blockbuster somewhere in town, but it's not convenient). And Grace and I have no TV, so there's sometimes not a lot to do. . . Anyway, we signed up to rent DVD's through Amazon.com, which apparently you can do in the UK. We get six a month for 10 pounds. That's about the right amount. As I type this Grace is watching Jane Eyre (with William Hurt as Mr. Rochester). We don't have a TV, so we haven't paid for a TV License, which is a 100+ pound annual tax you pay if you have a TV (the money subsidizes the fine programming on the BBC). Anyway, we've been getting increasingly threatening letters from the government. Now an inspector is going to come around and see that we really don't have a TV. I've called before to tell them we don't have one, but it seems to have gotten lost in the bureaucracy.
One of our friend's mom is a fraud inspector, but not with TV licenses. There's a lot of ways to try and cheat the system here and a lot of people try to do so, say by pretending to be single when they really have a partner. Apparently our friend's mom is amazing at catching people and generally being really quick on her feet.
Grace and I are heading down to London this weekend to go to a friend of our's party. The following weekend is my birthday, so get ready for that. And one of our friends is obsessed with going surfing some weekend down on the coast (with wetsuits). And the economics people want to go to Paris on the tenth of March. So, that's the plan for now.
And tonight, another radio show. This week, introducing the blood brothers.
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Radio Show Tonight
Mixtape radio is tonight from 11 pm to 1 am! Go to cur1350's website and click on listen now! If you're in the Iowa, we're on from 5-7 pm.
Also, we had some snow today, but it all melted before ten. I'm back in the swing of classes and I'm working a lot now. That's all for now.
Also, we had some snow today, but it all melted before ten. I'm back in the swing of classes and I'm working a lot now. That's all for now.
Thursday, January 18, 2007
The Peak District
At long last, the tale of Grace and I's trip to the Peak District last weekend. There's great photos but since I lost the camera cord, you can't see them yet. I divided the post up into parts for your enjoyment.
I. An Introduction to the Peak District
What is the Peak District, you ask? It's a national park full of big big hills (but not mountains - but they were 400 vertical meters from the valley floor). Named for the ancient tribes who previously lived there (not for the peaks of the . . . hills), it is the second most visited national park in the world, according to my guidebook. Fortunately Grace and I were going in January, which is not the peak season (ha ha ha!). It's sort of in the middle of Great Britain. Farthest North we've been in the UK thusfar.
II. Whereupon Matt and Grace Journey to their Hostel in the Peak District
Friday morning I packed up while Grace got herself a root canal. I had a topographical map in a plastic bag, a compass, an emergency headlamp that I bought the day before (in case we were stranded in the night), gaiters (waterproof things that go over your shoes and cover your shins), a first aid kit and a guide to hill walking. Plus some food and an ipod and clothes.
We left from Cambridge train station around three o'clock and went up to Peterborough (50 minutes). When they came to check out tickets we realized Grace had forgotten her "Young Persons Railcard," which lets us travel for a cheaper rate. But they didn't ask to see it, so we were in the clear. At Peterborough we switched trains for one bound for Doncaster. The first train to come through was totally full and they wouldn't let anyone on board. The second we got on, but we had to stand. It was about 70 minutes to Doncaster. There we switched again and caught a train to Sheffield (30 minutes?). At Sheffield we had some time to kill before our final train, a little one out to the village of Edale. At the station I called our hostel and asked if there was going to be someone there to pick us up at the train station (when I booked the hostel they had said there might be).
Not tonight though. We were advised to walk - through the car park, go left, then right at a crossroads, then a half hour along the road. Eventually we would see a white sign for the drive up to the hostel. It was a good thing we called when we did, because once the train entered the Peak district there was no cell phone reception.
Around 7:15 we departed on a little train, just two cars. Several stops later we were in Edale.
It was night, and lightly raining and we were deep in the countryside so there were no lights up. It was really, really dark. Right off the bat we couldn't find the car park which we were supposed to go through. The train station was just a concrete platform and a little shelter. We followed a path down the road, but there was nothing ahead or behind us to indicate the existence of a parking lot so we went back to the train station. We found a sign pointing to the car park, but couldn't actually find the park. Everyone was parting ways and we decided to follow a big family (how many hostels could there possibly be out here?).
We had to pull out the emergency head light almost instantly and Grace wore it. The family turned off the road into some other hostel so now we were on our own. We pulled out the map and the compass and plotted a course to the hostel that involved going left then right at a crossroads, as we had been instructed.
In the dark we could only really see as far as the light went, which was about 25 feet. It was a strange sense of both open space and being really closed in, since we were unable to get any wider sense of where we were and where the roads were going. Well, we turned right at the crossroads and we were on muddy wheel tracks rather than a proper road. This quickly turned into a wet, muddy footpath through fields. But we did know where we were. The map was correct about the placement of fences, and we passed a farm on schedule. Eventually we got into a tiny village, really just a clusture of inns around a farm. Our course passed through that though and we were back in farm fields. We saw signs warning that there were bulls in the field, but we didn't see anything.
At this point I was having a lot of trouble keeping on my feet. Grace had the light and so I was feeling things out with my feet but the ground was a mix of really slick grass and mud. Before long I had fallen and caught myself with my hands, though they landed in mud and were filthy from then on.
And we had a small problem. We were supposed to catch a path that veered to the right, but we weren't seeing it. We saw a set of muddy wheel tracks that went off to the right but since the light only went 25 feet we weren't sure they were actually a path, or just the farmer's tractor marks. We investigated and I tried to avoid walking in the mud tracks, so I walked along the grass instead. But this was up a hill and when I turned around my feet went out from under me and I landed on my hands and butt and legs in the mud. The map also went flying off into the night.
The map got snagged on a fence though so we were allright. And Grace's lighted investigation of the wheel tracks revealed they just went in a circle. And I was coated in mud now, and this was my only pair of pants. We took a close look at the map and turned off the path onto a gravel road that connected with the main road through the valley. We followed that road (realizing later that this is what we had been meant to do - we would have gone this way if we had found the car park) and stumbled up to the hostel after an hour in the darkness.
No eyebrows were raised about me being covered mud. It's probably pretty normal in the Peak District. We checked in and I did laundry (1 pair of jeans).
That night we pulled out the enormous map and plotted an ambitious route for the next day. Most long walks we take are 8-10 miles, but we usually have to bike or take a bus somewhere first. Since we would be starting and finishing at the hostel I aimed for 12-15 miles, with several hundred vertical meters of travel thrown in for good measure. We would go across the fields we tried to negotiate at night and follow a river up to the top of a really big hill. We would walk along the top of the hill for a few miles (it was more like a hill-range), descend into the valley, follow a roman road to the other side of the valley and summit two big hills on the other side before heading back in for the night. A little too ambitious, it turned out.
