I will also be spending an extra day and a half in Seattle, perhaps taking in some of the sights of and maybe meeting up with a couple of on-line contacts for the first time.

Flights & hotel booked, now where I did put my passport…

The event was a Software Design Review for Microsoft’s ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions including MVC. Twenty-four of us gave our thoughts, feelings and opinions to the teams on how we believe we would or could utilise various aspects.

[)amien

1. Commercial airlines take the fun out of flying. Airports are often overcrowded and always have so much ‘dead-time’ waiting for check-in, security, boarding, take-off, baggage claim, customs…
2. Heathrow is horrific and I’m glad Guernsey doesn’t fly there any more.
3. When UK customs say one piece of hand-luggage per person they mean it. Handbag and laptops are a piece and taking liquid or gels is still a pain.
4. It takes around 1h 20mins to transfer between Heathrow and Gatwick by coach.
5. Seoul’s airport is impressive even under construction – shame about the one-hour delays on the runway.
6. Korean Air’s fleet delivers interactive individual LCD screens with seat-to-seat gaming or ancient dodgy CRT projectors depending on the luck of the draw.

Trains

1. The JR Rail Pass offers massive savings for those wishing to get around. As well as Shinkansen bullet-trains between major cities you can take slower trains between towns and JR lines inside cities.
2. Show your JR Pass and ticket at gates instead of putting your ticket in the machine. Otherwise be prepared for a polite yet firm official to tap you on the shoulder.
3. JR Pass doesn’t let you get on the Nozomi Shinkansen. The quickest you can ride is the Hikori which is the same speed but has more frequent stops often.

Subway

1. Tokyo subway is quite easy to navigate despite the sheer size and number of people thanks to near-complete Romaji maps.
2. Kyoto subway is a bit of a mess thanks to multiple operators and no unified map.
3. Fukuoka’s subway is fast, clean and easy to navigate… it is also new.
4. Buy a credit ticket that will be deducted per trip. It saves a whole lot of time messing around with machines and costs and lets you get on the last few trains when the ticket machines have closed.

Technology

1. All Internet cafes should consist of cubicles you can sleep in with TV, workstation, bean-bag, unlimited soft drinks and a free comic library like Gera Gera.
2. Mobile phones are everywhere with people texting and gaming in the street, on trains etc.
3. Mobile phone system is UTMS/3G so a GSM-only phone won’t work. You’ll also need to make sure your operator has a roaming partner in Japan because you can’t buy pay-as-you-go SIM’s in Japan unless you’re a resident.

People

1. Japanese people are incredibly polite and helpful whether it’s a stranger sharing her umbrella at a road junction, somebody helping you pick up the contents of your bag sprawled across the floor or somebody from a shop coming outside to help you get your map the right way up and point you in the right direction.
2. Tiny Police stations (boxes) scatter Tokyo and are equipped with maps to help lost people – addresses are hard to find without one. Check the web-site for where you’re going and you’ll probably find a printable map.
3. Emotion is all about the eyes and not the mouth in Japan. It’s not just anime but even emoticons are eyes-only. A sad mouthed-face here is tearful eyes!

Food

1. The street-tent Japanese eateries are a great place to meet people as locals of all ages and foriegners get chatting.
2. Cheese, milk and chocolate are not common. Kit-Kat and Snickers are about the only recognisable brand chocolate bars.
3. Eggs turn up in many many dishes. Boiled and dropped into soups, or cooked and laid upon practically anything or sometimes raw over rice dishes.
4. Food is beautifully prepared, even supermarket sandwiches and lunch-boxes. Crusts are too ugly for their sandwiches.

[)amien

Got into Fukuoka and spent a few days exploring and a few evenings being entertained by Jo who also gave me some pointers on Japanese culture etc. I also subjected his friend Hitori ? to my incredibly poor attempts at Karaoke although my rendition of Franz Ferdinand’s Take Me Home almost veered onto the side of not quite making ears bleed.

We ate the fabled delicacy Ramen – noodles in a meat soup – and visited a cool local bar as well as trying out a DVD of some Japanese comedy set in a hotel that was rather good – plenty of set-up and bringing the various elements together for the final wrap up.

After a few days I took a train down to Nagasaki which was hit by the second atomic bomb during World War II just a few days after Hiroshima. Went to the monuments and peace garden there – it’s a stark reminder of too much power too little responsibility.

