by Jim Bellomo | May 27, 2019 | Uncategorized
But it does rain. Please excuse the My Fair Lady reference in the title but hey, I’m in the UK. What did you expect. Yesterday was all about driving around and seeing West Yorkshire. I am going to do most of the describing of what we saw in the photo captions so check there.
It was a better day than I hoped for because other than a couple of hours in the morning we had a pretty nice day of clouds but no rain as you will see from my pics…which yes, I did retouch a little.
The official name of the first place we went was actually Hebden Bridge, a really nice little village with a steam train, a Sunday market and a…wait for it…bridge. We actually saw a lot of bridges and to be honest, we just weren’t sure which one was the actual Hebden Bridge but they have a lot of nice ones. Especially over the canal that winds it way through village. We walked around a bit and then had a nice lunch in Hebden Bridge before driving on to tour Haworth.
Haworth’s claim to fame is that the Bronte sisters (please forgive the lack of an accent mark on Bronte but I can’t figure how to do that in WordPress) lived there while writing their books. I was the sacrilegious member of the group as I have never read any of their books and/or seen any of the movies made from them. Shame on me. It’s a really quaint little town that’s built on a pretty steep hill. Reminded us of the French Riviera village of Eze (missing another accent mark). We climbed the entire hill and stopped in a bunch of really cool shops, bought some chocolate (after being accosted by their pusher in the street ? giving out free samples). She was very persuasive and we had to take some back to Paul and Gail’s house because there was a distinct lack of sweet treats there…Gail had only made four desserts for dinner ?.
After grabbing the chocolate, we finished our climb and then turned around to head back to the car when we discovered that we were all quite thirsty and needed to stop for a quick cup of tea. I could get used to this stopping for tea thing. It provokes some very nice and convivial conversation that you really can’t have while walking or driving. We have done it two days in a row and it’s a habit I wish we could pick up. This time, we played it smart and didn’t buy anything to go with it so just tea.
After tea it was on to a rolling excursion through Saltaire, a mill town that was really cute and quaint. We were cutting down on the walking today due to my cold, my knee, Kathleen’s back, Kathleen’s leg and now Gail’s foot which she apparently hurt while she and I were off delivering invitations to their friends and relatives all over their neighborhood to their 40th anniversary coming up next month. We kind of looked like the walking wounded coming down that hill. Paul was the only one walking without a limp.
After Saltaire it was back to Leeds to tour the parts of it that can be seen from a car. We drove around and around the city center and are going back to see the parts that are inside the no-cars circle. A very cool city but I would get lost in it, in no time.
Then it was back to Paul & Gail’s where my cold got to me and napped for a an hour or so while Kathleen read and surfed and Paul and Gail made us a marvelous dinner. After that Gail and I spent the better part of an hour trading recipes and getting her Paprika 3 recipe app set up on her phone before it was off to bed for us early risers and a little more TV for our late-to-bed Brit buddies.
Arriving in Hebden Bridge
Looking for the actual bridges
Some cool buildin
Maybe this is the bridge
These are the official (I think) Hebden Bridge ducks
Standing on a bridge taking canal pics
Canal boats
Haworth looking back down the main street
The flag of Yorkshire
Pugs for Bob and Holly
Love the brilliance of this Union Jack and how well it goes with the door and windows
Maybe for my door collection
The sun came out!!!
The old apothecary
Inside the old apothecary
The Bronte chapel
From the side
Bronte’s buried here?
Bronte meadows
See…the Bronte’s really were here
In the Bronte chapel we found this man playing Beatles tunes on the organ
Looks like Eze
A church in Saltaire
And a meadow on the way home
by Jim Bellomo | May 25, 2019 | Uncategorized
Sorry to have to start this with a complaint but the one thing I really did not want to happen on this vacation, has happened…again. I am sick. All day yesterday (Saturday) as we transitioned via train and then car (driven by our dear friends Paul and Gail) I felt like I was getting a sore throat. Tried to pretend it was because I was around smokers and all the people on the train who used too much perfume. But by the time I went to bed, I knew…someplace about four or five days ago I had found a way to catch a cold. Woke up in the middle of the night with all the usual symptoms. I guess if there is a bright side to this, it’s that I should be over before we get on the ship a week from Monday. On the bad side…so many things.