III. Whereupon Grace and Matt realize they are not as good at Hill-walking as Matt thought
We left on our walk around 10 the next day after a hearty breakfast at the hostel dining room. Cutting across the fields I fell again and got my leather gloves filthy with mud. Why would I wear leather gloves?! It was stupid (plus, I'm a vegetarian!).
The walk was really good at the beginning. The landscape was much more dramatic than Cambridgeshire, which is sort of peaceful and idyllic. Here we were surrounded by a landscape that dwarfed us. We passed through farmers' fields full of grazing sheep (walking is so historic in the UK that you can cut through private property as long as you stay on the legal path). We went into a quaint village and over delightful little stone bridges.
Already I could tell we were not as extreme as the other people here. Everyone else had walking poles and waterproof pants, plus much bigger camping backpacks. And we were passed by everyone (we only passed one group all weekend and they were sitting down to eat after having passed us earlier).
Things got considerably harsher and less quaint. Going up the hill the path changed from a stone path to a dirt path to picking our way through rocks next to the stream. We had to spend a lot of time figuring out where to put our feet next. We had to use our hands more and more. The wind started to roar and the fine misty rain came in and out. Grey clouds moved fast over the top of the hills.
After about an hour and a half we had walked a few kilometers and gained perhaps 120 meters. We stopped to rest and eat before tackling the final section of the hill which went 80 meters up over, perhaps 250 meters. We used our hands all the time now to lean forward and crawl up the rocks which now dominated the terrain. The higher we got though, the better the view and there was no civilization in sight now, just this dramatic landscape of dark muted greens and browns.
We reached the top and a trio of people in skin tight athletic clothes scrambled up after us. Once they were on the top of the hill they took off running. They looked like the joggers you see in Iowa City, but they were out in this dramatic landscape that I had brought a first aid kit, map and compass for. For them this was just a little weekend exercise or something.
Anyway we had quite good views from up here and we walked off on a path following the edge of the hill. We stopped once to look at some big boulders that I thought looked like they were some kind of stone-henge-ish thing. Anyway, I started to get a little worried up here. It was coming on 1 o'clock and the sun sets around 4:30 in the UK winter. We should have been over halfway done by now and we were not even a fourth of the way through. On top of that I got a little spooked when I couldn't find a path that should have joined us at our right and then a fence appeared which wasn't on the map. It was obvious now we wouldn't get the whole route done today but I was worried we would be able to do the first half of it. It was a long way to the end of this hill top and then we would have to descend and get back to the hostel. I thought we would be hard-pressed to finish by nightfall.
And it was really windy and cold on top the hill (it was January, after all). And we kept getting passed by people. And then, coming the other way was a family of people who had brought their little dog with them. They had no gear, they were wearing tennis shoes and for them this was like a walk in the woods.
So we arrived at a juncture. It was 1:45 and we could take a side path straight down the hill and back to the hostel, or we could shoot for the other end of the hill and and walk back around the valley. There weren't any paths in between the two ways. We erred on the side of caution and came down the quick path.
I fell in those muddy fields a few more times, again landing on my butt. We realized my old hiking boots had a nice smooth sole from four years of use. No treads for me.
When we got back an hour later Grace took a nap and I hung out reading. We ate at the Hostel again (not wanting to walk the half hour to the nearest pub) and hung out in the lounge reading and playing boggle over some Hoegarden beer. Went to bed early so we could get one more walk in before we left.
IV. Wherein Grace and Matt have a generally pleasant walk
The next day we set our sights much more humbly. We would do one of the two hills we were going to summit yesterday and take the 2:50 train out of the Peak district. Grace was pretty tired but we made good time this time. The winds today were even stronger than they had been the day before though. There was a particularly frightening part where we walked along the edge of ridge and up a natural stone staircase. The wind was so powerful that we had to keep low and pause to brace against the gusts. The top was a great view, but windier than all get out. The descent was on the slick grass and mud I had grown to hate, but there were just enough rocks in the landscape for me to stay generally upright even with the harrowing wind. I did fall at one point, but only planted one of my knees in the mud.
After the hill the rest of the walk was really nice through English countryside and farms. There was a little dog that barked at us a lot and we illegally slogged through a muddy field to take a shortcut to a quicker path. We sank to our ankles in that mud.
Anyway, except for the fact that Grace had to use the bathroom for the last two hours of the walk, it was a good way to finish off the day. It was much sunnier too, and didn't rain at all.
V. Whereupon Grace and Matt's trip home is some kind of Joke
Once again the mini-bus to the train station was a no go so Grace and I walked there (this time on the road - no more muddy fields for me). We showed up a few minutes before the train left and got on to the platform. There was a train on the other-side and Grace warned me that the kids in the other train were tapping on the glass to get our attention, so I should ignore them. The tapping didn't stop and they opened the windows to yell at us - "That track is broken! This is the train!"
We hurried over to the other platform and dashed onto the train with minutes till the train was due to depart.
But we were sitting there in the station for twenty minutes before an announcement came on: "We apologize for the delay. We're just waiting for the driver. We should depart in 20 minutes."
After a half hour there wasn't a second announcement: "We apologize for the delay again. We are just waiting on the driver and we've been in contact with control. We should be departing within 10 minutes."
That was the last announcement we heard before 4:30 (after we had been on the train 100 minutes past it's scheduled departure). At 4:30 they apologized again and told us this train was going to become the 4:50 train, and the 2:50 service was cancelled.
At 4:55 we left (no explanation for the driver's absence). It was night by then, and our hope of a nice train ride through the Peak district was spoiled by night. Also we had missed the train we wanted by an hour or two in Sheffield. So, instead we had to take a train to Doncaster were we could switch for Cambridge. I figured we would be in by nine or so.
Anyway, on the train to Doncaster the coach master came around to check our tickets. We gave him ours and he asked to see our Young Person's Railcard. As you may recall, Grace had forgotten hers. We told him and I showed him mine. It turned out that I didn't have mine either - what I thought was the young persons railcard was actually just a photo ID they issued with it (stupid system). So we were travelling illegally.
The kindly guy just wrote on our tickets that we were invalid so we wouldn't be able to go further without fixing things up in Doncaster. This was instead of charging us each £50 each, so that was nice I guess.
