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Realising that the US visa isn’t going to be coming through any time soon with the jobsworth’s continuing to balls things up and cause further delays, I figured that rather than all my savings just slipping away on things I don’t really want or need (you know, bills and stuff…), I’d make the most of having an abundance of time on my hands + cash in my pocket to go travel somewhere I’ve always fancied. As much as Ireland + Wales were a good getaway, they didn’t really feel like holidays being so close to home!

So, 3 weeks in Japan should just about do it! Flying out on 6th September until 27th September and nabbing a Japan Rail Pass to zoom out of Tokyo to Mt. Fuji, Kyota, Osaka, Nara + Hiroshima, as well as north up to Nikko, Sendai + Matsushima (plus maybe Kakunodate + Akita) on the ‘shinkansen’ – bullet trains

That’s the plan anyways, but I’m open to ideas if anyone has suggestions on places to go and things to do in Japan!

Another competition over on the Unsigned Rock Podcast is for your chance to win a copy of The Eisenhowers latest album ‘Almost Half Undressed’ – simply send me an e-mail to unsignedrockpodcast@gmail.com with the subject line of ‘Give me free album’ or drop me through your details on the contact page.

There’s 3 copies of this excellent album to give away, and I’ll be running this competition for a couple of weeks so give it a try! Check out the last couple of podcasts for some of their tracks – failing that, check out their website for more info on the band, and you can also purchase the album directly.

Well, Wales was different. Much like the Paddywagon tour of Ireland, I quite enjoyed it though dunno if I’d be in any mad rush to go back! Staying in hostels for the 2 nights of the tour was cool though as you get a better chance to get to know the other folks on the tour, especially with it only being 3 days!

The first day included a bit of a hike across to Wales out of the London traffic, especially with it all starting off at 7.15a.m! Across the Severn Bridge we stopped at Tintern Abbey which was a pretty cool ruined abbey, with the major external walls still standing. After that, it was off to Caerphilly for lunch by the castle, with the tower having a greater lean angle than the leaning tower of Pisa! Also, Caerphilly is meant to be the teenage pregnancy capital of Wales, and full of chavs!

The night in Abergavenny was okay with the pub quiz going down well, even though we ended plum bottom (not surprising since we weren’t exactly being too serious with our answers…), and then chatting with Jeff the quiz-master until late into the evening with his stories! The hostel was terrible though, and anyone looking at doing the Welsh Dragon tour with Haggis should be well aware of this! Only 2 toilets + showers, with one of those showers blocking up with the slighest amount of water meaning you’re standing with water to your ankles and need to wait an age to clear from the previous person’s shower! Cramped kitchen + dining area didn’t help either.

But, onto Hay-on-the-Wye, the 2nd hand book capital of the world or something, and later on in the afternoon to Castell-y-Bere. This was a Welsh castle, one of their largest built, and one of the last to be taken by the English. The ruins stand quite nicely and give excellent views of the surrounding valleys. Most people enjoyed the sunshine + quiet!

We drove right through the Snowdonia National Park, and just about got to see Snowdon itself through the hazy sunshine which was nice, though even though our bus wasn’t the largest I’ve been in for a tour, it certainly caused some problems on the roads and in little towns especially! I could fully understand the other motorists getting annoyed, and as much as I appreciated being driven around the national park, I felt at some points the roads just weren’t designed for such vehicles and was a little irresponsible to drive on them.

Our 2nd night was in Caernafon, and I really liked this little town. The hostel was a world’s apart from Abergavenny – eletronic front door lock, nice open, light + breezy 6-person dorms, 2-4 huge power showers on each level for between 6-12 people, etc. We ate at the Floating Restaurant, seen in on the river in front of the castle in the photo, though we didn’t join in the night-life. A few others did and found it lacking, though enjoyed laughing at the locals!

I didn’t know where the idea of the Prince of Wales came from to the current day, and we were told the story – how the Welsh were tricked into having the representative they required actually being the king’s son, and thus bringing the tradition of the king’s 1st child being classed as Prince of Wales. The ceremony is still held in Caernafon castle, and is where Prince William will be crowned when Prince Charles takes his seat as King.

The 3rd day started out early again at 8a.m, and signalled a lot of driving. We headed over onto the isle of Anglesy for the longest place name in Europe. Yup, a right mouthful! There’s a nice phonetic spelling on the photo here, though even then it’s all a mumble of letters!

After a big hike, we stopped off in Stratford-upon-Avon to check out some of the sights of Shakespear’s home town which I wasn’t impressed with. No real desire to go for a wander with so many people packing the streets. Another long hike brought us back into London around 7.30p.m, which basically finished off a very long day of driving!

