2011 – Europe and Japan
Foodie report…
Went to St John Restaurant last night!
The restaurant was quite noisy with a couple of large parties. Service was generally good, with a few long waits tarnishing the experience a bit. The food however is absolutely wonderful. It is a clean, minimal and traditional. Nothing over complicated. It highlights the best of British food.
He had potted pork with pickled cabbage, saddle of rabbit with courgettes with sides of spring vegetables and potatoes. Followed by shared Chocloate Cake and course of freshly backed Madeleines (awesome!!). She had brown shrimp and cabbage salad, pigeon and radishses.
I’d recommend everyone visit. It is a good contrast to the more complicated French food and it shows that the British traditions certainly have much to offer.
The Saturday morning technology report!
Well every holiday seems to involve a series of compromises in relation to the technology required to take photos and blog. This time we’ve ditched the hacked Dell Mini running Mac OS X and external hard drive. We have replaced it with two iPads, a photo back-up (Sanho iPad Hyperdrive), wireless router (for fixed internet in hotel rooms). Don’t forget three cameras!!
Well for those contemplating this setup I can provide some advice. The iPads work wonderfully well. Flickr Stackr is a great App fro managing your Flickr account (You can’t use all of the Flickr online functions on iPad’s Safari), Photoshop Express is great for a quick crop, rotate and touch-up. I can not be so glowing about WordPress application for blogging, it seems to have unexplained problems uploading sometimes. I find Flickr’s blog to WordPress function the easiest way to get a photo onto the blog.
The biggest problem is that a typical holiday could involved 40gb of photos, no iPad can handle that. The largest available is 64gb and with Apps and Music that is cutting it fine. So here steps in the Sanho iPad Hyperdrive. It is a portable, battery powered hardrive. It pretends to be a camera card so it can upload photos to the iPad. It also offers incremental backups. Sounds great? It did, we bought one. It has, in my opinion, very flakey operating software. I have had to format the harddrive twice and it seems to have problems with incremental back-ups. In no way would I recommend it someone for a road-trip.
So what gives? Well Apple has made a great platform with the the iPad, but Apple either needs to release a larger iPad (128gb or 256gb would be nice) or it needs to offer a better way of having external storage. Until that time it is a bit of a hassle for a long-road trip. I also hope that the next version of iOS makes it easier to delete events or photo albums on the iPad, currently it seems you can only delete a photo at a time! Ickkk that could cause RSI!
Your on the road technical advisor!
Thunderstorm in Avranches
This is what the TDF looks like in the middle of a thunderstorm when ones umbrella has just blown inside-out.
Yes, it was still a buzz!!
We had just successfully chased and beaten the Peleton. We couldn’t make Mont St Michel. This was a few more kms down the road.
A rainy start to stage 4 in Lorient
Rain has a tendency to put a dampener on events – especially while on holiday. However for us, it gave us the advantage.
We drove in early to Lorient…. And spent 25+ mins walking to the start, as today’s TDF started near the submarine base (makes sense – away from the centre of town). It all looked good, slightly over cast, and cool. The biggest decision of the morning was “do we wait near the actual start or go where cyclist will be signing on?”. Given we had 3 hours before the start, we decided to go with the sign on area, even though we weren’t on the barrier to get the best view.
Entertainment during this time took the form of TDF sponsors giving out food, newspapers, and a range of promotional products which are meaningless to us. There were kids, men in costumes, and a band, but at 10:30 the overcast sky started to rain on their parade – and us.
The sprint at 200m to go.
We waited more than eight hours for this! Lucky we had our friends from the Tour de France sponsors to keep us going for all of those eight hours. Some of the locals come as a replacement shopping trip! See the earlier post.
No person need go hungry on tour
The caravan is an amazing temple to consumerism. Like a Christmas Pageant on steroids a very long cavalcade of vehicles with pretty young things gyrating to pulsating dance music travel for the length of each stage. Alternating between taunting and delighting the crowd. The objective is to get the spectators to worship the products. This year a sausage maker is celebrating 40 years – the crowd sings its Happy Birthday in French. The sweet manufacturer has the crowd chanting its name. The bottled water supplier sprays the crowds with water while conducting acrobatic contortions from a slow moving truck. There are banks, newspapers, betting operators, television channels, the police and fireman are represented.
The photo is some of the stuff we have collected in two days. We need buy no more water, madeleines, sweets, snack foods while in France. I have a hat for every occasion, a baguette back (one of the best), pens, bottle openers, washing detergent (yes, that’s right we can wash our clothes), hand clappers, and to Helen’s delight three massive PMU hands.
After 5 Panches (A no alcohol beer freely served to the crowd), Helen was a convert. Oh did I mention the fresh bread and Nutella! If only I were a kid!
If only it passed through poor districts or visited the homeless!
What is it?
Okay… It’s big and white… But what does it have to do with the Tour de France?
Darn good question… But it does help to pass time.
TDF post to come. Too tired.
Subway eat your heart out ……
You may all be expecting a TDF report, but you probably have a better idea of what is happening than I do. We stayed the night in a gorgeous (well priced) guest house at Les Rosaires beach. It has no wifi or tv in our room. A great break from it all (sounding like a person who has been on holiday for weeks and not the actual few days we have).
I digress, the purpose of this post is to share with you the wonders of the French boulangerie and what were described as American sandwiches. They are quite simply what subway should be. A well sized (I.e. Not overdone) piece of fresh baguette (yes, real bread) with a very simple but tasty fillings (no choice overload). Best thing is you can get a fresh pastry and an oragina and the cost for all of it is €10 (for 2 people!!!), that’s cheaper than a footlong and Subway meal deal for one in Australia. What gives?
The photo is one of Helen’s.
Ah.. So to the tour
Leaving Nantes we headed for the feed station… Well at least we attempted to head to St. Mars de Coutais. However, surprisingly when you type in the name of the town on the GPS guide it doesn’t exist. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m not familiar with the roads here…. So you can imagine the few choice words uttered in the vehicle. Thankfully we saw a road side information bay (hooray!), it was then I worked out we were onto wrong side of Nantes with under an hour before the caravan was due to pass the feed station.
Thankfully, we were able to enter a larger town name into the GPS, and we were off again. You know you are on the right road when you see a large number of French people on bikes. After parking the car on the side of the road (along with everyone else) we walked towards the route to wait for the caravan to drive by.