At Doncaster we had to upgrade our tickets to pay the non-discounted rate (£17 each). There was no way to get a better price without our cards present. And we had to take a totally garbage route home. She wrote it out for us because it was prety complicated.
Train from Doncaster to Newark.
Bus from Newark to Grantham.
Train from Grantham to Peterborough.
Different train from Peterborough to Ely.
Different train from Ely to Cambridge.
We would get in at 11:30 or so. Each leg of the trip was under 40 minutes long. We just had so many lay-overs, the one at Peterborough over an hour in the cold.
Well, what can you say? For about an hour I was furious but eventually I was just tired. The bus from Newark to Grantham was ridiculous. The whole train had to get off and walk to the end of the platform, down a ramp, across the tracks, and wait in a big crowd (a lot of the crowd stuck on the tracks - ha ha for them!). Anyway they crammed us onto this bus with 70 seats - three on one side, two on the other. The seats were too narrow for me, and I'm not exactly a wide guy. I had this foreign couple next to me (about six inches from my face, but across the aisle still) and they were having a really loud argument in French (I recognized some words - thanks Basic French 1!). At one point the man punched his the palm of his hand really loudly for some reason.
At Peterborough Grace bought some crisps (or, Chips, in American) and some crazy drugged out woman walked over to her and stuck her hand out and in a childlike, loopy voice asked, "Can I have crisp please?" Grace gave her one and she walked off, but not before stopping and ecstatically shrieking while shuddering. Grace was interested in the crisps after that ("they probably have traces of opiates now" she said), but eventually she got hungry again and ate them anyway.
Also, they cancelled our train from Peterborough to Ely which was quite a surprise. It was on the board, but it wouldn't list the platform and I went looking for it. Eventually I found out it was cancelled and when I came back it shortly disappeared from the board.
Fortunately a half hour later a train straight to Cambridge showed up. We jumped on board and took a taxi home where we quickly went to bed.
The end.
I. An Introduction to the Peak District
What is the Peak District, you ask? It's a national park full of big big hills (but not mountains - but they were 400 vertical meters from the valley floor). Named for the ancient tribes who previously lived there (not for the peaks of the . . . hills), it is the second most visited national park in the world, according to my guidebook. Fortunately Grace and I were going in January, which is not the peak season (ha ha ha!). It's sort of in the middle of Great Britain. Farthest North we've been in the UK thusfar.
II. Whereupon Matt and Grace Journey to their Hostel in the Peak District
Friday morning I packed up while Grace got herself a root canal. I had a topographical map in a plastic bag, a compass, an emergency headlamp that I bought the day before (in case we were stranded in the night), gaiters (waterproof things that go over your shoes and cover your shins), a first aid kit and a guide to hill walking. Plus some food and an ipod and clothes.
We left from Cambridge train station around three o'clock and went up to Peterborough (50 minutes). When they came to check out tickets we realized Grace had forgotten her "Young Persons Railcard," which lets us travel for a cheaper rate. But they didn't ask to see it, so we were in the clear. At Peterborough we switched trains for one bound for Doncaster. The first train to come through was totally full and they wouldn't let anyone on board. The second we got on, but we had to stand. It was about 70 minutes to Doncaster. There we switched again and caught a train to Sheffield (30 minutes?). At Sheffield we had some time to kill before our final train, a little one out to the village of Edale. At the station I called our hostel and asked if there was going to be someone there to pick us up at the train station (when I booked the hostel they had said there might be).
Not tonight though. We were advised to walk - through the car park, go left, then right at a crossroads, then a half hour along the road. Eventually we would see a white sign for the drive up to the hostel. It was a good thing we called when we did, because once the train entered the Peak district there was no cell phone reception.
Around 7:15 we departed on a little train, just two cars. Several stops later we were in Edale.
It was night, and lightly raining and we were deep in the countryside so there were no lights up. It was really, really dark. Right off the bat we couldn't find the car park which we were supposed to go through. The train station was just a concrete platform and a little shelter. We followed a path down the road, but there was nothing ahead or behind us to indicate the existence of a parking lot so we went back to the train station. We found a sign pointing to the car park, but couldn't actually find the park. Everyone was parting ways and we decided to follow a big family (how many hostels could there possibly be out here?).
We had to pull out the emergency head light almost instantly and Grace wore it. The family turned off the road into some other hostel so now we were on our own. We pulled out the map and the compass and plotted a course to the hostel that involved going left then right at a crossroads, as we had been instructed.
In the dark we could only really see as far as the light went, which was about 25 feet. It was a strange sense of both open space and being really closed in, since we were unable to get any wider sense of where we were and where the roads were going. Well, we turned right at the crossroads and we were on muddy wheel tracks rather than a proper road. This quickly turned into a wet, muddy footpath through fields. But we did know where we were. The map was correct about the placement of fences, and we passed a farm on schedule. Eventually we got into a tiny village, really just a clusture of inns around a farm. Our course passed through that though and we were back in farm fields. We saw signs warning that there were bulls in the field, but we didn't see anything.
At this point I was having a lot of trouble keeping on my feet. Grace had the light and so I was feeling things out with my feet but the ground was a mix of really slick grass and mud. Before long I had fallen and caught myself with my hands, though they landed in mud and were filthy from then on.
And we had a small problem. We were supposed to catch a path that veered to the right, but we weren't seeing it. We saw a set of muddy wheel tracks that went off to the right but since the light only went 25 feet we weren't sure they were actually a path, or just the farmer's tractor marks. We investigated and I tried to avoid walking in the mud tracks, so I walked along the grass instead. But this was up a hill and when I turned around my feet went out from under me and I landed on my hands and butt and legs in the mud. The map also went flying off into the night.
The map got snagged on a fence though so we were allright. And Grace's lighted investigation of the wheel tracks revealed they just went in a circle. And I was coated in mud now, and this was my only pair of pants. We took a close look at the map and turned off the path onto a gravel road that connected with the main road through the valley. We followed that road (realizing later that this is what we had been meant to do - we would have gone this way if we had found the car park) and stumbled up to the hostel after an hour in the darkness.
No eyebrows were raised about me being covered mud. It's probably pretty normal in the Peak District. We checked in and I did laundry (1 pair of jeans).
That night we pulled out the enormous map and plotted an ambitious route for the next day. Most long walks we take are 8-10 miles, but we usually have to bike or take a bus somewhere first. Since we would be starting and finishing at the hostel I aimed for 12-15 miles, with several hundred vertical meters of travel thrown in for good measure. We would go across the fields we tried to negotiate at night and follow a river up to the top of a really big hill. We would walk along the top of the hill for a few miles (it was more like a hill-range), descend into the valley, follow a roman road to the other side of the valley and summit two big hills on the other side before heading back in for the night. A little too ambitious, it turned out.