Then decided to head all the way up to Tokyo on the Shrinkansen bullet train and have spent a few days in a haze of neon.

I’ve visited shrines, temples, gardens, parks, stores, markets but far too many subway stations and their rather long connection walks (about 0.5km much of the time).

I feel like I’ve walked to the ends of the earth between that and all the walking around parks, shops, streets etc.

I also visited a geek paradise known as GoraGora – you get a small cubicle with a sliding closing door, padded floor, bean-bag, pillow, PC with net access and games pre-installed, TV, lamp and somewhere to put your shoes. Nearby is the free soda machine, showers and comic library (Japanese only – doh!). You can also have food delivered to your cubicle – all for the price of 980 JPY for 3 hours (about £5 GBP or $9 USD).

Hit the Sony Building which Jo’s generally-good TimeOut guide to Tokyo claims has a whole floor of PlayStation gear and games. It no longer has any such thing and indeed I couldn’t find a single PlayStation 3 in the building although I did see a Wii and the associated bits in a store but it should be out in the UK by now.

Tomorrow I’ll be taking another fast train down to Kyoto for a couple of days to get some more Japanese gardens and wild-life done. I think I’ve reached my shopping and bright lights limit – apparently Tokyo is one of the two biggest cities in the world depending on how you measure it (tied with Mexico City).

Everybody I’ve met is incredibly nice and polite – I’ve had Japanese people running out of their stores/hotels to help me when I spend more than a few minutes outside staring at my map and a kind lady in Nagasaki held her umbrella above my head for me. Which reminds me – I’ve left my newly purchased umbrella in the last hotel.

[)amien

With my project reaching a milestone this week it seems like the perfect time to take a well deserved holiday. Clarissa can’t get the time off and isn’t too interested in Japan so I’m holidaying solo again (first time since Vancouver/BC in 2004).

The good news, for me at least, is that Matt’s brother Jo is living and working in Fukuoka and so hopefully he’ll help me find my feet for a day or two when I get there. We might even check out the ski/board conditions and head up there so I’m packing my ski-trousers – I’ll be wearing my jacket during the day as it’s quite cold this time of year.

There are so many things to see and do that I’m going to grab a £120 7-day Japan Rail pass which I have to purchase before I enter the country as it’s not available to Japanese residents.

Matt also helpfully pointed me at Japan-Guide which has lots of information but tomorrow I’ll head into town and pickup something I can put in my pocket. I’m not sure what net access I’ll have out there – my Tytn smart-phone will work apparently but C&W Guernsey have no roaming partners!

I can’t wait!

[)amien

The indoor carting was quite cool fun although as usual the carts felt too slow and the indoor surface meant sliding on every corner regardless of slowing down so no attempt at fine tuning those race lines to the edge of your tyres. Well, maybe there was, but I wasn’t slowing down enough to find it.

Clay pigeon shooting was fantastic. It’s the first time in my life I’ve fire a real gun and this was a double-barrelled Baretta shotgun. I did pretty well and came third in our group behind a friend who used to play for Guernsey and another friends father who’d done it a long time ago. I even beat the whole team on one set that involved overhead clay pigeons although the debris did manage to fall down and hit my in the small of the back.

The comedy club was quite good although there was a fair amount of heckling at the start from a small group. The compère went to great lengths to try and shut them up with a variety of put downs but in the end had to have them removed. The New Zealand guy was pretty fast ‘n humorous but then pick on some guy who’s girl went and sat next to another guy to the point where the woman ended up walking out and the guy stood up and told him to get on with his act and stop picking on them before running out after his girlfriend.

Oops.

Our table was absolutely covered in bottles of beer us having ordered ice buckets of 5 bottles of beers each – not actually that much all considered but it did look a LOT and put it in some kind of perspective.

The second guy on was much slower and less in your face being a bit of a stoner with a crazy shirt.

At this point my headache from earlier in the evening kicked into overdrive and having made my apologies to the groom-to-be I ambled back to the hotel along the streets of Southampton. My brain had helpfully made some sort of semi-concious route and I found myself back at our Ibis by 10pm.

There the headache took full force and the fact our Window wouldn’t close properly became a problem with my headache and the noise outside. My room-mate Glyn was quite patient with my as a ran a wet towel and placed it on my head. The Ibis guy, who was possibly Dutch but definitely weird came up and failed to fix our Window with his miniature set of tools.

