Traveling

Paul posted his map, so I thought I'd do the same.


create your own visited countries map

And visited states.


create your own visited states map

It seems I've visited 10% of the world. More than Paul, but not as much as I'd like.

Edit: Technically I've also been to New Jersey, I've landed in Newark airport a couple of times. But then my only experience of Germany was an airport, so I guess it balances out.

Road Trip

Dan and Map on Flickr

Well last weekend was fun. On saturday my housemates and I went on a little bit of a road trip to Europe.
I guess I'd better start this tale in our local pub 'The Goose' last Thursday night.
Chris' cousin was visiting for a week, we were all bored and had done nothing productive since New Year. Chris comes up with an idea, we take a road trip to France on Saturday to buy cheap beer and stuff. The instant unanimous decision was 'Well why not?', so it was set.
Friday night was the night in Metros, so we didn't get in 'till the early hours of Saturday morning. I set my alarm for 7am hoping for an early up for a shower and stuff before the trip. I then realised that it was 6am when I set the alarm. Bugger, I thought, one hour will have to do. 8am came and went and there was a violent banging on my bedroom door. "Wake up you lazy ****, we are going to France!", was Chris' traditional wake up call.
Anyway, a few minutes later we were piling into the cars (of which we have two of now that Jim has his with him), and heading off to Dover.
On the Ferry the chicken burger I had eaten that night really came back with avengeance. Jim described me as 'Night of the Living Dead' and that the bags under my eyes had bags under them, charming.
So we were in Calais, and Jim needed petrol as we'd been driving on fumes since the M20. We negotiated the automatic fuel pumps and found them impossible to use and must have an anti-english system on board. Instead we had to use a manual pump, and due to the French driving on the wrong side of the raod, meant that I as the passenger had to pay at the kiosk. Jim still owes me 30 Euros for that.
So we were sitting in the car park of a hypermarket deciding what to do with our 9 hours in France. Paris was one option, but rejected for time. Instead we settled on a trip down the Autoroute to Belgium.

Dunkerque on Flickr

We stopped in Dunkerque on the way for a toilet and beer stop, and because none of us had been to Dunkerque before.
The short journey to the border was filled with music and making gestures between cars. Jim, after his initial freak-out of 'Oh my god, driving on this side of the road is insane' and having to be reminded to go anticlockwise around roundabouts, was getting comfortable on the Autoroutes. Though he couldn't work out the kph-mph conversion, often resulting in myself or Dan correcting him.
The border between France and Belgium was little more than a blue sign saying 'Belgie' and then a subtle language transition on the road signs. Leaving us to decide where in Belgium we would go and what the hell we planned to do there.
Brugge was our first destination, but by this time it was getting late in the day, so Oostende was chosen instead. In the end we decided to get a Steak dinner and drive like hell back to Calais before the hypermarkets closed.
I have to say, while it wasn't the best steak I'd ever had, it was close to it. Tenderloin steak with green peppercorn sauce, ordered medium but arrived bloody as hell. Chris and Dan shared garlic snails and Frog's legs, the first time I'd seen the latter.
So it was getting late and we were still at least an hour from Calais, so what happens...traffic jam leaving Oostende. We assumed it was a crash or somethign but then we saw sirens and a sign saying 'Alcohol Police'. Now, while we had an instant panic, we soon remembered that Jim hadn't been drinking that day, apart from a 25cl beer with the steak. The Belgian police had a bit of trouble explaining that he had to blow into the machine to test for alcohol, but he got the idea. After passing the breathaliser, Jim recieved a free keychain from the Police for being a safe driver and a polite sendoff. If only our Police were like that.
The result of the police check was that our two cars were then separated on the way back to Calais. By this time I was starting to feel my lack of sleep and drifted off a few times in the car. Our car knew were we were going and managed to get a fair amount of beer in the Carrefour, but Charlie managed to miss the Calais Autoroute junction altogether and ended up missing the trip to the first Hypermarket. Thus by the time we met up again, we had missed the 9pm ferry and had to wait for the 11pm sailing instead. Great, more time for shopping! Two wine/beer warehouses later we had some very full cars. Mostly filled with crates of '£4 for 24 bottles' beers, excellent stuff. Chris' cousin bought a lot of Fosters. We ridiculed him appropriately for his purchase.
Off to the ferry we went, spending the short sail drinking our purchases.
We thought we had survied and it was easy driving back to Fulham from there. That was until we went through HM Customs at Dover anyway. We were driving through, confident that we were within our limits and that we'd sail though customs and off to the motorway. A customs officer comes to the window for some routine questions.
"How long have you been in France, what was the purpose of your journey..." and the like. Then came the question "Did you visit any other countries?", so we told him "Yeah, Belgium". When he asked why, we answered honestly, "For a steak dinner and a beer". With a very puzzled look, he directed us to a customs search bay, where the car in front of us was being torn apart and X-Rayed. At this point we were very worried, understandibly. Charlie rang me to say he'd got through no problem and was waiting outside.
The Customs man asked Jim and Dan to step out of the car, took them to the boot and asked them a few quick-fire questions about bookings, insurance, car ownership and such. Then had a look at our booze stash. Thankfully everything was in order and he seemed happy with our Belgium story, if a little bemused at going that far just for a meal.
To sum up the journey back to London, we took the same route we used to get to Dover and arrived safely. Charlie took a 'shortcut' and ended up looping back around and travelling back to Dover for 10 minutes before realising his error.

The Supply on Flickr

Now the house is full of 30+ crates of beer and various other bottles of wine.
A trip well done, and something we may be doing more often!

(Appologies for the poor writing here, I wrote half of this between lectures and the rest at lunch, so I rushed it a little)

Night out...

Tonight was interesting, so we (me and my housemates) went out to the Fitzroy pub in Soho, we had a few pints and chatted for a while. Then come 11pm, we were thrown out of the Fitzroy and a few of us decided to go on to the 'Metro' club off Charing Cross road. So yeah, we stayed there until the wee hours and had a good time drinking and dancing and all that.
On the way home I took a detour to the cash machine because I wanted to get some food on the way home. Now, central London is a nightmare for getting money at an ATM late at night. Either there is a queue, or the machine isn't working, or whatever. Anyway, I was looking for a machine and a nice homeless woman directed me to a working machine. So after I got cash out, I decided to talk to her for a while. For the life of me I cannot remember her name, but she knew Liverpool well, and was a fairly articulate woman with a hell of a story to tell. It turned out she is pregnant and she did tell me a story as to why she ended up in London instead of Liverpool. She told me about her recent life on the streets, where she sleeps and all that.
Anyway, after an hour or two of chatting, I decided to help her into a shelter for the night, for which she insisted I choose a name for the daughter she was expecting.
Long story short, I felt good for helping a woman out for a night or two. I also proved to her that the world isn't such a cold, heartless place, and that someone would spare an hour of their time to talk, instead of walking past and ignoring her. If only that were true more of the time, then maybe the world wouldn't be so bad?