III. Whereupon Grace and Matt realize they are not as good at Hill-walking as Matt thought
We left on our walk around 10 the next day after a hearty breakfast at the hostel dining room. Cutting across the fields I fell again and got my leather gloves filthy with mud. Why would I wear leather gloves?! It was stupid (plus, I'm a vegetarian!).
The walk was really good at the beginning. The landscape was much more dramatic than Cambridgeshire, which is sort of peaceful and idyllic. Here we were surrounded by a landscape that dwarfed us. We passed through farmers' fields full of grazing sheep (walking is so historic in the UK that you can cut through private property as long as you stay on the legal path). We went into a quaint village and over delightful little stone bridges.
Already I could tell we were not as extreme as the other people here. Everyone else had walking poles and waterproof pants, plus much bigger camping backpacks. And we were passed by everyone (we only passed one group all weekend and they were sitting down to eat after having passed us earlier).
Things got considerably harsher and less quaint. Going up the hill the path changed from a stone path to a dirt path to picking our way through rocks next to the stream. We had to spend a lot of time figuring out where to put our feet next. We had to use our hands more and more. The wind started to roar and the fine misty rain came in and out. Grey clouds moved fast over the top of the hills.
After about an hour and a half we had walked a few kilometers and gained perhaps 120 meters. We stopped to rest and eat before tackling the final section of the hill which went 80 meters up over, perhaps 250 meters. We used our hands all the time now to lean forward and crawl up the rocks which now dominated the terrain. The higher we got though, the better the view and there was no civilization in sight now, just this dramatic landscape of dark muted greens and browns.
We reached the top and a trio of people in skin tight athletic clothes scrambled up after us. Once they were on the top of the hill they took off running. They looked like the joggers you see in Iowa City, but they were out in this dramatic landscape that I had brought a first aid kit, map and compass for. For them this was just a little weekend exercise or something.
Anyway we had quite good views from up here and we walked off on a path following the edge of the hill. We stopped once to look at some big boulders that I thought looked like they were some kind of stone-henge-ish thing. Anyway, I started to get a little worried up here. It was coming on 1 o'clock and the sun sets around 4:30 in the UK winter. We should have been over halfway done by now and we were not even a fourth of the way through. On top of that I got a little spooked when I couldn't find a path that should have joined us at our right and then a fence appeared which wasn't on the map. It was obvious now we wouldn't get the whole route done today but I was worried we would be able to do the first half of it. It was a long way to the end of this hill top and then we would have to descend and get back to the hostel. I thought we would be hard-pressed to finish by nightfall.
And it was really windy and cold on top the hill (it was January, after all). And we kept getting passed by people. And then, coming the other way was a family of people who had brought their little dog with them. They had no gear, they were wearing tennis shoes and for them this was like a walk in the woods.
So we arrived at a juncture. It was 1:45 and we could take a side path straight down the hill and back to the hostel, or we could shoot for the other end of the hill and and walk back around the valley. There weren't any paths in between the two ways. We erred on the side of caution and came down the quick path.
I fell in those muddy fields a few more times, again landing on my butt. We realized my old hiking boots had a nice smooth sole from four years of use. No treads for me.
When we got back an hour later Grace took a nap and I hung out reading. We ate at the Hostel again (not wanting to walk the half hour to the nearest pub) and hung out in the lounge reading and playing boggle over some Hoegarden beer. Went to bed early so we could get one more walk in before we left.
IV. Wherein Grace and Matt have a generally pleasant walk
The next day we set our sights much more humbly. We would do one of the two hills we were going to summit yesterday and take the 2:50 train out of the Peak district. Grace was pretty tired but we made good time this time. The winds today were even stronger than they had been the day before though. There was a particularly frightening part where we walked along the edge of ridge and up a natural stone staircase. The wind was so powerful that we had to keep low and pause to brace against the gusts. The top was a great view, but windier than all get out. The descent was on the slick grass and mud I had grown to hate, but there were just enough rocks in the landscape for me to stay generally upright even with the harrowing wind. I did fall at one point, but only planted one of my knees in the mud.
After the hill the rest of the walk was really nice through English countryside and farms. There was a little dog that barked at us a lot and we illegally slogged through a muddy field to take a shortcut to a quicker path. We sank to our ankles in that mud.
Anyway, except for the fact that Grace had to use the bathroom for the last two hours of the walk, it was a good way to finish off the day. It was much sunnier too, and didn't rain at all.
V. Whereupon Grace and Matt's trip home is some kind of Joke
Once again the mini-bus to the train station was a no go so Grace and I walked there (this time on the road - no more muddy fields for me). We showed up a few minutes before the train left and got on to the platform. There was a train on the other-side and Grace warned me that the kids in the other train were tapping on the glass to get our attention, so I should ignore them. The tapping didn't stop and they opened the windows to yell at us - "That track is broken! This is the train!"
We hurried over to the other platform and dashed onto the train with minutes till the train was due to depart.
But we were sitting there in the station for twenty minutes before an announcement came on: "We apologize for the delay. We're just waiting for the driver. We should depart in 20 minutes."
After a half hour there wasn't a second announcement: "We apologize for the delay again. We are just waiting on the driver and we've been in contact with control. We should be departing within 10 minutes."
That was the last announcement we heard before 4:30 (after we had been on the train 100 minutes past it's scheduled departure). At 4:30 they apologized again and told us this train was going to become the 4:50 train, and the 2:50 service was cancelled.
At 4:55 we left (no explanation for the driver's absence). It was night by then, and our hope of a nice train ride through the Peak district was spoiled by night. Also we had missed the train we wanted by an hour or two in Sheffield. So, instead we had to take a train to Doncaster were we could switch for Cambridge. I figured we would be in by nine or so.
Anyway, on the train to Doncaster the coach master came around to check our tickets. We gave him ours and he asked to see our Young Person's Railcard. As you may recall, Grace had forgotten hers. We told him and I showed him mine. It turned out that I didn't have mine either - what I thought was the young persons railcard was actually just a photo ID they issued with it (stupid system). So we were travelling illegally.
The kindly guy just wrote on our tickets that we were invalid so we wouldn't be able to go further without fixing things up in Doncaster. This was instead of charging us each £50 each, so that was nice I guess.
At Doncaster we had to upgrade our tickets to pay the non-discounted rate (£17 each). There was no way to get a better price without our cards present. And we had to take a totally garbage route home. She wrote it out for us because it was prety complicated.