Thankfully I found my sponge earplugs in my pockets from that days shooting and plugged them into my ears for a reasonable nights sleep.

Sunday was paintball day and we set off on a McDonald’s breakfast (we tried to find other places serving hot food but were running out of time).

I managed quite well not getting shot until about the 4th game where I got a hand-splat to my glove. The enemy team were cheating a bit at this point and we had to start getting marshals to go over and point out to them that yes, they were covered in paint and should report to the dead zone.

I eventually got shot on my head which although hurt like crazy for a few seconds soon went down and hasn’t left a bump.

Unfortunately in the last game, a free-for-all, some European girl decided to shoot my bottom from quite close range as I ran through the undergrowth and so I took a big bruise. I always seem to get one at paintball but I thought I’d managed to avoid it until then.

All in all a very good weekend and apart from antlers and pink hair the stag got off quite lightly especially compared to my brother-in-law’s one in Prague.

Tired now, good-night!

[)amien

Myself and a few of my friends from St. Sampson’s Secondary are off to celebrate the forthcoming marriage of one of our number (no, not me).

It’ll be my third such stag night and it is to be a jam-packed weekend. Later today I should be clay pigeon shooting and karting before hitting a comedy club for the evening. Two new first-time activities in one-day being that I’ve karted a few times including winning a cup in France at one of the annual Jersey Telecom trips.

Tomorrow we’ll be clearing that hangover with a few hours of paint ball – strangely most of them have never played before.

Oh, it’ll be sweet. Especially if I get a baggy set of overalls again that prevent the paint balls exploding on impacting my body.

[)amien

It is a little disappointing that to book two different flights that you have to book each one separately despite obviously being possible on the phone or with non-airline sites such as Amazon. To avoid booking one and finding the other not available and being left with useless tickets we decided to book each using a different computer so that we could try and make sure it went through at the same time.

Our first issue was that once you have chosen your flights there is no indication of the dates again until the payment has been processed. Other sites seem to have no problem displaying a "current itinerary" down the side at every stage yet with yours this place is instead full of such great things as "You saved £10 booking online!" in giant text and other less important details than a reminder/confirmation of what I have chosen thus far.

The next page, that of your details, then completely omits GUERNSEY as a country forcing us to choose UNITED KINGDOM. For a business that used to be called Jersey European it seems you have forgotten that the Channel Islands are not and have never been part of the UK. Would it be that hard to get it right? After all you’ve even got VATICAN CITY listed although I doubt you get many bookings from it’s residents.

The next part automatically includes travel insurance – which is of course completely unnecessary if you are booking on credit cards or have a travel policy but it there it is and switched on as default. This adds to the whole spiraling-supplements experience that seems to be FlyBe.

Also here is a "I’m a UK resident" check-box. What do I select being from Guernsey? Do I tell the truth and uncheck it or leave it checked as you forced me to choose UNITED KINGDOM as my country?

An option here lets me choose my seat for an extra £5.00. There is no indication of course that it is £5.00 PER PART not per booking so for return trip will be an extra £10. The conditions also make it clear that you can renegade without refund on this arrangement if you feel it’s not safe or that you didn’t make it to the front of the queue within the allocated check-in time.

We struggled through and elected to pay the £2.50 per-person-per-leg-per-hold-item charge. If there’s one thing that’s really annoying about commercial flights it’s the time it takes to get into your seat while people try to stuff over-sized items in their overhead lockers, other people’s overhead lockers then under the seat in front of them. With a supplement on hold baggage I can only assume it’s going to get worse.

Finally, the payment screen and one that seems okay apart from the fact that you’re about to pay for something you can’t get a refund on and there is no final confirmation as to what it is you are buying in contrast to every other e-commerce site I have ever used.

In order to ensure we both got our flights we clicked okay at the same time.

One completed, the other came back with a card error despite the details were okay. I can only assume your system was not happy about processing two different transactions with the same credit card details.

Hitting "retry" to return us to the previous payment screen led us to a page saying our booking was now invalid as that level of seat had gone and now only more expensive ones were available.

Joy, we get to do it all over again for one of our tickets.

Luckily for us we managed to get the second booking through, albeit at a more expensive price.

Using your site is like playing Russian roulette.

[)amien

Jackson is a rather small cowboy style town that apparently is even busier in the summer than the winter. Everybody in town is very friendly and helpful apart from the miserable bar staff in the Cowboy Village who could barely be arsed to tell us what they had available to drink. We spent more time at a bar called Sidewinders which is a sports bar with far too many televisions and watched American "Football".