Overall, the tour was a nice overview of Wales, but it all seemed so rushed. Why they try to cram it into 3 days, I’m not too sure. Making it 4 days would be much better, and cut down on the long drive back to London. As much as I really got along with our tour guide, Marie, who knew all the Welsh history spot-on too, it did seem to kinda spoil things by being driven around Wales with an English guide. In Scotland + Ireland, you seemed to get a bit more passion + pride with the stories and legends, which was a bit lacking here. Again, Marie was great and have no arguments with her as the tour guide, but I feel this trip might have been better served with a Welsh guide. But, guess it’s not really a big enough seller to warrant a dedicated driver

But, other than the first hostel in Abergavenny which everyone, including Marie, agreed was terrible, the Welsh Dragon tour would be nice for anyone over to the UK touring. Although I still maintain it’s nice for us Brits to tour our own country, I wouldn’t say it was quite worth it unless you from abroad as it just didn’t feel like much of a holiday or experience, nor give a good idea as to the history like I got in Scotland + Ireland.

Anyone after some more photos can check out the Welsh Dragon album in the photo gallery!

With the red hot weather breaking, rain predicted, and the mad rush on the trains with the school holidays starting, we’re off to London in an hour or so before heading out on the Welsh Dragon 3-day tour of Wales (funninly enough!). Should be good, though it does mean a worringly early start of 7a.m to get our bags thrown on the bus before heading out of London!

Get back on the Sunday evening, but we’re then gonna take all Monday in London itself so hopefully the weather will stay warm + clear as the hotel is right next to Hyde Park! All being well, should get back into Durham on Tuesday afternoon.

Having been using the MacBook for a month or so, I’ve been getting itchy fingers with not being able to tinker as much as when running Linux. In a way, this might explain why I haven’t had anything crash, lock-up or re-act erratically…

But, with more + more music getting dumped onto the fairly paltry 60Gb hard drive (I’ve got a Seagate 250Gb USB HDD now too ), I was keen to save a bit of space. Enter Monolingual. This nifty little app certainly takes it time to accomplish what you tell it to do, but it’s worth it! It lets you remove any un-necessary language packs, keyboard layouts and architecture builds. Removing the language packs alone saved me over 2.5Gb, and the PPC architecture data a further 800Mb or so. That’s still not a bad saving though! All helps, I suppose. I’ve already tidied up iPhoto which at first I found chunky, but quite like now, and using smart albums is quite nice to automatically update things as photos are added/deleted/updated.

Another cool little app I’ve started using is Vienna RSS reader. I just haven’t been able to find anything decent to handle reading all my RSS feeds which is why I’ve using Gregarius almost all the time (yes, I know, the plugin never happened as I was simply using a bookmarklet to quickly handle things!), as Thunderbird just couldn’t cut it. But, Vienna is very nice indeed, and I like the smart articles idea again which lets you collect all unread articles together which again automatically updates as you read/delete/tag them.

Finally, thanks to Feedburner which provide the RSS feeds for both fouldsy.com and my podcast, the Unsigned Rock Podcast is currently sitting prettily on the front page of feedburner.com! They posted some comments I made a couple of months back just as I was starting the podcast on their Feedburner Buzz blog (direct link to my buzz bit!) which has been drawing in an awful lot of traffic. I think it’s pretty cool, as the Unsigned Rock Podcast is starting to draw quite a bit of attention actually – expect some big news soon!

With Kat over here for another few weeks and parts of family wandering off on holidays soon, my parents organised a cool engagement / going away party for the two of us. Held at the Hallgarth Manor, Durham on Saturday night I’ve just got the photos all sorted! Check them all out in my photo gallery.

It was nice to get to see members of the family from down London way which I don’t get to see very often, but Kat was a bit overwhelmed with so many new faces, especially with a number of duplicate names and very similar names!

Still, no-one fell over from too much alcohol and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves Once Kat heads back to the US, looks like I’m still going to be around for a good while yet with the immigration department continually failing to do anything useful, so will probably head down to London to visit people again before I eventually fly off (whenever that is!).

Also, Kat + I spent the afternoon at Finchale Abbey a few days ago, and a few photos are available in the gallery too.

Well, just about made it back from our Paddywagon Tours 6-day tour of Ireland. Kinda got mixed feelings about it all to be honest. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting – I dunno why, but Ireland was a lot more similar to England than I was expecting and wasn’t all that impressive as Scotland. The west coast, especially the south west and Slea Head around the Dingle peninsula was very cool, as was the Belfast Taxi tour taking you onto Shankle Road and housing estates, Belfast peace wall and offices of Sinn Fein was good too.

