I’m a big fan of the b-side lounge, and the b-sidecar…
b-side
They also have excellent mac ‘n’ cheese. Yum
Tag Archive for 'beer'
After the day of talks we went out for a few beers and dinner. I paid over $7 for a schooner, and over $8 for a pint. Ouch. It was nice sitting outside at least…
I’m in Perth for a week attending the Astronomical Society of Australia’s Annual Scientific Meeting. Holiday in WA!
We got in Saturday night, our cheap apartments turned out to be just that. Some cabbie volunteered the information that it might be frequented by people who used the rooms, but not for the whole night…
We cruised over to Northbridge for a few drinks. Not the classiest of districts but we managed. We sat in a part of a bar that was also a bottle store. So sitting with a few beers next to a fridge and rows of wine bottles.
More to come…
So walking out of the Sam Adams brewery tour, we were coaxed in the back door of the 2008 NEBSRA Winter Nationals. Free beer and loads of entertainment. (NEBSRA = New England Belt Sander Racing Association)
There’s a collection of videos here.
Australia day (try googling “invasion day“) was celebrated in proper tradition on Saturday, with footy on tv, at the Phoenix Landing, pies, and beer. Later Jill had a party with copious amounts of Australiana, like pav, koalas, coopers, and vegemite. Nice.
There are some clever ads on tv over here. Unfortunately they don’t always advertise products I would endorse or purchase. Here’s an excellent example from Bud…
So Christmas has been a great time for sitting in front of the TV doing pretty much nothing. It’s also a time to drink some beer and play with my camera. I am fortunate to have in my possession an old 50mm f3.5 zuiko OM macro, and to use it I went and bought the adapter Olympus have to use these old lenses on the new digital SLR’s. Really there’s little to review. At about US$100 it’s a pretty expensive annulus, which is rather tight to get both onto my E500 and the lens, but it’s fun, and worth it if you have old OM lenses you want to bring in to the digital age.
I haven’t used a macro much, but here’s part of the sticker on one of my favourite Magic Hat beers…
I also too a few photos of the cats we have here, and the good ol’ National Geographic world map.
After a night of Manhattans and Nic’s home brew, I dragged myself off to South Station and headed for New York (again). The purpose being a few days hanging with old Massey mates Todd and Nick. Arriving in Chinatown, I headed north in the hope of seeing someting interesting before meeting up with the others.
First I stumbled upon a footbag (what we call hacky, but they’re good) competition. Those dudes were unbelievable, though looked rather cold in shorts and t-shirts.
We were staying at some crazy place near Times Square, so had a look at the place before heading down to Ludlow St for a pub crawl. The bars there are nice, not too trendy or expensive (for NY), and most importantly very close to each other. They guys were a little jet lagged however, and we were home by a respectable 1am or so.
In the cold light of the new day we wandered up to Central Park for a few band photos, and caught the subway down toward Chinatown for Nick to buy a handbag.
It was funny to see the people hocking fake Louis Vuitton bags, and hastily packing up their suitcases when police looked like coming by. Now I know what random dodgy looking people trundling suitcases around have in them.
We carried on down to see the huge Staten Is. queue, and take some pics of a very small Statue of Liberty. We stopped by Ground Zero, and took some photos through holes in the fence. The place is still a complete mess, as you might expect from such a massive project.
That done, we made our way back up to Times Sq area for some beers. Dinner was BBQ in a huge place, probably seated 500 at a time or something. Our food was good, and came fast… mmmm
Monday was hometime, good ol’ Chinatown bus. The rest of the photos are here.
Talk about your impromptu trips… Arriving home somewhat inebriated on Friday night, I booked a rental car for Sunday with vague plans of going somewhere, and sent a few invites. On Saturday I found that Fall isn’t really over yet, and decided Cape Cod would be a nice, near, new place to visit. Jill and Liz thought the same, so early Sunday we set off.
The car was a bit flasher than usual this time, with heated seats. Unfortunately the stereo was a little dated, not having an iPod jack. We managed to survive and overcome this deficiency by talking…
By the time we were on the Cape itself, it was getting a little ten o’clockish (as Pooh would say). We picked about the only place that looked open in Barnstable and wandered in for an excellent breakfast of eggs benedict. I’ve never been anywhere to eat where everyone got the same thing before.
