Foreign Adventures

After a long time of making excuses and never quite getting around to it I finally lived up to a long standing promise and made it over to southern Italy to catch up with an old friend. When I flew out of Stanstead it was raining and when I arrived back it was still raining, but in the time inbetween I was enjoying Mediterranean sunshine and temperatures in the 30s. It was great, there’s a few photos from my time in Pompeii here. It’s pretty much core national curriculum teaching in Italy, but there is some information about the fate of the famous roman city here and here.

A few emails have come in over the last few weeks. Here’s a few:

From: Chrissy
Subject: Croatia

Reckon you could ride on these local trails?

I think that’s rideable. I’d love to get out there and check it out, now all I need is some more holiday time, so, er, that’d be sometime after September. This next one is in from a fellow fan of Belgian beers.

From: Tyrrell
Subject: 10 FACTS

10 – Life is sexually transmitted.

9 – Good health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.

8 – Men have two emotions: Hungry and Horny. If you see one without an erection, make him a sandwich.

7 – Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; Teach a person to use the Internet and they won’t bother you for weeks.

6 – Some people are like a Slinky… Not really good for anything, but you still can’t help but smile when you shove them down the stairs.
5 – Health freaks are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.

4 – All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.

3 – Why does a slight tax increase cost you 50 quid and a substantial tax cut saves you 50p?

2 – In the 60s, people took LSD to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and People take Prozac to make it normal.

AND THE NUMBER 1 THOUGHT FOR 2006:

1- They know exactly where any untaxed car is located among the millions of cars in Britain……

But they haven’t got a clue as to where thousands of illegal immigrants and terrorists are located. Maybe we should put the DVLA in charge of immigration…….

This one is in via Shaun at Aegishosting and it just goes to show that there’s a good chance that not everyone who stumbles across this site does so because of the bike related content.

From: Martha
Subject: INFO: wrong date

Please contact the designer of this web page you are hosting the flood was in 2005 not 2006.

Bit of a balls up that, but well spotted. I’ve sorted it now. Here’s some local news from Jed…

From: Jed
Subject: Hanging Around

I missed this last night on the news… apparently it was a cracker and this farmer was a real country guy.

Finally when is a Vehicle not a Vehicle? Perhaps when it is a bike… The law regards the bike as a vehicle, and IMBA is constantly chiding Local Authorities for issuing orders to restrict vehicular access, when they actually mean motorised vehicular access. Unfortunately such wrongly worded notices cause a lot of confusion and aggravation as they appear to reduce routes available to cyclists. So it is of particular concern when the well regarded Lake District National Park issues a widely distributed but inaccurate letter stating that 31 routes in the National Park ‘have now had their vehicular rights extinguished’. This mistake is a result of a clause in NERC which is thought to extinguish motorised rights over highways which are on both the definitive and highways maps – and even includes some bridleways! So keep a watchful eye for similarly wrong statements in your own Local Authority areas and contact IMBA if you spot any.