The people at our hotel, The Ranch Inn, were incredibly helpful and also had a free open WiFi hotspot which my laptop made it’s new best friend.

Either Jackson has a problem with under-age drinking or they are a little paranoid about it. I was ID’ed in a bar (okay), a liquor store (not buying anything just with somebody who was) and when ordering a pint of pale ale with my meal in a restaurant. It’s kind of strange how they are so strict on alcohol yet we went to watch Underworld 2 at the cinema and some 10 year old child sat through the whole gorefest.

Jackson Hole (Teton Village)

We were a little disappointed to find that the main ski – Jackson Hole – is a 30 minute $3 bus ride away but we’ve done worse. The area only has 11 lifts and minimal grooming so you are left wondering exactly why the 10 day lift pass is over $500.

There are some great runs although many are quite steep and the masses of recent powder leave the unfit and untrained struggling. Alas, that seemed to include me but I still managed to have a lot of fun.

Inghams

Our rep was a nice woman called Nikki. Originally Scottish but having lived out in Jackson for a while she now talks with a very strange accent.

While our rep was nice it’s worth mentioning that while Inghams can provide you with a lift pass for slightly less dollars than the resort they also convert that dollars to pounds there and then at a rather pathetic $1.6 to the pound rate so it may not work out so well. My ski hire was also more expensive per-dollar than going to the place directly which I did once my 3 day rental expired and I switched equipment.

So I don’t forget I’ll leave myself a little marker here. 160cm ski’s, 8.5 US boots and release tension setting 8.

Return trip

We said our goodbyes to James who was still in hospital and attached to lots of medical equipment and to Jim who would be his entourage home now Warren had hassled the insurance enough to get them to do something other than say "yeah it will be fine". As he pointed out walking into a hotel and saying "the insurance is paying for this" doesn’t elicit a "that’ll do nicely" response without paperwork or something.

The return trip was much shorter than the one out there and we were able to fly from Jackson straight to Atlanta which cut out another flight entirely. Alas the Delta transatlantic flight was much more crowded and too cold to sleep even with the paper thin blankets they provided.

It was with little surprise that I fell asleep quite quickly when I got home having left Jackson at 11am on Saturday and arrived home 2pm on Sunday after a brief Q&A with the people at Guernsey customs.

Sleeping when I got home was, of course, the stupidest thing to do because it meant a whole night of sleeplessness followed by a day of sleeping.

The joy of time-zones.

[)amien

Getting there

As always our first flight landed us at Gatwick. One overnight stay led us into flight 2 to Atlanta, Georgia via Delta Airlines. The flight was a whopping 9.5 hours but luckily quiet and under booked. If they hadn’t smashed the handle on my new luggage I might have given Delta a full 5 stars.

Things got exciting at US customs when the customs officer said "Come on little buddy" to a friend ahead of me. At that point all sense went out the window and was replaced by uncontrollable giggles and a bout of amnesia as to what exactly I’d come to do in the USA. Thankfully I’d already written out all the details on the Visa waiver form and despite a few stern looks and harsh words was let in. I guess terrorists and illegal immigrants don’t break out in a laughter attack at customs checkpoints.

Tired and dazed we boarded another 4 hour flight to Salt Lake City and then a quick 1 hour to Jackson itself where we finally met our Inghams rep Nicki – imagine a Scot with an American accent…

Man down

During our first day my friend James had a nasty fall off his snowboard that left him with a very painful wrist. As the day went on we found out it was dislocated and fractured and he was soon hospitalised.

As the week went on he’d go through three operations, have a metal plate put in his wrist and require a skin graft which would leave a massive red square of bare flesh on his leg.

To make matters worse he wouldn’t be able to join us on the return journey home and one of us would need to stay out a little longer to bring him home once the doctors think he’s ready.

Travel insurance is of course invaluable when this happens but phoning them up and making them sign forms when drugged up on morphine leaves a lot to be desired.

[)amien

The flight there was uneventful but dull thanks to Aurigny’s one-flight-per-day to Stansted at mid-day. This means 5 hours + of milling around. Thankfully Stansted isn’t quite as bad as I recalled and there are a few book and game shops to browse around in and I managed to keep my shopping down to a mere 3 books… Shame I already had 3 in my backpack.