Going in search of typical and interesting Cape Cod experiences, we first stopped at a beach. Being the time of year it is it was a little fresh out, and the water was pretty much as cold as it looked. We walked along it for a while anyway.
Next up was a more local experience, as we stopped at a road side barn sale. There was pretty much just junk for sale, and we pondered different means by which the purveyors of said junk had come to be in its possession. Perhaps by purchasing junk from the ubiquitous American “antique” shop? We didn’t think there was any way a person could acquire such a lamp collection by accident…
After passing a little lake in Nickerson State Park, we moved on to the Cape Cod National Seashore to tick off a lighthouse. We found it easily thanks to the excellent signage.
Continuing, and getting a little hungry, we went to the tip of the Cape to the lovely Provincetown. Being near the coast we had to have some seafood. I had fish and chips and a beer, yum. We walked off our late lunch by climbing to the top of the Pilgrim monument. The sign said a measly 112 steps, but I’m not sure that it explicitly said that most of the altitude is gained by walking up a big square spiral ramp.
The view from the top was nice, if a little breezy…
With the day nearly gone, we drove to the top end of the Cape for a quick photo before returning to the warmth of the car for the drive back to Boston.
We encountered some traffic at a few points, but nothing bad. Apparently the population of Provincetown grows from a few thousand, to something like 60,000 in summer, so I think we had it pretty easy. After a few glimpses of the sunset as we drove along random roads to avoid the traffic, we hit the highway proper.
The rest of the photos are here.
Oh yeah. Hot on the heels of my Peruvian adventure, and having Pete and Mary visit, Halvar and I drove to Orlando to have a few beers with Jose for my birthday. And by Halvar and I, I mean I drove, and he took photos out the window.Starting on Thursday morning, we headed out to Canton, home of the Autodriveaway Co’s local office. The hope was to pick up a 2002 Taurus destined for Greensboro, NC. I’d been watching the National Carlist for several months in the hope that something would come up, and a few days before we were destined to leave, up popped the Taurus. It turned out that getting approved was quite simple. The ACT DMV people were quick and helpful in supplying me with a drivers record (as they were when I renewed my licence recently), the essential thing for aproval. Talking to the driveaway guy, it turns out that overseas folks are way easier to process, since he doesn’t have potential access to the same wealth of information that exists for Americans. Lucky us.
Rhode Island, Ocean State (license plate tagline): With a potential twelve states to visit along the way, we wasted no time in getting down to Rhode Island for some breakfast/lunch. We ended up at the “Liberty diner” for some good honest cooked breakfast. The name inspired the thing we needed to do in each state, which was something to do with something patriotic. Eating at a place with liberty in the name counts. Having ticked off Rhode Is. we headed on to Connecticut.
Connecticut, Consitution State: I’m not sure how patriotic it was, but we stopped at Hammonassett Beach in Connecticut for a look (I didn’t know there was an extra ‘c’ in Connecticut!). There were lots of reasonably large, very tanned people lounging around as it they had nothing better to do, which I suspect they didn’t. Having ticked off Connecticut we headed on to New York.
New York, The Empire State: We didn’t really do anything in New York. We’ve both been there so it wasn’t in need of a ticking off. We were in Pennsylvania before we knew it.
Pennsylvania, visitPA. com (what? that’s crap!): PA got the full patriotic treatment from us, since we drove across a fair chunk of it, and stayed the night at a campground. We stopped for a stretch at a lake the first evening, where a hot air balloon flew right over us. It had an American flag on the basket, which was pretty patriotic. The lake was pretty too…
We stayed the night at a nice campground, and went for a walk the next morning. It was a pretty small park, so hunters could only use bows and arrows, black powder, and shotguns. Thankfully noone tried them out on us, despite our ignoring the signs instructing us to wear bright orange. We drove on to Gettysburg. There is this whole route one can drive around that takes hours, and goes past dozens of battlefield and historic sites. We stopped at a couple, but there were too many and we had other states to visit. Having thoroughly done Pennsylvania, we moved on to Maryland.
Maryland, ?: Our visit to Maryland was brief, but we made sure to stop at the welcome center and admire the state flag. Having not really ticked off Maryland, we managed to get a bit of West Virginia, since we’d long ago decided it was going to be a bit much of pain to go through Delaware.
