Buda and Pest

During the same week as my trip to Cork, I also traveled Budapest, Hungary for work. (4 passport stamps in one week, eat that Jill!) The trip itself was a bit intense to say the least.

On Friday morning, I woke up at 4am to catch a car with my coworker Paul to Heathrow. Our plane left at 07.50 and was nicely on time. I guess that early in the morning, Heathrow hasn't had a chance to become a mess yet. After touchdown we waited a bit for another co-worker and took a cab into the city for a meeting with a parter. After the meeting we had a couple of hours to kill before a group dinner.

I had planned on taking a nap during that break, but thankfully Paul convinced me to go out and do some sightseeing with him. It was amazing in Budapest. We walked up and down the Danube riverfront totaling about 13km. Since we walked up one side and down the other, we technically saw both Buda and Pest. It took us a couple of hours, but we got to see the sun set over the mountains which was worth it. I can now see why Jill says it's one of her favorite cities. To see my (small) photoset check here.

Unfortunately after dinner and a bit of drinking, Paul and I had to call it a night. We got up the next morning at 4am to catch the flight home! I believe that when we worked it out we spent less than 18 hours actually in Hungary. I can't wait for Jill to get over here so we can go back and spend some quality time in the city.

The one good thing about this flight home was that we landed at Gatwick at exactly the same time as my parents did. They were coming in from the US to spend 10 days traveling around the south of the UK with me. Hopefully this post encourages my parents to put up their pictures so I can blog about it.

So what other Eastern European cities do I need to see?

Fog

When I think of Britain (in the abstract I mean), I always think of the Kevin Costner movie, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Now getting here and noticing that there were all of these roads and shopping malls was a bit disappointing. But nothing really matches up to the fact that there's almost no fog.

From what I hear, it's just that there isn't much fog in the South, while other parts of the country get it regularly. But I'm disappointed no more. When I woke up this morning, I noticed that I couldn't see anything out my windows. Heck, I couldn't even see across the street!

Here are a couple of photos from the morning.



Next I'm hoping to see someone with a long bow.

Bounty

After a layoff due to a crazy couple of weeks, I'm back with a few posts. The first of these deals with my recent eating competition.


I love Bounty bars. For those who've never encountered one it's like an Almond Joy without the almonds. Now before anyone says it, that is not a Mounds bar. A Mounds has dark chocolate instead of milk chocolate and totally changes the flavor. A Bounty stays with milk chocolate and might be the best food ever made.

At some point in a moment of stupidity, I mentioned to Rob that I could eat an entire case (24 pairs) of Bounty bars in a day. Stupidly, a coworker named Chris said he could as well. And from this, a competition formed. Since we both thought we could eat our way though it was a test to see who was fastest.

After numerous delays, we finally set off to eating and it turns out that it's way way way too much to eat in a single day. I managed to make it up to 24 single Bounties, exactly half of my goal while Chris beat me with 28. Suffice to say that we both realized that discretion was the better part of valor and didn't try to go the whole way. As part of losing the competition I got to wear a special shirt for a day. Let no one say that I don't pay off on my bets.


During our eating we took to doing some calculations about what we were consuming. Turns out that even if I'd eaten my entire goal my total sodium intake would have been half of my daily allowance. So if you've got blood pressure problems, Bounties are your food. We also noticed that if we'd hit the goal we would have consumed 13,000% of our daily allowance in calories. So by only eating half, I managed to only consume 1 weeks of calories that day instead of two. :)

So, what foods have you consumed in stupidly large quantities?

Green and Wet

I can now say that Ireland is indeed green and wet. That being said it appears to be a beautiful country and I'm sad that I didn't get to explore while I was here. I'm sure I'll be back though and I'll be able to see if my first impressions (like Great Britain, only newer) stand up.

Things I've learned while I was here:

• The Irish passport stamp is green


• A quick after conference drink is actually an event unto itself, with a lot of drinking


• Murphy's (brewed in Cork) is better than Guiness, but I think I like Beamish most of all

And no I didn't see any fellow Leprechauns ;)

Status Report

I realize that I haven't been blogging lately, but it's just because my life's been so boring! I've been staying away from holiday time so I have some saved up for when Jill gets here, but she just doesn't seem to be getting here.

But no longer! This is the week that exciting things start happening.

First, Jill noticed that today the Home Office has finally moved to under a month from her application.

Second, next week I'm going to Cork, Ireland for three days for a conference (in fact I'm putting off doing slides, by blogging).

Third, I go to Budapest at the end of the week to interview some new contractors.

Fourth, I get back to London on Saturday morning just in time to meet my parents at the airport! They're coming over for 10 days to see London and Southwestern England. Expect blogging and photos galore from that trip.

Fifth, sometime over the next two weeks I'm getting a gigantic couch! It's only been 9 months and I'm finally starting to make it feel like home.

That's all about me over the next month, but I feel like I'm so out of touch with the rest of my friends back in the US. What kinds of things are you doing? Anything new? Or just dodging hurricanes?

Faccombe, I'm going home!

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of doing the second leg of the Test Valley Tour. It's one of those things that kind of sneaks up on you though. In fact, while I knew it was coming up, I didn't have any idea what the date was until I got an email warning about registration two weeks before the ride. Needless to say, there was no time for any real training. Although maybe that was a good thing. The email actually explicitly mentioned that this one was going to be 'hillier' than the last one. Now I've got to say, I remember the last ride and it wasn't exactly flat.

So I got up at some stupid hour on a Sunday morning and rolled down to Rob's house. Adrian picked us both up there, and we drove about 45 minutes north to an area outside of Andover. After a little bit of prep-work, we set off in the cold. The prediction had been that there would be rain all day, so when it appeared that it was just going to be overcast, it was great. And in the end there were about 5 minutes of spitting rain towards the end of the ride, but in general the ride was dry.

Now, the route itself was killer. This was the longest distance (112.4km), longest time (4:23), and most climbing (1199.6m) I've ever done on a bike. In addition to that the group of us were going to focus on keeping with Adrian's training schedule. This meant that on anything other than a serious climb, he couldn't go out of heart ranges 1 and 2 (of a possible 5). Now, I'd been on a ride with him the weekend before and I knew that that wasn't going to be all that slow.




You can see from the profile, there were some serious hills on this ride. There were a number of climbs over 16% grade and you had to use all your strength just to keep your cranks turning over. I just can't imagine how the Sportive riders used their race chain-rings on hills like that.

There wasn't really any drama on the ride, other than about half way through I got a puncture on my front wheel. 5 minutes to put a new tube and and off we went. Thankfully Rob and Adrian stopped with me otherwise, I'm not sure how I would have made it to the end.

I'd have to say that one of the best parts of the ride happened around 95km. You go through a town called 'Faccombe' (it's pronounced without the 'b'...) and there's a split. Go left and you can do another 50km for the Sportive ride, or you can go right and finish the 100km Challenge ride. Needless to say we took the right fork and called it a day.

I managed to stay with Adrian until 109.8km. But right there at the end there was a dreadful little climb. I just didn't have anything left in my legs and Adrian dropped me and I rolled into the finish about 3 minutes later than him. The good news was that it wasn't nearly as bad as Rob who dropped at about 50km and did the back half on his own. He did manage to do it only 20 minutes or so slower than the two of us, so that was great work as well.


This is the last competitive ride of the season for me and I can tell you that I'm glad. I've been riding essentially 6 days a week ever week since I moved here in January. I've ridden nearly 5000km and boy are my legs tired. I'm just hoping to have a car soon and maybe take it a little easier than I have been.