After the introductions and a good nights sleep I put on my best "oh please" face and Clarissa drove us to Media Markt to see if they had Xbox 360′s in. Unsurprisingly they didn’t so we headed into Nuremberg to check out the shops and experience the Christmas market.

Having spent hours exploring the streets and stores of Nuremberg on a previous trip I stopped by EB Games in the mall and quickly acquired one of the two 360 core’s they had in stock as well as a wireless controller, Project Gotham 3 and Need for Speed Most Wanted. The box weighed the same as a small child but alas was not equipped with legs and so we dropped it back off at the car before my knuckles reached the floor.

The Christmas market was very atmospheric and the white lights the Germans favour over the English disco-fever multicolour bonanza felt less tacky and helped keep the descending chill of sunset at bay for a few minutes longer. We ate hot waffles and caramelised nuts whilst wandering around the multitude of stands before my feet eventually protested to further activities and we headed wearily back to the car.

Back at home we played a bit of 360 (I’ll post more on this in a future post) where I found that while the console and PGR3 will auto-switch to the language my NFS Most Wanted was decidedly German only and Clarissa had to help me every stretch as my German currently consists of telling people my stomach is empty or that I have hiccups.

We met the morning with tragic news… Clarissa’s parents had set-up the Christmas tree in the lounge where the only TV in the house and my 360 were. This meant after weeks of waiting to get one I would now have to wait 2 days before I could get back into the lounge to play it!

We had Christmas shopping to do and some friends to visit and between those two events I sunk into The Time Travellers Wife (a very good read so far and a similar core to something I had in mind a while back). Clarissa’s father had taken the plunge and installed a wifi ADSL connection so I kept up with emails and repeatedly checked for my assignment score.

On the 23rd we had a mini-grill/fondue night with friends where we ate lots and played some games. Unfortunately my German is still minimal despite evening lessons and Clarrissa’s help and her friends were only occasionally speaking English so the night went by with a rather detached feeling.

The 24th here in the UK is Christmas Eve, generally people rush around getting the final gifts they need for people before retiring for a few drinks with friends or family before a big meal and gift exchange on the 25th. In Germany the gifts and big meal happen on the 24th.

Clarissa’s parents cooked a fabulous dinner which we ate with her sister and brother-in-law and we all exchanged gifts. We even got her brother-in-law and father to have a quick go on PGR and NFS respectively with… well, mixed results.

Boxing day was a quiet affair but we took in some snow and a meal at a Chinese restaurant before packing as much as we could into our suitcases, grabbing 3 hours sleep and setting off at 4am for our flight back which involved an even longer sit at Stansted, falling asleep in departures, a nice sandwich at Pret and some woman throwing her coffee over my 360′s box.

Damn Sony fan girls.

[)amien

While this is incredibly annoying at least I know about it. In the next paragraph they try to soften the blow by letting me know that there are going to be additional flights from Heathrow. Intelligence fails them however because I don’t have access to Heathrow and their database already knows this.

The result isn’t a softened blow but rather a reminder on how Channel Islanders are Heathrow-less since BA purchased Guernsey’s slots at Heathrow airport from KLM subsidiary Air UK back in 1998 for a reported £14.5m. Our government fought the loss of a vital route – and lost.

The fact I could get to Gatwick at all is no thanks to BA either. They purchased regional operator Cityflyer and their Guernsey-Gatwick route back in 1988 too.

Fresh from the Heathrow wound our government raised valid concerns with the appropriate regulatory group that they believed BA would sell off the Guernsey-Gatwick slots or use them for non-Guernsey routes. Cityflyer assured us that would not be the case and the deal went ahead.

BA did of course suspened this route a few years later claiming the aircraft needed to be retired. I don’t know what happened to the slots but I can only guess.

Is it any wonder that our government decided to purchase one of the two airlines that services Guernsey to make sure it carries on? Personally I would rather have seen the government purchase slots at the essential airports and sub-lease them to the airlines, perhaps with a little subsidy but hey I’m not a politician.

I’m trying to be a traveller.

