General Blog – Page 15 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

October 4, 2013

Rhine – Day Nine – Black hearts and round wheels

After a night bumping into locks, today we ended up on Amsterdam. Interesting city, of course, with all the bikes. No, I mean ALL THE BIKES. Unless you’ve been here, you have no idea how many bikes are here. Racks and racks of bikes. Every street has a bike lane. Bikes rule the city. While this might seem like Nirvana for me given my interest in bicycling, it didn’t come across as a particularly friendly city. Pedestrians are threatened by cars and bikes. People toss the finger and curse each other with great abandon. So, no, I don’t think I […]

October 5, 2013

Rhine – Day Ten – Broke her crown

The morning of debarkation. We’ve put the suitcases out in the hall with ribbons to show our transfer to the hotel. I’m walking down the hall, toting my carryon, calling out to an Aussie I knew. And JB, somewhere behind me and following, trips on some sheets left in the halls by the cleaners and faceplants. Crash! At first I was pretty angry – how embarrassing. Everyone’s standing around cooing and she can’t seem to tell where she hurts. I thought she was just shaken. But no, she can’t move her left arm. I’ll give them this – Avalon (the […]

October 6, 2013

Rhine – Day Eleven – Lemonade

You gotta be kidding me. The phone did not ring. TRAVEL INSURED INTL denied the claim and the special flight out. Why? How could they leave a woman in a foreign country with a broken arm? It turns out their non-English-speaking doctor did not fill out the O2 entry in the documentation he was supposed to provide (he only had a simple satchel with him, with no means of measuring it anyway). And I even had included (with the eight pages of documentation the insurance company wanted) his own form with the FIT TO FLY box checked, AND the hospital’s […]

October 7, 2013

Rhine – Day Twelve – Homeward Bound and Travel Thoughts

I think it was the dread of traveling again via air that kept me awake most the night. After all, I’m dealing with all the crap, along with a wife with a broken wing. In preparation, we repacked everything down and condensed it into our two checkins and one carry bag. One very heavy carry bag. And I’m the bag who carries it. The driver was on time – thank goodness – but dropped us at the wrong terminal. Yes, we were flying UNITED AIRLINES but it was actually Lufthansa. This mean a good hike to our checkin gate. I […]

February 19, 2014

Disnificartion

I’m getting rid of my little yellow bug. I loved that car. Got it back in 2000, back when they were new and different. When we drove up through Georgia, people came out of the service station to gawk at it. I was the coolest uncle ever. On the road it handled well, and after all these years the controls feel as comfortable to me as the hilt of a samurai’s sword. My fingers know where everything is. No fumbling. Second nature. But over the recent years the relationship soured. There was the fact that even though that car spends […]

March 1, 2014

The new car

I‘m out of Orlando, driving over to Palm Bay for a fun model railroad ops session. Nobody else could go – the invite list is tight and my buddy has a cold and backed out. So it’s just me. And that’s fine. I’m finally getting a chance to get my new Mini Cooper out of the city, to let it loose on the wide open road. I’ve got the windows down, the sunroof open, and its a balmy 74 degrees. The sun’s just overhead, so sliding the shade forward screens me. The car’s flying along at 80+mph, sipping gas in […]

March 12, 2014

Corporate 5K – it begins!

I like trains, but not training. Big difference! We’ve got that corporate 5k coming up and that means jogging so I don’t totally humiliate myself. This time, the wife is coming (for the walk). Me, I’m jogging again. Hopefully, with better shoes and stretching exercises, I won’t suffer a repeat of last year (cramps, pulled muscles, a month of pain and a slow jog in the event (but, dammit, I made it)). So now, Tuesday and Thursday noontime, my work friend Manjula and I are training together (Omar, he’s somewhere back there someplace). We’ll jog around the neighborhood behind the building, […]

March 16, 2014

Bikes are now a private thing…

It’s not that I’m not riding the bike to work. I’m still keeping to my three times a week, showing the world (and America, specifically) that bikes are authentic and practical transportation. It’s just that I haven’t written about them for a while and the site is now focused on writing, book reviews and model train events (one of my other passions). To clear things up, I’ve dropped the bike blog. I’ll still mention interesting and death-defying events while riding, but it will be on my general blog. Been thinking about this for a while – I’m just so busy […]

April 18, 2014

Special K

It was my second 5k. Haven’t mentioned it, but these things really get in the way of writing (and lunches, and comfort). We’ve been training at work (a couple of coworkers and myself) for weeks now, jogging pretty much ever lunch time, three miles through a tree-less neighborhood under a hot tropical sun (except for that time it poured on us). I got to the point where I wouldn’t stop, and could do three miles in something like 35 minutes. That’s about as good as it gets with this old body. So we went over to Eola Park at 3pm […]

April 30, 2014

Is this thing on?

I don’t remember when the last time I checked this was – my CONTACT ME option in the left menu column. And I don’t know why I went and tried it now. But today, out of whimsy, I posted myself an email while at work, from my site. It didn’t work. I clicked it a dozen times. Nothing. Oh, I’d get a form, all with who you were, a numeric anti-bot check, all that stuff. But no message went through. Then I went online and looked up my version of Joomla and guess what – a lot of people were […]