It's not often you spend 3 weeks in England with almost no rain but we hit a lucky streak on our return visit and had glorious weather pretty much the whole time. We walked into Richmond one day and stopped in the playground for a quick climb.
Then strolled into town Having been local for a while we headed up to Cambridge, or Ely to be more precise to see my Dad and Sarah and spent the afternoon looking round the town and the gorgeous colleges and punting on the river You can either get a guided tour with a professional punter or you can try it yourself which sometimes has mixed results as this guy found out. A couple of interesting facts from the punting. I just missed this in the photo but some of the windows in this old building were boarded up, that comes from a time when there was a tax placed on windows! The phrase 'daylight robbery' also comes from that tax. And here is the pub where The Pink Floyd played their first ever gig. We went into town on the graduation day of one of the colleges so there were plenty of gowns and costumes about. Seeing so many people on bikes made me realize one of the differences between the US and UK, in the US the bicycle is used for recreational or fitness activities whereas in the UK it is also a utility vehicle and people use it to get around which you never see in the US (or at least we haven't so far)
Just before heading back to England I took Dan on his longest bike ride to date, a 5 mile ride to Bush Lake beach which has a killer hill on the way that Dan somehow managed despite having a bike that weighs the same as a bull elephant and no gears - here's Dan looking very pleased with himself as we got to the lake. On the other end of the bike spectrum here is a picture from the MS150 ride which I completed in no small amount of pain. The first day was the England v USA football match so we had to get the first 75 miles done before 1:00am. Despite really bad fog and not great weather I managed to get the 75 miles done by 11:00am - however my pedals weren't adjusted properly so I ended up straining a tendon and then overcompensating on the other leg and getting a swollen ligament (or the other way round, I can't ever remember my tendons and ligaments and Andy is out the house and I'm too lazy to look it up). Obviously the less said about the match the better (my favourite comment was when we got back to England, driving home from the airport the radio commentator said 'Not sure why England don't seem to do well in the world cup, on paper they have a great side. It's just on grass they can't perform').
Anyway here is a photo from the halfway stage where 3,200 riders left their bikes overnight in a field - the most carbon fiber I've ever seen in one place. Our Best Buy Mobile tent, which actually proved really handy to have close by. We had arranged a big screen TV to be in the main company tent to watch the game but the weather was so bad that the satellite signal was too weak to tune into. So we borrowed a 4G data dongle from the stand and streamed the match to the TV from a laptop.
That night we hit the local bars in Hinkley, the half-way stage. Let's just say that Hinkley isn't exactly London. This is Mike (our rock-star developer) trying to keep a straight face as my wine originally came in a plastic cup and was only half full as they'd run out of Cab Sav. I made the mistake of going for a different red rather than playing to the strengths of the bar which was something in a bottle.
So I know America has a huge budget deficit but they also have a huge bank holiday deficit with the first holiday of the year (apart from new year's day) coming at the end of May - Memorial Day which is when American's remember the last time they got a holiday. They typically get around this obvious government blunder by 'working from home' a lot. E.g. 'It's Friday, I'm working from home', or 'WFH, sick dog' and the like.
Anyway the weekend we just had was simply glorious, we did some work on the screen porch getting it ready for the Summer and spent a couple of afternoons on our local lakeside beach I also made it out on the bike for a ride. I'm doing the MS 150, a 150 mile bike ride over a couple of days from Duluth to Minneapolis in order to raise money for the Multiple Sclerosis society. The biggest challenge is that I have to complete the 75 miles on the first day by 1:30 in the afternoon in order to watch the England USA world cup match. So I've been getting up and out on the bike before 6am in order to get 45 miles done before 9am and not disrupt the weekend too much. If you are interested in sponsoring me you need to do it soon as the ride is on the 12th of June and I got a late start due to both my natural tardiness and some pain with the US Embassy. If you can sponsor me click here to make an online donation.
Becky also finished nursery this week and they had a 'graduation' ceremony (personally I'm with Mr Incredible on this concept but everyone else seems to love them). Here's Becky looming over the rest of her class Becky and her friend Lexa Our church also did a food packaging event for Feed My Starving Children, a charity organisation founded in Minnesota which uses volunteers to package nutritionally balanced meals for areas of world where they desperately need food. We were really short of volunteers so the kids and grandparents pitched in on a few occasions and ultimately we hit the target of packaging 300,000 meals in 3 days with only half the number of people normally required. And finally, Becky was in her end of year ballet show dressed as a chick - birdy song anyone?
