The maid, the sheriff, the friar, and the thief

Throw in some buffalo swimming around a flooded baseball field and it could be the title of another really bad Kevin Costner movie, couldn’t it?  Luckily, Robin Hood has been around a bit longer than Mr. Costner, so even though Nottingham unabashedly exploits the legendary outlaw for commercial gain, and the first words out of my wife’s mouth when she saw this photograph were “It doesn’t look like Kevin Costner to me”, there were thankfully no references to that awful 1991 Hollywood version of the story in Nottingham.
 

This statue is placed just outside the gates to the castle occupied by the Sheriff of Nottingham…

….and just up the hill from the oldest pub in the UK, “Ye old trip to Jerusalem”, established in 1198.   We stopped in for a pint and some fish-n-chips.  It was an incredible atmosphere, with small rooms hacked out of the side of the cliff and furnished with rough wooden stools facing a modest, dank fireplace.  You could almost hear the conversations of crusades and conquest.

 
Nottingham has a decent town center, although it was missing continuity in how it developed over the years which left some pretty desolate places that you had to walk through to get between these more vibrant bits.

 
The University of Nottingham campus was one of the finest that I’ve ever seen.  Its sprawling grounds outside the city were filled with parks and classic buildings.

All of the technology conferences that I’ve attended in the past have been pretty heavily staffed with, well, let’s just say a different demographic profile behind the booth.  So I was very surprise to be invited by our marketing team to participate in this conference.  Does that make me a “Booth Boy”?

De Rusthoek

Last week was some fantastic spring weather in Amsterdam.  Sunny terraces.  Sparkling white wine.  Short skirts.  Unfortunately, we were slogging it out in the rain, sleet, and snow back in mountain-top Maryland.  Not that I'm complaining.  We actually had a great time putting our backs into building a new game room for the rental house and are really happy with the results.  Here are a few pics from the construction project.

We first cleared all of the hunting gear out of the pole barn and started hanging maps for wallpaper.

One of the biggest jobs was to get power down to the barn from the house.  This was going to take some serious horsepower.  So, I called up our local rental place and told them what I was trying to do.
 
They delivered this Ditch-Witch on Tuesday morning...just in time for a fresh coat of snow.  What a wicked machine!  It was a blast to operate, chunking through rocks and roots.   But the thick, snow saturated mud didn't flow through the extraction auger properly and I had to run the ditch three times...ripping the hell out of the yard in the process.

 

But once the snow melted and the mud dried up, we were able to bring it up to some level of acceptability.

We had lots of help from family and friends on the whole operation.  In Holland they bring their dogs on their bikes...in Western Maryland, they come on ATV's.
 

And the results turned out really well.  Based on the game room alone, we just secured an entire month-long rental in July - a family of four with two dogs.

 We named the game-room De Rusthoek after one of our favorite Dutch pubs in the nearby village of Bloemendaal.

It was an action packed week, full of hard work and satisfying results.  We didn't really even have time to kick back a bit until the last evening.  Now it's time to start planning a real, relaxing vacation.