Safely Back Home, and Back On the Internet

During the rest of my European vacation I had little opportunity to get back online for anything other than travel planning and emailing home. Lisa and I continued to cram as much into each day as possible, and any time I tried to spend with the Internet was much shorter than I needed.

The hostel in Dublin was a very large one, called Avalon House. This photo is from their website. There where six PCs and a sign asking you to limit your use to twenty minutes when others were waiting. Twenty minutes just isn't very long. Lisa and I were trying to make her final travel plans. Would she meet up with her friends from school to finish the week, or should she head back home? Was there available space in the hostel they'd chosen in Edinburgh? Could she get a train from London (where we would be when I took a plane back to the US), and then transportation back to her town in France for a reasonable price? When would her friends be arriving and departing Edinburgh, London, Paris and arriving back at school? Lisa e-mailed one of her friends and had to wait for an answer, and we tried studying transportation route websites, but twenty minutes, even on two PCs, again is really brief.

We found Google or Rick Steves' website to be the most helpful for locating information about transportation or places to stay. There is a graffiti wall on his site where other travelers post their opinions about places they have stayed. We used one of these recommendations to locate the hotel/B&B where we would stay in London. The names of two B&B's, including the Blades Hotel, were given at Rick Steves' website, and we were able to locate the two facilities' websites using Google. The websites told us where the places were located (both not far from Victoria Station in London) and I copied the information and phone number into my little journal/notebook (a very helpful tool), since the PCs at hostels have no printer. Then we got out the international calling card that we'd bought (and that Kevin had added money to, from home), and we called them up. We found that when we got to the pay phone at the Avalon House that it had cheap rates for calling other countries, so we emptied our pockets of coins (in Euros) and placed two calls. Lisa helped me with the country code and plugged the coins (her eyes are better than mine and some of the coins look too much alike), and I did the talking.

The first place had no vacancies for the nights we needed, but the Blades Hotel had a room for £85 a night -- not bad for London; about $119. I took down directions for us to get there from Victoria Station, which we would reach by train after our plane landed at London Gatwick Airport on Monday, 13 April.

If I'd had more lead time we could have done this by email, but when I'd tried to check availability of some places in Germany several weeks before we would be in Germany, I found that the email replies would come days after I'd written, which made that process somewhat frustrating. We couldn't afford to wait a few days when making these London arrangements. The same had happened when we were in Paris and decided to try making reservations in Germany. We ultimately reached a woman who spoke no English and then another who spoke little English, but we secured a reservation with the second (I think the first was telling me that they weren't open yet for tourist season). Again these two places in Germany had been recommended by Rick Steves. The Tulsa City-County Library carries his books, and he updates them each year so that his details are pretty reliable.

Another source for our booking places was hostelworld.com. Lisa found the 3 Ducks in Paris and the Sudfanne Hostel in Heidelburg, and Kevin found Avalon House in Dublin, using hostelworld.com. The 3 Ducks had been extremely noisy, but we'd been warned at the hostelworld.com website that it would be. So we can't fault them for that.

I had my iPod Touch with me, which has a little bitty screen, but which will connect with the Internet using Apple's Safari browser. It's a little slow to enter words into search boxes or to zoom in and out of various web pages, but there is no twenty minute limit. While I did laundry at the hostel early one morning, I found a sofa not far away and typed some emails to send home.

I was continually trying to fix a problem on my iPod with the Mail application. We use Macintosh computers at home and each of my daughters have MacBooks (and so does my mother), and on these we use the standard email application called Mail. I composed some emails and a blog entry to email using Mail on the iPod, but never could get it to "go." I use Cox for my Internet service provider and so I needed to interface with their system properly, but my iPod reportedly had issues with the outgoing server settings. Doesn't sound much like vacation, does it? So I sent an email to Cox asking for their help, but even when they sent an email with the settings (for a Mac, not for an iPod), my emails couldn't be sent. So, those emails are still stuck in my "Out" box.

I was able to email, though, using the web-based Cox Webmail. Through the tiny browser I can call up the cox.net website and login to my email accounts. So, I could see my incoming messages, reply if I wanted, and compose new emails. I could even delete some of the numerous emails that had been arriving while I'd been away from home. I use Cox's Webmail at other times when I want to access my email and I'm away from home.

Lisa checked her email the same way -- either her OU email or her other web-based email account. She posted some to her blog, too. We had no way to post her photos to her blog or to our emails, though, because that would have involved downloading the digital pictures from her camera to a computer. That would have to wait until she got back to her computer. She was using SD cards -- tiny little memory cards that hold maybe 700 pictures each. She ultimately took them back to school with her and will be sending them to me now that she has copied all of the pictures to her MacBook. So, I have had to tell everyone asking to see pictures that I don't have them, but that they'll be coming.

While Lisa was in charge of taking the pictures (after all, her major is Photography), I borrowed my dad's camcorder and tried to capture the experience through video. I would stand in an open area, turn on the camera and start recording, turning in a full circle while random strangers did whatever they do. I especially enjoyed capturing the sounds, including the various languages spoken. I taped the loud buses, the traffic signal beeps, the street performers' music, and occasionally the chimes of a cathedral. Lisa could capture the detail in the sights we were seeing -- castles, monuments, flower gardens, and whatever her artistic eye spotted in a bit of graffiti or a brightly-painted door -- while I tried to capture the feeling of the place where we walking, hearing, seeing. Lisa didn't really agree with my choices of subjects, so I hope that my pans turn out to be good anyway. Be sure to read Lisa's blog posts, too.

I also tried to take video through windows or from the top of a double-decker bus. These are bound to be poor, especially those taken through dirty windows, but I really wanted to show what I was seeing. I even took some video from a few airplanes. The countryside of Ireland, seen from the train we took from Dublin to Cork and then back again, may be a blur, but hopefully there will be a little that will show what I was seeing. When I was on a train and I saw something that I'd like to film, it would be gone by the time I got the camera in place and the record button pressed. And, if the train came upon some good scenery and I wanted to pan from side to side, invariably the train would enter a section with a high embankment or a row of dense trees, which obstructed the view. Oh well, it'll be raw footage that may contain some sections worth using in an iMovie that I hope to create with Lisa's pictures and my video. I know that at least Kevin, Erin, and my parents will want to see it. Maybe it'll be short enough that I could share it somehow at work, too. I know that Lisa and I will want to see it later, to remember our wonderful trip.

As we were walking across one of the bridges in Paris my first video tape was near the end. Lisa snapped pictures of the street performers in the middle of the bridge -- a five-piece ensemble including some string instruments (or maybe all strings?) I'll have to see if I have the answer to that on the video tape.

I think I ended up taking a second video tape and much of a third. I haven't watched and labeled all of them yet, now that I'm back home. I'm still catching up on sleep and spending some time with Kevin, Erin, my parents, and friends.