Train from Doncaster to Newark.
Bus from Newark to Grantham.
Train from Grantham to Peterborough.
Different train from Peterborough to Ely.
Different train from Ely to Cambridge.
We would get in at 11:30 or so. Each leg of the trip was under 40 minutes long. We just had so many lay-overs, the one at Peterborough over an hour in the cold.
Well, what can you say? For about an hour I was furious but eventually I was just tired. The bus from Newark to Grantham was ridiculous. The whole train had to get off and walk to the end of the platform, down a ramp, across the tracks, and wait in a big crowd (a lot of the crowd stuck on the tracks - ha ha for them!). Anyway they crammed us onto this bus with 70 seats - three on one side, two on the other. The seats were too narrow for me, and I'm not exactly a wide guy. I had this foreign couple next to me (about six inches from my face, but across the aisle still) and they were having a really loud argument in French (I recognized some words - thanks Basic French 1!). At one point the man punched his the palm of his hand really loudly for some reason.
At Peterborough Grace bought some crisps (or, Chips, in American) and some crazy drugged out woman walked over to her and stuck her hand out and in a childlike, loopy voice asked, "Can I have crisp please?" Grace gave her one and she walked off, but not before stopping and ecstatically shrieking while shuddering. Grace was interested in the crisps after that ("they probably have traces of opiates now" she said), but eventually she got hungry again and ate them anyway.
Also, they cancelled our train from Peterborough to Ely which was quite a surprise. It was on the board, but it wouldn't list the platform and I went looking for it. Eventually I found out it was cancelled and when I came back it shortly disappeared from the board.
Fortunately a half hour later a train straight to Cambridge showed up. We jumped on board and took a taxi home where we quickly went to bed.
The end.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Radio Show
Get ready!
I have a radio show. We're on from 11 pm to 1 am on Wednesday nights and we're called Mixtape Radio.
They have a webcast and, best yet, they archive all their shows for six weeks, so if you miss a show, or want to listen to it again, you can stream it from the website. To stream our pilot show, which we had to perform under the watchful eyes of the training head, go here and click on either hi or lo, next to the Mixtape radio show (from 11-12 on Friday the 12th).
Our first proper show is not tomorrow night, but the following Wednesday. Earlier I commented that I was really worried about the show because I hadn't been interviewed about my musical tastes. I suspected I was being hired to babysit a computer.
It turns out that's not the case - the radio station is just gloriously informal. It's in the basement of some people's house and they have a 1 watt transmitter, so must of their listenership comes from the webcast. The guy training us told us he doesn't care what we play and the 24 hour computer broadcast plays mainstream stuff like Fergalicious and Jerk it Out, so we don't even have to worry about Indie pretension if we want to slip in some mainstream stuff (finally, the opportunity to play Shakira!). We have the same restrictions on swear words as in KURE, which is that if someone complains and we get fined, the station goes bankrupt (they get even less funding than KURE!).
Equipment wise the station is both worse and better off than KURE. They've got two CD players that work fine, and a computer that lets you play bumps, beds and jingles. But there's only one record player, and it's busted. Our trainer didn't seem to know if the minidisc player or the tape decks worked, but he didn't think they did. They do have three microphones though. The strange thing is that the training head was really particular about proffesionalism on the radio. He insisted we use background music ("beds") while we chatted, that we go no more than two songs without talking, that we plan out what we were going to say, etc. He would say things like "Your sound levels were good there, but it didn't sound like you really wanted to be talking."
Anyway, like I said the show is on the web. If you want to listen live, and you live in the Central time zone, it'll be on from 5-7 pm on Wednesday afternoons. Naturally you can listen any time, since the shows are archived, but if you listen live a little webcam takes pictures of us in the studio and you can look at that. You can also send us emails with the little web player and complain about the show.
To listen live, go to cur1350's website and click on "Listen Now." To listen to an archived show, click on "Listen Again" and find our show in the schedule.
I have a radio show. We're on from 11 pm to 1 am on Wednesday nights and we're called Mixtape Radio.
They have a webcast and, best yet, they archive all their shows for six weeks, so if you miss a show, or want to listen to it again, you can stream it from the website. To stream our pilot show, which we had to perform under the watchful eyes of the training head, go here and click on either hi or lo, next to the Mixtape radio show (from 11-12 on Friday the 12th).
Our first proper show is not tomorrow night, but the following Wednesday. Earlier I commented that I was really worried about the show because I hadn't been interviewed about my musical tastes. I suspected I was being hired to babysit a computer.
It turns out that's not the case - the radio station is just gloriously informal. It's in the basement of some people's house and they have a 1 watt transmitter, so must of their listenership comes from the webcast. The guy training us told us he doesn't care what we play and the 24 hour computer broadcast plays mainstream stuff like Fergalicious and Jerk it Out, so we don't even have to worry about Indie pretension if we want to slip in some mainstream stuff (finally, the opportunity to play Shakira!). We have the same restrictions on swear words as in KURE, which is that if someone complains and we get fined, the station goes bankrupt (they get even less funding than KURE!).
Equipment wise the station is both worse and better off than KURE. They've got two CD players that work fine, and a computer that lets you play bumps, beds and jingles. But there's only one record player, and it's busted. Our trainer didn't seem to know if the minidisc player or the tape decks worked, but he didn't think they did. They do have three microphones though. The strange thing is that the training head was really particular about proffesionalism on the radio. He insisted we use background music ("beds") while we chatted, that we go no more than two songs without talking, that we plan out what we were going to say, etc. He would say things like "Your sound levels were good there, but it didn't sound like you really wanted to be talking."
Anyway, like I said the show is on the web. If you want to listen live, and you live in the Central time zone, it'll be on from 5-7 pm on Wednesday afternoons. Naturally you can listen any time, since the shows are archived, but if you listen live a little webcam takes pictures of us in the studio and you can look at that. You can also send us emails with the little web player and complain about the show.
To listen live, go to cur1350's website and click on "Listen Now." To listen to an archived show, click on "Listen Again" and find our show in the schedule.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
What's On
Grace is working all week and I'm supposed to be studying, but I'm finding it difficult. Grace is getting a root canal on Friday morning and then we're taking a train up to the Peak Distict, a big national park in the heart of England. We'll spend the weekend in a remote rural hostel and do some walking in the dramatic scenery.
I've been getting really into hill-walking, which is the proper name for this activity. I've got topographical maps, a compass and I'm learning me some navigation skills. This new interest is not making studying economics easier.