West Virginia, Wild, Wonderful: We were only in West Virginia for a while, but stopped by the Shenandoah river for a bit of a walk. We also caught a covered bridge along the way. West Virginia done, we moved onto Virginia proper.
Virginia, ?: We arrived into Virginia later in the evening, and proceeded to find a campsite to stay at. Somewhere along the way we stopped at pub for a beer and some pub food. The girl couldn’t really understand me, and exclaimed something like “You’re accent’s different!”, as if that were a highly improbable thing. It was well dark when we arrived at the campsite, and we were tired so we set up and went to bed. The next morning we drove along the Blue Ridge Parkway, a nice bit of road through forest on the edge of the Appalachian mountains. There weren’t any really good looking breakfast places around, so we dropped into a Food Lion for some donuts and turnovers. Virginia done, we moved on to North Carolina.
North Carolina, First in Flight: After driving down the parkway, we arrived in North Carolina, and headed to Greensboro to drop off our car. We drove all the way to the owners house, a suburban mansion somewhere in the ‘burbs. Though the house was nice, it looked just like all the others, as is so commonly the way in these places. He was kind enough to drop us out the airport, where we picked up our rental. Greensboro was about halfway, 900 miles from Boston. With our new iPod compatible rental, we cruised on down towards Charleston.
South Carolina, Smiling Faces, Beautiful Places: The first thing we caught in SC was Dizzy Gillespie’s birthplace, in the little town of Cheraw. We felt it important that we eat some southern food, so stopped for a bbq buffet. The ribs were marinated in vinegar and other things, very nice. Nearer Charleston, we hunted out a campsite, but not after driving around the national park past several map marked campsites. Eventually we happened to spot an unlit sign, and pulled off for another great nights sleep. We awoke to a misty forest in the morning, with an irresistible fenced off tower to climb for a nice view of the local forest.
From the campsite we drove on down toward Charleston, taking a detour to see some swamp dwelling wildlife. At some pont we found a confederate flag on the side of the road (the one on the car roof of the General Lee). Going into Charleston we went over a HUGE bridge that disappeared into the fog. We stopped at the ubiquitous Huddle House for some food, just to be sure we were being patriotic, and then headed on to Savannah, Georgia, which also had a pretty large bridge leading into it.
Georgia, ?: The first thing to do in Savannah was head out to the Crab Shack for some seafood. We ordered the massive seafood platter for two, a margarita, and soaked up the atmosphere. After our feed we said hello to the alligators, but it was getting late so we headed off.
We were hoping to drop by Okefenokee swamp for a look at some real size alligators, but a ring ahead told us that there had been a fire earlier in the year, which rendered the boardwalk and observation tower unusable. We instead headed along the coast, and stopped at a much smaller reserve. This place was still pretty impressive, we saw some baby alligators, and then a real size one hiding in the algae choked water. We were approached by a seemingly deaf and blind armadillo, which didn’t run away until it was close enough to hear my camera taking pictures of it. We also saw storks, herons, large spiders, and squillions of mosquitoes and other bitey insects.
Upon leaving the park we found another gem, the Smallest Church in America. A little non-denominational shack, we couldn’t resist a photo stop. That done, we headed on down toward Florida.
Florida, Sunshine State: Time was getting on by the time we reached Jacksonville, so we made sure we got a little confused and crossed the river five times on three separate bridges. They were rather nicely lit up in blue, with one sporting a particularly large American flag in lights. We headed on down to Canaveral to meet Jose, arriving about 11:30, just in time for the purchase of some $4 “Icehouse” beers to celebrate my birthday.
The next morning was time to head for the airport. We could see the famous NASA space shuttle building as we drove along. In a photo Jose showed us, the doors were open halfway up, which is enough for the space shuttle to get out. Massive. Arriving at the airport we almost had a disaster, no petrol station! Thankfully my guess of going down some random road turned one up in ten minutes, thus saving us a threefold increase in the cost of gas that rental companies impose. The car had around 900 miles on it, making the trip a grand total of over 1800 miles.
We flew back to Boston, safe in the knowledge that we could claim a bunch of states, without really having done anything in any of them. The rest of the photos are here.