Anyways, a lot of the first couple of days was centered around the conflicts in Northern Ireland. I didn’t realise all the different parties involved, and that were those on the Protestant side just as happy to use extreme force to stay within the UK, as well as the IRA and others using force to make it all a Republic. The walking tour of Derry was quite poor, though it was late in the day and the guide had already done a couple of tours that day and had rushed to us from a previous large group.

The Giant’s Causeway really wasn’t overly impressive for me. I dunno, maybe we were there at high tide and when the tide washes out a lot more becomes visible, but I don’t think so. Most of the photos are very moody and atmospheric, which just didn’t come across whilst we were there. Still a nice walk though!

Further round the coast, Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge was quite cool. A rope bridge connecting the small island to the mainland, which originally was traversed by fishermen using the island to catch fish by being able to cast their nets off whichever side the fish were schooling. Although the weather wasn’t too good with a constant light rain, it was still pretty clear looking around the island, though crossing the bridge and climbing the wooden steps back onto the mainland was fun in the wet!

The Belfast Taxi tour really impressed me. Not from a touristy point of view, but because I’d heard so much on the news whilst growing up but never fully understanding things. Both Charlie and Connor, our guides from Paddywagon did a good job explaining things, but George our taxi driver then took us right onto the Shankle Road, Shankle Estate, head-quateres of Sinn Fein and the Belfast Peace Wall. Going to places I’ve seen to many times on the news with all sorts of riots, fires, shootings, etc. going on and standing there myself was quite weird. Charlie had mentioned the previous day about protection money he pays in Derry and Belfast, and how painting the Paddy’s Palace hostel in Belfast bright green as with the other hostels wasn’t really a good idea since it was in the heart of Protestant Belfast. Someone asked Connor if he was worried about being in a bright green bus around this area and he casually dismissed it, saying “I’ll be driving so fast you’ll just see a blur” and as we headed back into the Republic of Ireland he came true to form!

The Cliffs of Moah (probably spelt wrong!) were impressive, and this is where the local guide paid off. When we first rocked up, Connor realised the weather wasn’t going to give a good view of the cliffs, so we headed down the road for lunch instead. By the time we returned, the rain had eased up, the sun came out, and all was good again!

Heading down to the River Shannon was a nice little drive, and even though we missed our intended ferry crossing, it was only half an hour before we caught another one. This is where some of the stories came out about what the guides have done with other tours. Things such as getting people to hide in the boot if they didn’t have their passport after being told since they were crossing the river they’d need and the inspectors were coming around… I quite like boat trips, and this was a nice 20-25 minutes ride.

Up in the mountains, the Randy Leprechaun is a hostel + pub joined together and owned by Paddywagon Tours. It’s a really nice pub, and the guys managed to organise some live music to kick off. 2/3 people ended up grabbing the guitar and standing up, which then carried on well into the early hours of the morning in back room of the hostel! How long the pub will stay painted bright green with the pressure the local council is exerting is unknown, but I liked it, and the locals didn’t seem to have any objections – the amount of business being brought into the village probably makes it bearable!

The drive around Slea Head was very pretty, going around the most Westerly point of Ireland, including islands inhabited until the 1950′s using age-old traditions and speaking completely in Irish without much idea of the outside world! We then headed into Dingle for lunch which was a scenic touristy town, not much to my liking but was nice to get away from the town and across to the far side of the harbour:

The last night on tour took us to Kilarney, another nice, pretty touristy town. A choice of horse-back riding through the Kilarney National Park or a horse + coach ride was available, and since most of us were lazy, the coach ride was where we ended up! Very peaceful, if only I could have understood the accent! I would have liked more time to explore the parks, and the south west of Ireland is probably the only area I’d be looking at coming back too, and Kat was of the same opinion. More drinks were called for, with the Granary displaying an amazing collection guitars which had been loaned to the pub by a collector who needed some extra room at home. Hell, he could donate a couple to me!

Another long day on the bus for our last day, which was something I was a bit disappointed about, along with a few others on the bus, led us to Blarney Castle. Kissing the Blarney Stone was a must, even though the idea of kissing a stone which is kissed thousands of times a day for a number of years wasn’t too good from a hygiene point of view! A long hike back up to Dublin was broken by a stop off for lunch and a nice audio/visual tour of a local castle (forget the name!), and we the got into Dublin around 6p.m.