Our bikes have been ravaged by the weather and the chains turned brown from rust. For about a week I kept saying I would scrub them clean with a toothbrush (my brother left his here) and then grease them up. I never did it though and my transformer (not sure if that's what it's called - it's the thing on the back wheel that makes you shift) crumpled up one day. I took it to the Bike man and he installed a new one and cleaned the chain. So now the motivation to clean the chains is lessened and Grace still has an ugly brown chain.
We've been happily active though now that everyone is returning to town. Tonight I go to get trained for a radio show - stay tuned for more information. I'm actually really worried because there was no interview to get the gig, no form to fill out about my music tastes. I think those are clues that I'm signing up to be a glorified computer babysitter and I won't have any actual input. And that's a shame because there's so much music I want to play.
Anyway, if that's the case, I won't be finishing the training. But, if all goes well, I'll be co-DJing a show with a British friend of ours.
I've been getting really into hill-walking, which is the proper name for this activity. I've got topographical maps, a compass and I'm learning me some navigation skills. This new interest is not making studying economics easier.
Our bikes have been ravaged by the weather and the chains turned brown from rust. For about a week I kept saying I would scrub them clean with a toothbrush (my brother left his here) and then grease them up. I never did it though and my transformer (not sure if that's what it's called - it's the thing on the back wheel that makes you shift) crumpled up one day. I took it to the Bike man and he installed a new one and cleaned the chain. So now the motivation to clean the chains is lessened and Grace still has an ugly brown chain.
We've been happily active though now that everyone is returning to town. Tonight I go to get trained for a radio show - stay tuned for more information. I'm actually really worried because there was no interview to get the gig, no form to fill out about my music tastes. I think those are clues that I'm signing up to be a glorified computer babysitter and I won't have any actual input. And that's a shame because there's so much music I want to play.
Anyway, if that's the case, I won't be finishing the training. But, if all goes well, I'll be co-DJing a show with a British friend of ours.
Friday, January 05, 2007
We're Back
Preface:
This is a really long post about what Grace and I have been up to with my family. The first part is about London, the second about Paris and most of the last part is about trying to punt in Cambridge. In case you don't want to read it all, because it's long, there are pictures up at flickr. The relevant sets are "London with the Family" and "Paris with the Family."
Real Post:
After a frenetic eight days running around London, Paris and Cambridge with my family, Grace and I are settled back in at home. Grace is at work, and I've got under two weeks left in my vacation. I spent yesterday doing six loads of laundry and tackling the mountain of dishes.
Anyway, my family came over and we spent three days in London, three days in Paris, and one day in Cambridge, plus some days spent mostly traveling. First we went to London.
It was difficult for Grace and I to travel on Boxing Day (December 26th), since the trains were not running. Since my parents were arriving at 9 AM and we wanted to spend the 25th in Christmas, it was impossible for us to get to the airport for their arrival, as much as I love the idea of meeting at international arrivals gates. Anyway, we got a car to pick them up. It was the real deal, with a guy holding up a sign for Mr. Clancy and everything, which I think is great. Grace and I took a bus down to my parent's hotel. Because there was no traffic on Boxing Day we arrived early and were served tea in the lobby while we waited.
I was really stressed out during this time since there was no way for me to contact my parents and make sure things were going smoothly. Also, I had arranged both their hotel and the driver, so I was worried I might have screwed something up. But I didn't and they arrived and there were a lot of hugs. I hadn't seen them since September, and now that they're gone I won't be seeing them until August probably.
Our relatives in London had gone to the States for Christmas so Mike, Grace, Hannah and I were going to use their flat. We dropped the luggage off there while my parents took a nap and then went for a walk. Straight away, within an hour of my brother and sister's arrival we had the necessary pictures of them in red phone booths, next to stoic guards, and in front of Big Ben. There really wasn't much left to do after that, so we all went to some relatives house for an extended six hour tea/beer/dinner. It was a good chance for us to meet some relatives we hadn't before, and they told Grace and I to come and stay with them anytime we wanted to, which was really nice.
That took us into the night and all the weary travellers collapsed into bed.
The next day we got up relatively early and had some English Breakfast at a little cafe. We took the family on a walk to see Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park, and Harrods. We spent the afternoon in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Imperial War Museum. The Victoria and Albert Museum has a room full of enormous plaster casts of things like Michelangelo's David, Trajan's Column, the doors of Cathedrals and so forth. I was loving it, but my dad was unimpressed with the casts because none of them were originals.
The Imperial War Museum looked really interesting, but unfortunately, Grace and I were already tired of museums by then and didn't really give it our full attention. Maybe some other time. We did like a small exhibit about a messenger pigeon on D-Day that delivered an important message and was awarded the Animals' V-C award before later being accidently killed when it's trainer stepped on it.
It was dark by then, it being winter, and so we all went home, passing the lit up Houses of Parliament on the way. That night I advocated ice skating at Somerset house and around 9 o'clock we headed out. We walked for a half hour only to find it was totally sold out, until January 6th or so. So Mike, Grace and I went to a pub.
The next day was another busy one. We spent the morning at the Tower of London, which was pretty grisly. Lots of talk of executions, torture, and so on. But we did see the crown jewels which were pretty big, as you can imagine. But we weren't allowed to take photos, so you'll just have to go to the monarchy's website. The place was really crowded, since it was a holiday.
After the Tower Mike went for a run while we all went to St. Paul's Cathedral. Grace and I balked at the £8 entry fee and went to the free Tate Modern art museum instead. My mom, dad and sister paid their dues and really liked the cathedral. They walked 500 steps to the top of the enormous dome (second only to St. Peter's Basilica in Rome) for a nice view. After that they went shopping on Oxford street which sounds like a bit of a mistake. The place was completely packed with people since the January sales were in full swing and everyone was still on holiday. It was pretty claustrophobic and when Grace and I got done with the museum and went to Oxford Street ourselves we quickly left.
That evening my mom and dad and sister had tickets to go see Les Miserables at the Queen's Theatre. Mike, Grace and I had some Thai food and then decided, on a whim, to see if rush tickets were available for the show. We ended up getting standing room only seats for only £10. We did have to stand though, and the musical was probably three hours.
There's pictures of the london segment of the trip here.
So, on to Paris. We packed up for the trip the next morning. My mom wanted to get to the train station really early, but Grace and I negotiated us down to leaving for the station 90 minutes before the train left. Once we had left and were taking our luggage down the two stops on the tube we realized that we had been reading the wrong time on the tickets. It turned out we had 25 minutes till the train left, not 90 minutes.