With the Summer finally coming to Minnesota I had a business trip out to the center of the US wine region, Napa Valley in California, where the weather, sadly was not so hot.
Despite a pretty packed agenda we managed to get a sliver of time carved out for visiting the vineyards and so here is a little bit of information on Napa.
Wine making in Napa is pretty recent with most of the wineries starting in the eighties and nineties. Since then pretty much every square inch of the land has been converted in vineyards and the rest is dedicated to roads that lead to vineyards. We got out to probably the most famous vineyard, Opus One which was founded by Baron Philippe Rothschild and Robert Mondavi in 1980 (see how new it is!). Opus One is unusual in that they only make one type of wine - a Cabernet Sauvignon blend at $195/bottle. Here are some pictures from the winery, which was pretty impressive. Here's a lot of expensive wine We also went to Silver Oak winery
Where they have a very nice restaurant just overlooking the fermentation tanks [warning - boring techy interlude] On the coach on the way back from Napa I had a bit of a glimpse of the connected world that our kids are going to take for granted in terms of always being able to access the internet. A couple of the guys had wi-fi hotspots and everyone on the coach was using them to catch up on emails, surf the web etc on their laptops. On Friday Sprint are bringing out a phone which allows you to connect up to 8 devices to its hotspot. It was pretty interesting at a time when the iPad and other devices are coming with a 3G option - I can't help but think that putting 3G/4G capability into any connected device other than a phone is a waste of time and in 12-24 months everyone will have realized it. A colleague was saying to me that in the future we'll just need our phones and our car keys, personally I think the car keys are also going to be redundant.
Read a couple of thoght provoking books recently, I'm just finishing one called 'The Shock Doctrine' by Naomi Klein - very good and talks about how governments have got very good at using crisis situations to pass very aggressive free market laws which benefit the few at the expense of the many. Just before that I read 'The Next 100 years' by George Friedman which really makes a good case for the fact that from about 2020 onwards the populations of most developed countries will start to shrink and the need will be to attract immigrants not to dissuade them from entering countries. Anyway, both of these are well worth a read, the Klein book is much longer and the first 100 pages seem to be stretching the point a bit but it makes for an enlightening if not very cheerful read. The Friedman book is a much lighter read but has some very interesting viewpoints which he summarizes on the link.
Over Easter (that's how far behind I am with getting some of our pictures on the blog) we headed back to the Dells for a long weekend. This time we didn't stay in any of the waterparks instead we found a hotel just outside and just had one day in a park. It's a bit like going to Vegas and not going to the hotels - not many people really understand why you'd go to the Dells and not go to the waterparks but there is a lot to see - like the Dells.
These are taken on the way back when we decided to stop off at one of the 4 points in Minnesota that is more than 9 ft above sea level.
And here are various pictures of the kids and the Dells themselves. The Dells themselves are a series of sedimentary gorges which you can take 'ducks' (amphibious trucks) or boats through. Becky was petrified of getting onto the duck we took but soon settled down.
The air temperature in these gorges was way below the outside temperature. We were in shorts and T-shirts outside but there was still snow on the ground in the gorges.
Then strolled into town
Having been local for a while we headed up to Cambridge, or Ely to be more precise to see my Dad and Sarah and spent the afternoon looking round the town and the gorgeous colleges and punting on the river
You can either get a guided tour with a professional punter or you can try it yourself which sometimes has mixed results as this guy found out.
A couple of interesting facts from the punting. I just missed this in the photo but some of the windows in this old building were boarded up, that comes from a time when there was a tax placed on windows! The phrase 'daylight robbery' also comes from that tax.
And here is the pub where The Pink Floyd played their first ever gig.
We went into town on the graduation day of one of the colleges so there were plenty of gowns and costumes about. Seeing so many people on bikes made me realize one of the differences between the US and UK, in the US the bicycle is used for recreational or fitness activities whereas in the UK it is also a utility vehicle and people use it to get around which you never see in the US (or at least we haven't so far)