[)amien

I thought about writing another little travelogue but then it wouldn’t make much sense as my previous trip to Hochstadt is still undocumented – I left readers wandering around the outskirts of Paris. So here’s the short version…

End of travelogue, July

Parc Asterix was so overcrowded we filled in a complaint form and left. Queues were about 2-3 hours long for anything at all. We returned on the Monday knowing the French kids would be back at school and it was much better, the water rides proving to be very refreshing in the hot July sun and queues that only lasted about 15 minutes. A month or so ago I got an apology letter from the Parc and a free single-entry pass for the 2005-2006 season… for one. :(

We abandoned my car at Charles de Gaulle and flew into Nuremberg where Clarissa’s parents had arranged a very nice hotel who’s name I have since forgotten so there goes the plug. Any hotel that does a complimentary beer is a good one in my books and it made a change from the faceless Ibis‘ that we’d hit a couple of times. I got to try some German food including currywurst – a giant sausage in a spicy tomato sauce – and the Numberger which consists of a bun containing a variable number of small grilled sausages. Yum.

We met Clarissa’s friends, played pool and saw some great sights and because the hotel was only available for a few nights, moved my things to Clarissa’s parents lovely house where we I stayed for the remainder of the trip. Their garden is a little like a jungle and vines scale one of the walls right up to the roof top… All German houses seem to have these outside window shutters, presumably to stop stray branches etc flying through them and to help keep in the warmth.

The green fields and endless forests make me miss living somewhere that has them. Guernsey is fine if you like beaches, sailing, working in a bank or want to grow old but has precious little else to offer. One review said it was more continental than England, relaxed with good food, while still retaining the familiarity. I think he was trying to give the island a compliment but to me this came out as “less relaxed than Europe and still retaining the parts of England you wanted to leave behind.”

We shopped in Erlangen where I picked up possibly the only pair of sunglasses to ever fit the shape of my face for a bargain €9 only to loose them two weeks later at my sisters wedding. In Nuremberg we found “British Empire” and I was able to stock up on a few cans of Irn Bru and Cherry Coke. My Marmite supply was not in need of replenishment – Clarissa and her family had been avoiding it since I took the lid off.

We picked up a small bonsai tree and named her Emma. I had a Serissa at home called Toby, which was not doing too well when I left him. He passed away while I was on holiday despite frequent watering by my sister. Despite the claims these are indoor plants Emma immediately had problems which were immediately (well, 2 days) solved by leaving her outside in the shade.

The flight back to Paris was without incident, as was the drive back to Saint Malo. My friends father had let out all his holiday homes and so I was settled for another basic-but-has-hot-water Ibis. I should probably have joined their rewards scheme but I didn’t want to encourage myself to stay there any more often than I have already.

Last week

And so, some three months later I returned to Hochstadt. It had been a while since I had seen Clarissa – since my sisters wedding at the end of July in fact. Being a member of BA’s Exec Club is a good idea, it’s free and lets you check-in on-line and cut the time you need to sit around at the airport by half… which lets you cut it closer to other flights. It was a bit tight on the way out but what’s life without a little excitement.

The forest canopies were showing the signs of autumn, the odd yellowed and rusted tree among the darker greens. The vines along her home had turned into a fine gradient of yellows and reds. I’ve yet to check my camera, but perhaps it will do them justice. Emma was doing fine too and I had purchased another bonsai back in Guernsey, named Toby2 in memory of the first. He is doing much better, a different species and sitting upon a humidity tray :)

We relaxed, we drove, we visited Nuremberg again and this time I managed to get some orientation of the town while wearing the skin off the heels of my feet. I examined a large church and wondered how a large town can have three Macdonalds and no computer shops bar a tiny EB Games hidden away in a mall.

We visited an exhibition in Hochstadt, ate good food and generally had a great time. It’s a wonderful thing to have a girlfriend who can not only drive, but drive well :) Clarissa’s parents were very welcoming again, her father baked us some nice German bread and drove us through a wonderful valley with a river and some amazing rock formations left by rivers that departed aeons ago.

I visited Clarissa at her work again, where giant pictures of her hung up above her section and made her look like a school teacher. We did a little shopping and I picked up a rather nice new jacket, a smart blue tie and a much needed pair of ski boots. Yep, that’s right, nine ski trips and I’m still using rental equipment much to the bemusement of my snowboarding colleagues. We’re booked into Jackson for January and I’ll buy some ski’s out there once I’ve tried a few pairs.

There is so much more I could, should or will write.

[)amien

Versailles

We had left Disney behind us now, heading south-west to avoid the hot city streets of Paris and on towards Versailles. With high expectations of “the largest palace in Europe” we arrived underneath a hot midday July sun amid a mass of tourists. This did not bode too well.

