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”?