Well, some panicked a bit. The tickets weren't exactly cheap around New Year's Eve. In classic fashion we ran through the terminal with our luggage, trying to make the train. My mom used the wrong ticket trying to get out of the tube and the exit machine kept reading "error." When she realized this and got the right ticket out, it blew out of her hand and she had to chase it down the station floor.
It was like Home Alone or something. We had seven minutes to catch our train when we cleared security. We were in car 16, which was a long way down the platform. So we ran again, the only people on the platform, everyone else sitting calmly in their seats with their books. We had to take our coats off to get through security and I forgot that I had put all the gift money from my grandparents in one of my pockets. As we were running the money wafted out into the air and my sister yelled out "Leave it!"
Well, we didn't leave the money and we made the train.
So, we arrived in Paris. Mike, Grace and I were sharing a small, cheap room in the Garden Hotel, while my parents and sister were sleeping in the lap of luxury at a fancy hotel near the Arc de Triomph. Our room was just that - a room, entirely taken up by two beds. A third bed for Mike had to be wheeled out from under one of the other two. There was just enough floor space for the three beds to exist along with our luggage. But the bathroom was pretty nice, although we were warned there was no hot water between 8:30 in the morning and 10:30 at night, due to the hotel being totally packed (one morning Mike got up early to take a shower only to find this was a lie! Ha ha ha!).
So the first night in Paris we had this great plan to go to the Louvre, since it was open late on Fridays. Unfortunately, half of Paris had the same idea and when we saw the line stretched around the courtyard we switched plans. Instead we walked along the Seine until we found a restaurant, which Grace and I had actually eaten at last time we were in Paris. It wasn't a great place then, but it was alright and it catered to tourists with it's bi-lingual menu. The notable thing about the restaurant is that it had Cheeseburgers, and Mike ordered one, and (ha ha ha!) it was tiny, like a meatball for a hamburger patty. The small size of the burger was not reflected in it's price.
After this meal we went to the Eiffel tower. Grace and I have been there before and we sort of hated it. Not the tower so much as the endless lines and steep price to go to the top. This time we paid 3 Euro to walk up the stairs to the first floor. Then, we went home and watched French Celebrity Who Wants to be a Millionaire.
The next morning we did go to the Louvre. It was raining, as it would continue to do all day. The line was much more manageable, probably since we got there early. It's a really big museum, the biggest in the world. We took Mike to see the major sights - Venus de Milo, Mona Lisa, Large Format French Paintings - just to get them out of the way. The rest of the time at the museum I really enjoyed. The crowds stayed close to the just mentioned major sights so the place was quiet everywhere else. We took in some more French paintings and some old Mesopotamian artifacts that Mike had learned about in his Art History class.
Following the Louvre we went to the Ile St. Louis, an island in the Seine, for lunch and ice cream. This place did not have bi-lingual menus and my family struggled a little bit. Many of us ordered the wrong kind of ice cream. It was pretty much the nadir of the trip.
So, after lunch we went to see Notre Dame, the big, free, Cathedral. We did pay to see the treasury room, where they keep bones of saints and the carrying case for the (maybe) actual crown of thorns. We weren't sure where the crown was, since everything was in French.
After Notre Dame we parted ways. Grace and I knew a Cambridge student from Paris pretty well, and Mike, Grace and I spent the rest of the day with him. It was so refreshing to be in the city with someone who knew the language and the city. He took us to the Latin Quarter, to small French streets, to the Sorbonne, to the Parthenon, and to many other place we would not have found without him. He humored us by accompanying us to the Champs Elysees and helping us order some crepes.
For dinner we went to a traditional French restaurant. I shared a three cheese fondue with him while Grace and Mike gathered around a pot of boiling oil to cook pieces of steak on little skewers. We had some white wine, which Grace and I thought was just wonderful. Our French companion was not so impressed, but he admitted he was a bit spoiled on wine, since his family had opened a 20 and a 30 year old wine for Christmas. I thought the three cheese fondue (which you dip pieces of stale bread in using skewers) was really, really good. It would be a mess to clean up the pot afterwards though.
The next day was New Year's Eve. Mike, Grace, Dad and I met at the Catacombs early in the morning. The catacombs was the one thing I really wanted to check out in Paris. It's an extensive underground network. It was originally a quarry I think, but has been used for clandestine meetings by anyone operating under official radar. The French resistance used it, and recently the police uncovered a secret movie theater being run by an arts group. It's also famous because it holds millions of bones. There was a cemetary in Paris back in the 1800s that seemed to be causing lots of disease problems so they had all the bodies disinterred and moved into the catacombs. Now the bones are stacked in perfectly symmetrical patterns along long hallways. The place is a labryinth of caverns and tunnels far below Paris. It's illegal to enter it except on the tour part, which is what we did.
When we arrived, we saw a sign warning that children and people of a nervous disposition might be upset by the Catacombs. We payed our admission charge and walked some 100+ steps down a spiral stone staircase deeper than the metro and into the guts of Paris. The beginning part was all dank, short stone tunnels that were dimly lit. I had to stoop most of the way.
Eventually we came into a big room with a bunch of placards about the French Rebellion and the bodies down in the catacombs. There was an old warning over the doorway into the next section, called the Ossuary, which read, "Beware; you are entering the empire of the dead."
It was in here that the hallways were lined five or six feet deep, with endless bones. The bones were arranged like bricks, perfectly symmetrical with the skulls forming a long horizontal line a few feet off the ground. The first skull I saw gave me pause - I think that's probably the first time I've seen a real human bone, unpolished, unprotected. But the effect quickly wears off since you're literally surrounded by bones. Grace didn't wait around and quickly walked to the end of the tour. I waited for Dad to catch up, which took 15 minutes then went to find them. Because we delayed then seperated, both Dad and I were pretty much alone except briefly for the whole 15 minutes of quickly walking through endless halls of bone. There were a lot of placards with french poetry and apparently it's pretty grim stuff if you can read it. There were also small monuments among the bones, and sections were the bones were arranged in new patterns, like crosses.
Eventually I left the ossuary and caught up with Grace and Mike up 83 stairs and outside the Catacombs.
While we were at the Catacombs my mom and sister had gone up to Sacre Couer Basilica, which I think they probably enjoyed more than they would have the Catacombs.
After the Catacombs we took it easy at my parents swank hotel while Mike ran and then went out again in the late afternoon to get some Berthillion Ice Cream (best ice cream I've ever had) and do some shopping. My parents went to the Musee D'Orsay, which is full of impressionist paintings. Our shopping/ice cream expedition was hampered by lack of time, intermittent rain and the fact that it was late Sunday on New Year's Eve so most shops were closed. Still, Mike found a hat he liked at an open air booth and Grace and I got some ice cream. We were also part of a big crowd watching a street performer. He had pulled some people out of the audience and was directing them through a movie scene that involved someone with a gun, someone in love with someone else and a lot of French dialogue.