Having seen the queues and general melee for entrance to the palace we skirted round to the back and the 300 year old gardens. We walked around a little of the gardens themselves, around a third by my estimation, but although I was daunted by the sheer size I found such a scale seemed to preclude individual attention to detail.

We managed to escape the sun by retreating into the shade of trees where we relaxed in each others arms and watched life slowly drift by. We shared a romantic moment until we noticed the small audience of school children. We decided against continuing the performance for their benefit and watched as better informed tourists toured the massive park in electric golf carts.

Rested and cooled we headed back to the palace but the crowds still swamped its walls and we vowed to come back another day. We wanted a smaller château we could have more to ourselves and within an hour or two we found one.

Château de Valançay

I can’t recall the inspiration for this visit as my guidebook doesn’t extend as far as the Loire Valley region. The château was acquired by Talleyrand in 1804 and as Napoléon’s foreign minister the château was soon used to dine and impress foreign dignitaries. It was also where Ferdinand VII of Spain (King) was held in luxurious captivity during Napoléon’s reign.

The scale of the château and gardens are much smaller than Versailles but that missing level of detail is restored. Hedges were perfectly trimmed, flowers blossoming everywhere and the main fountain spraying water clear enough to bathe in. If the restaurant had been open it would have been perfect though I doubt there were enough visitors to justify switching on an oven.

We drifted slowly through the château itself each receiving a guide in our own native language courtesy of devices vaguely resembling 90′s mobile phones. The rooms themselves were full of original furniture, partly because the château was untouched by the ravages of WWII when its owner the duc de Valancay established his personal neutrality as Prince de Sagan, therefore avoiding occupation on a technically.

The grounds are also home to a rather fun maze with locked doors, mirrors, smoke machines and historical puzzles to be solved if you wanted to get out. We were also treated to a small farm where you could feed various animals which was an experience in itself, perhaps one better enjoyed had there been a sink or somewhat where I could have washed the goat drool from my hand.

Somewhere to sleep

We spent much of the late afternoon hunting for somewhere nice to stay passing through Orléans and it’s surrounding villages. We stopped to ask for directions of the only person we’d seen in hours, a rather elderly gentleman. Clarissa ran up behind him, prompting him in French several times. He looked up at the sky as if being addressed by the heavens themselves before realising it was a lost German girl standing behind him. Within seconds they’d switched to English, the man revealing himself to be American before giving us directions to our hotel. Directions that turned out to be completely wrong…

[)amien

Driving

Driving in France was less terrifying in my own car than in the left-hand drive rental cars I’ve used in the past. The run from St. Malo through Rennes, Le Mans and up to Paris was uneventful punctuated only by the unidentified random songs and the splatter of unfortunate insects emptying their stomachs onto my windscreen at 140kmh. I went through Paris, around the five lane ring-road several times and even drove along a section of road where I could see the fabled Arc de Triomphe, noted across Europe for being a top spot to avoid while driving because of it’s twelve avenue junction that surrounds it.

My trusty Nissan Silvia S14 (200SX) performed perfectly in the 1,426 miles I clocked in one week – impressive for somebody who lives on an island just nine miles long. The black-on-silver registration plate with it’s five numbers and no letters attracted some attention including a confused pedestrian who nearly made it the last thing he saw, and a driver at a petrol station who asked me where I was from before accidentally paying for my fuel. No doubt the confusion also saved me from the occasional horn beep when hesitating at a junction for a second or not meeting the French minimum speed of “sign-posted maximum speed + 35%”.

I actually enjoyed driving in France and Paris, but then Clarissa made a great navigator and I’d selected calming music including Magical Sound Shower…

Disneyland Park

Little had changed since my previous visit, same rides, same long queues and the same blistering heat punctuated with a shower. The Maz was closed as was the centre of the square and the Mexican themed restaurant. The paddlers were not in operation and looked quite decayed from the train Star Tours was either going for added realism of an olfactory nature or else somebody had recently emptied their bladder inside, either way the result was quite unpleasant. Space Mountain had been upgraded to a new 2.0 ride but alas we couldn’t ride this for our own reasons.

One new feature is the FastPass which means you can get a ticket for a ride and come back between the times it mentions, joining the shorter FastPass queue. Alas, not all rides support FastPass yet and on Thunder Mountain the FastPass queue still took 25 minutes. You can also only have one FastPass active at any one time, and the longest queue was for Peter Pan again with FastPass machines switched off. Europeans not used to the heat and it still amazes me that Disney can’t fork out a few quid to cover the queuing areas. As it was we saw one woman pass out in the queue for Peter Pan.