Overall, the tour was a nice trip around Ireland with some good craic with the people on tour and with the guides. I wouldn’t really go do it again as other than the south west, there wasn’t really anything that jumped out and said “come back and visit this place again!”. The accomodation on Paddywagon tour was awesome – we were expecting your run-of-the-mill bed & breakfast, but in Belfast we were in a Holiday Inn Express, and in Galway we were in a very swish hotel. You maybe missed out a little by not staying in the hostel’s as you didn’t spend much time with the other guys on the tour, but the extra room, en-suite facilities, cooked breakfast, etc. made up for it!

I’d also say some of the places where the guides chose to stop weren’t always ideal or made sense. On our first day, yeah, we had a long hike from Dublin up to Londonderry, but we stopped in a service station with joined on small restaurant and take-away. On our third day, we drove right through an area with 6,000-7,000 years of history, dozens of stone circles, massive burial chambers, etc. which was all explained in good detail, but we then stopped in a town where an appartion of the Virgin Mary appeared meaning a huge tourist
drive with a dozen taps bumping out holy water, and ice creams for sale all over the place. Most people weren’t overly religious so weren’t interested in going into the church itself, but even we had wanted to explore, it was only a 20 minute stop for a bathroom break + grab a drink.

Dublin itself was also very disappointing. I can’t for the life of me think why people rave about the place so much, other than because flights are cheap so they’re going for a night out, then flying back. We took a tour bus around the city, and only Phoenix Parks looked good, and maybe the Guiness Brewery, but you’re stuck inside for hours anyways. The traffic in Dublin was awful and took so long to move around by bus or taxi. It’s not really somewhere I’d be keen to go back to, and is weird that a city with so much history didn’t have a great deal going on other than shopping areas and churches that all looked the same!

But, if you want more photos, check out the following links:

• Northern Ireland
• Belfast Taxi tour
• Republic of Ireland

We’re off to London on Thursday afternoon for a 3/4 day tour of Wales which should be good, or at least I hope so! Gonna have a day in London, and maybe a day in York too on the way back up, so hopefully there’ll be some good stories and photos to put up from there too!

Well, off to the airport in an hour or so to fly away to Dublin. Booked in on a week’s backpacking trip with Paddywagon Tours which should be good. Goes right around Ireland, and so long as the weather holds up like this will be really nice! Seems to be very similar to the MacBackpackers tour I did last Easter which I really enjoyed.

It’s all worked out to give us very little time in Dublin itself though, as we won’t get in until early evening, and fly out just after lunchtime next Thursday, but hopefully we’ll at least be able to catch an open-top tour bus like we did in Edinburgh last weekend to get to see some of the sights + sounds!

All being well, should be back next Thursday with a stack of photos!

After being given a couple of tickets for The Des Moines Riot’s gig at Henry’s Cellar Bar on Friday night, we decided to make a weekend of it. Usual chaos with the trains – 4.19p.m non-existant, so we’re told to get on 3-coach train that pulled in at 4.37p.m. Told to get off at Newcastle and go across the bridge to platform 4 to get the train to Edinburgh, although the ticket inspector had informed us to stay onboard. So we starts walking across the bridge and realise we’d actually pulled in to platform 4. Back onto the train, and they then say we’ll depart at 5.30p.m, only to find a little after 5 we leave.

Ah well, got there in the end! The gig was excellent, and nice to meet the guys from the band. Check out the Unsigned Rock Podcast #16 for 5 tracks from their 9-track set!

I also met up with Ewan Spence from TPN Rock, an excellent podcast that’s been going on for well over a year. We had a lot of stuff to talk about, and he was very supportive of my podcast. Put some ideas my way which could be very interesting, so watch this space. But, most importantly, he took me off to get a deep-fried Mars Bar which was actually pretty good – that’s Ewan on the right in the photo above waiting for my reaction after taking a bite!

On Saturday, we met up with Wulf, an old work colleague who originally hired me to work on the SuSE Linux support team. He’s living just outside Edinburgh now and turned out to be a really good day – lunch, coffees, a hike up Carlton Hill and the tower, followed by ice-cream in the park and watching some of the football!

Sunday started out a bit wet. but after drying off the sun came out and we took an open-top tour bus around the city for an hour or so which was really nice. It’s the kind of thing worth doing at the start of your weekend as you get a 24-hour ticket which lets you basically use the tour buses to travel around from attraction to attraction and gives some good discounts too.

Got a decent number of photos in the image gallery if anyone gets bored!

But, off to Ireland on Thursday for a 6 day tour with Paddywagon Tours which should be really good!