For dinner we had room service. This was because most restaurants were both booked and extremely expensive for New Year's Eve ($100 per person was the cheapest we could find). Now that I've been to Paris on New Year's Eve I think we would have been able to grab a cheap bite at a cafe (as opposed to a restaurant), but at the time we didn't know what else to do. Anyway, Grace and I bought some French wine, and we thought it was alright (we brought a champagne and two reds back to Cambridge and the first red was really good).
There had been a lot of debate about what to do for New Year's Eve night. We knew there would be tons of people on the Champs Elysees to watch the fireworks but we had also heard that, 1) they were a really rowdy group, 2) they were not actually Parisiens but just tourists, and 3) there actually weren't any fireworks at all. My parents were not interested in going out into the mess because of the potential for rowdiness. Grace was tired of crowds. I wasn't crazy about being with a bunch of tourists. My brother was worried about how we would get home, since we lived far away and he had to run the next day.
Anyway, we decided to go to a performance of Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" and Mozart's "Requiem." It was in an enormous church/cathedral. I had never been to a classical music concert like this before. People were extremely respectful, holding their coughs and shifting until the breaks between movements. It was pretty long though, and my family got pretty tired of it, so we got out of there pretty quickly when it ended.
Outside we were greeted with pouring rain. That sort of clinched it and we went back to our hotel, since it was already 11. Personally I kind of like being part of a big crowd and would have liked to stay out, but I think I was the only one in the group of that mindset, so we had a pretty tame New Years. Ah well.
Pictures of the Paris leg of our trip are here.
The next day was devoted to travel to Cambridge. We arrived at the train station very early this time and had a pretty straightforward trip home. Grace and I were really excited to get to our home. At Cambridge the plan was to take it easy and recover from the sight seeing expeditions we had earlier embraced. We stuck with the plan, taking in a pint at "The Eagle," an old (1500s) pub where Watson and Crick announced they had discovered DNA. We had a long dinner at a local restaurant and Mike, Hannah, Grace and I stayed up watching YouTube junk at my place.
The next and final day my parents came over for breakfast and to see my place. We took them for a nice long walk into town. The sun was shining and the weather was really mild for January. We all got some hot chocolate and the plan was to take a relaxing punt down the river cam.
Good God, what a mistake. Where to start?
First off, in case you don't know, punting is where you take a long, flat, narrow boat down the barely moving river Cam. The boat is propelled by someone standing on the back of the boat and pushing off the ground of the river with a long pole, like the gondoliers in Venice. The plan was I was going to be the punter, pushing us off the river bed and Grace would be in the front with the emergency oar which is used when you're going to crash into things.
Now, this is a pretty sedate activity. It's hard to achieve anything approaching walking speed on these boats. But it's much harder than it looks to get the boat to go where you want. To go left, you either push off the left side of the boat (so the back goes right, due to Newton's third law, and the front goes left), or you try to use the pole as a rudder and drag it on the left side of the boat. It's really hard to just go straight. And you're standing on a flat boat all the while, trying not to fall into the water. But like I said, you're going really, really slow, so if you crash into things, you just sort of bump into it. And there's a bunch of bridges too.
So, I've done this before and I thought I had the hang of it. I wasn't a pro, but I could get the boat to go where I wanted with a little work and some zig zagging. Of course, my family had never experienced the usual, even worse, style of punting, and so all four were yelling advice immediately about where to put the pole, warning me that I was going to hit that wall, that I wasn't pointed in the right direction, that I was about to fall into the water, etc.
And then, right after the second bridge the pole got stuck in deep mud and I had to let go or fall off the boat. We kept up our momentum and drifted away from the pole. Grace paddled us back, but by then the family had lost all faith in my abilities to command the punt and the backseat driving ramped up to a fever pitch. And it started to rain. We had been out 10 minutes when my mom started asking if we should just go back (normally it takes a little over an hour to see the best of Cambridge from the river).
There was intermittent light rain and the relaxing punt on the river with hot cocoa became an ordeal to get through, not enjoy. The boat didn't seem nearly as easy to steer as it had a few months ago. We drove into walls, into branches and had to be paddled out of a lot of situations. It didn't help that I didn't really know anything about any of the colleges, including their names in most cases, so the informative aspect of learning about Cambridge was pretty much non-existent. We made it just as far as I felt we had to, to the Bridge of Sighs (which is famous for some reason, but I don't know why), and then tried to turn around.
Here we encountered a delightful new problem. There was a slight wind at our back while we were heading down the river. Now it was in my face, and it seemed that when it was forced through the opening between the surface of the water and the bottom of the bridge it followed principles of aerodynamics and sped way up. We could see the surface of the water change under the bridge and suddenly the wind howled past my ear. We literally could not make it through the bridge. Everytime I tried to push us through the wind forced the front of the boat to turn sharply left or right until we were sideways under the bridge. As I said, it's really hard to go straight on a punt - normally I have to zig-zag my way to a location. But with the wind, any turn was amplified and the boat turned 90 degrees, where no forward motion was possible. It also didn't help that I'm really tall and acted sort of like a sail.
We went at it three times, each time ending up sideways before making it under the bridge. Eventually we backed up, straightened out and, with a combination of paddling and grabbing the bottom of the bridge, we made it through. Of course, by then there was no confidence in my captaincy. I gladly handed over the duties of punting to Mike and was delighted to see him subjected to the torrent of suggestions, warnings and panicked cries. After he failed to make much more than 15 feet of progress in 10 minutes, he sat down and let Dad have a shot. Mom was certain Dad would fall into the water and could barely watch him as he stood on the back of the boat.
Dad did better, but it quickly became clear I really did know sort of what I was doing. So, in the interest of getting off the river, I took over the punt and we hurried back to the dock. The backseat driving finally stopped.
We made it back without any more major incidents, though I almost lost the pole in the deep mud again. As we piled out of the boat we saw some tourists heading out, with both passengers standing, one with the pole and the other with the emergency oar. I doubt they fared well.
We had the punt renter take a picture of all six of us, the only picture with everyone in it. Mike ruined the picture by blinking.
The remaining few hours of the day we had some lunch and split to go shopping. Shortly afterwards everyone left and I was sad.
Grace and I tried to see a movie, but everything in the theaters was terrible so we went home.
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