They look tanned and healthy enough, but I’m pretty sure that most of the population of West Palm Beach is undead. They are too tanned to be vampires so my money is on zombies. How else do you explain the huge flock of vultures circling over the town center… … and roosting on window ledges. You can see it in their eyes, that blank, fashion conscious, Fox News watching, undead stare. Who else but zombies would be tearing down an…
St Augustine is the oldest European town in the USA, founded in 1565, 20 years before the Roanoke colony and 55 years before the Pilgrim Fathers landed. However, it has been blanked out of American history books, because the people who founded it spoke Spanish and not English. The Spanish got corn tortillas and beans from the Native Americans, while the Pilgrims got turkey and sweet potatoes. If we really understood American history we would all be eating tacos for…
This, my friends, is the business end of a Saturn V, the rocket that took men to the moon. After all these years, and in spite of the best efforts of the Russians, the Chinese, and Elon Musk, the Saturn V is still the most powerful rocket ever built. It could deliver 140 metric tons to low earth orbit. That’s more than twice the Falcon Heavy’s payload, six times the Space Shuttle’s, bigger than anything the Russians ever had, and…
The passage from Florida to Grand Bahama and back is one of the shortest and cheapest cruise ship journeys anywhere. In fact when times are bad, millions of spam messages appear giving them away “free” (except for taxes, port fees, drinks, portholes, and anything you do on Grand Bahama that actually involves having fun). The cruise ship terminal is in an industrial port, with a big container transshipment facility, dry dock, oil storage, and limestone quarry. One of Grand Bahama’s…
We’ve been back in SF for several days now, and I haven’t got around to writing up our last day in London, so it probably isn’t going to happen. You’ll just have to make do with the pictures.
There is wild fuchsia growing in the hedgerows which gives a striking burst of color on a grey day. I walked along the coast today, taking pictures. I caught a bush full of fluttering goldfinches. I’d been looking for black backed gulls, and was just sneaking up on a group of them when a dog ran along the beach and startled them all. There are great and lesser black backed gulls in this bunch, as well as herring and black…
Having done the bottom left hand corner of Ireland we set off yesterday for the bottom right hand corner, passing through Waterford (where the famous crystal factory has sadly gone out of business) to Wells House in Wexford. We visited for their “hawk walk”, an hour long hands on falconry class. Paula and I both got to have the birds (Harris Hawks native to the Americas) land our our wrists multiple times, and learned about their training. However, it turns…
Ireland, land of many surprises. Green post boxes, and black traffic cones. Today we took a loop drive down the Beara Peninsula before heading back to Ardmore. The weather was cold, grey, windy, and damp, which one of the locals told us was typical summer weather here. Still, the scenery is beautiful. We debated whether the sheep perched on the rocky hillsides were incredibly surefooted, or just too stupid to know that was really dangerous. At Allihies near the end…
Everyone knows that you shouldn’t invade Russia in the winter season. It’s also true that you can’t invade Afghanistan at all. The British Empire failed twice, the Soviet Empire failed, and the American Empire had failed but refuses to admit it. I’ll add another military maxim to that. Don’t try to invade the British Isles in sailboats. It hasn’t worked since 1066. The weather will get you if the British Navy doesn’t. There’s a statue in Bantry to the last…
We checked some more items off the Ireland bucket list today. There was the Irish pub that doubles as an estate agent (US: realtor) and undertaker. I guess it makes sense that if you die from alcohol poisoning then can drop you straight into the coffin right there in the pub and then sell your house. This, incidentally, was in Midleton, home of the Jameson Irish Whiskey distillery, so there is no shortage of embalming fluid. Midleton was having a…