The parade was rather short and disappointed Clarissa who had fond memories from a trip many years ago when she stayed at the rather wonderful Bayport view.

I came away from Disney Land a little unimpressed, it was very busy and really is aimed at young children and their parents. I couldn’t help but feel suffocated in Main Street with almost every shop selling a variety of garish Disney merchandise. There are a few exceptions such as the photographic store, the hair dressers, the story shop and a couple of the food bars but would it kill Disney to try and theme the shop to what it says on the outside or stock merchandise that’s less in-your-face. Many designer brands get away with small logos and the Disney ears could be very subtle yet easily recognisable…

One pleasant surprise was the restaurant located right next to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride which had a wonderful atmosphere, the ride itself passing through it at one point. Through my own oversight we missed Pooh’s story time and the main indoor show.

Walt Disney Studios

This whole park was new to Clarissa and myself and made up for my disappointments with the main park. Access was included in our three day hopper passes and everything in here was impressive from the back lot studio tour with it’s great physical effects to the Aerosmith themed indoor roller-coaster (which stopped part way through and we got to see it all with the lights on), the space-station simulation ride, a build-your-own-virtual-roller-coaster played back in a 360′ simulator, and a live stunt show.

This stunt show deserves a special mention, it was quite possibly the most impressive thing I’ve ever seen in person. Five cars driving at high speed performing stunts, jumps, two-wheels, simulated crashes with people being shot and falling from the top of buildings to motorbikes doing stoppies, crashing and the riders catching fire. The most amazing thing was it all worked perfectly and that these guys perform all this twice a day… Wow!

Queues were very short, about 5-10 minutes maximum and there were very few shops instead there were many things to look at such as the Disney history and the tour of Disney Europe’s actual TV studio which is hosted here. You could learn about how a Disney character comes to life (in this case Mushu from Mulan) or enrol in a drawing class and learn how to draw the mouse himself. Most impressive!

Still to come… Versailles, the The Château of Valançay and Parc Asterix!

[)amien

The timetables from Saint Malo are sketchy at best and we still needed to get around between Saint Malo, Disneyland, Paris and Charles De Gaulle airport. So with haste I equipped my Nissan Silvia S14 (200SX) with the headlight converters, first-aid kit, warning triangle, jump leads and a spare bulb kit. A map, torch and compass may also be useful if I can find decent ones locally, failing that I’ll muddle through. It is being serviced tomorrow night and hopefully the Pioneer iPod adapter will spark to life too.

I’m a little nervous about driving in France again, the last two trips I’ve hired a left-hand-drive car so I kept to the “you still need to be sitting in the middle of the road, just like back home” school of thought to keep me driving on the right.

With my car being obviously right-hand-drive it might make for unfortunately interesting times. I’ve also been warned that the French police now hand out some pretty severe on-the-spot speeding fines but I doubt I’ll be going fast enough to garner any attention from them.

Okay, I promised some travel tips;

1. When booking items individually start with the items that have the best refund policy or failing that, the cheapest.
2. Don’t book late at night – systems update, become unavailable and prices suddenly recalculate. Tired eyes could also miss a painful typo.
3. Some budget airlines won’t appear on LastMinute, Expedia or Travelocity. Head over to the airport official web sites for arrival/departure timetables to find out if any budget airlines service your route.
4. If you don’t want to fork out for route finding or GPS gear then try the free route planners from ViaMichelin (indicates speed cameras) or RAC (more detailed inner-city directions).
5. If staying in a country for more than a week and using a mobile phone consider acquiring a local prepay SIM card. As well as saving a small fortune in receiving/making calls and text messages you can text the temporary number to only the important people to keep holiday interruptions to a minimum. You will need to ensure your mobile is not locked to a specific network SIM – this is often the case with heavily discounted phones offered with a contract.
6. While Lonely Planet and Rough Guides are jam packed with useful information you may find the fun and educational DK Eyewitness Travel Guides more useful for short trips.
7. Visit cash machines on holiday with your Visa Debit card to obtain local money at a good rate without having to mess around with travellers cheques and rip-off currency exchange shops.

“You’ve got kittens!”

While I’m used to the odd cutesy kitten picture in my e-mail inbox having them turn up to play in your desks in-tray is much more fun.

[)amien