As those of you who knew me from before I started posting on this site, on our last big vacation in October, the same DAMN thing happened. I got sick. It was on a cruise ship. And it pretty much messed up our vacation. All the most vivid memories I have of that trip are about being sick. I despise being sick when I am not at home. I feel miserable but I am stuck just living through it without the comfort of my own bed, my own illness rituals and just being able to be miserable. I am sure you know what I mean, don’t you? For instance, when my head gets so stopped up I can’t breath and I am at home, I go in the garage and ride my stationary bike for a while and it breaks things up. Or when I just don’t want to deal with people, I can go hide in my room.
When you get sick on vacation, you still have to do what’s planned and soldier forward. And being sick when you are with friends is even worse since you don’t want to infect them…or Kathleen (it’s probably too late to think about that—DAMN! I sure hope she can miss this one) You just hope it’s a light one and you can get through it but since this is the first time I have been sick since October, I am not sure I will get that lucky. I just wish I knew how to avoid this. I am a religious hand washer, can’t remember the last time I got close to anyone that I could tell was sick (other than my grandkids about three weeks ago) and I do just about anything I can think of to not catch this and now for the second major trip in a row, I am sick. Like I said, DAMN!
OK, complaining over. And please don’t fill the comments with cures, sympathy and/or ways to avoid this in the future. We all know, there is no way to avoid a virus. You get it or you don’t. On to travel.
Besides starting to feel this coming on, yesterday was a pretty great day. We were up early in the morning to catch our train from Waverley Station in Edinburgh down to York in England where we are to spend the next few days with the aforementioned Martini Mate buddies, Paul and Gail. We first met them on a Cruise Critic Roll Call back in June 2013 and we have sailed together three or four times since then. When we did our last Martini Mates reunion cruise to Alaska in 2017, we picked them up at the airport in Vancouver, BC and toured almost a week, first in Vancouver and then at our place in Redmond, before the cruise. We had such a great time and they have been wanting to show us Yorkshire (as they have shown other Mates) so this trip gave us the opportunity to see them and stay in their lovely home where I am writing this now at 5:00 am.
First a couple of notes about our train trip. I was worried about getting our luggage on the train. One of our fellow TAs at our agency that travels even more than we do (hi Marjorie) suggested that I just look for a porter who would help me get them onboard and then give them a nice tip. We checked the day before we were to board the train and were told that “Waverley Station has no porters!” so I would have to struggle with them on my own. Thankfully our train originated at Waverley so I had plenty of time to get all five bags on. We were in first class so this also meant we didn’t have to struggle for seats as they were reserved. Suffice it to say, it all worked out…getting them on the train.
A quick note about First Class on this train (can’t speak for others). It’s almost funny but when we sat down in our FC seats, (which were very comfortable) we found a beautiful menu detailing the breakfast we could order once the train was under way. I wish I had taken a picture of it. It showed our food being prepared and served in a truly first class manner (table cloths, linen napkins, silver service). Now the reality: After we left Waverley, two very nice guys came through with a coffee pot and a cart with tubs of yogurt and ice-cold, cellophane-wrapped danish (worse than what you get on Celebrity) and that was it. Kind of false advertising? Not only that, but we were in the second car of three first-class cars. Our car’s restroom was out of order so we went through to the first car to use theirs. That was fine but then after using the facilities, Kathleen discovered there was no running water in the loo. Which is great after she had completely soaped up her hands to find that there is no way to rinse them off. Kathleen always carries wipes with her so she got to wipe off all that soap—fun (where’s that sarcasm font when I need it). Other than those two things (which were more funny than irritating) the train ride was great…for about half of it. When we first boarded, we pretty much had the entire coach to ourselves with only two or three other people until we got to Newcastle and then it started filling up—first with some really posh folks headed to (we later learned) a big horse race in York and then it became standing-room-only when a huge crowd of footballers got on to head to London for a big match that will happen later today. From that point on it was almost impossible to move around at all. The train staff kept coming on the public address system to apologize for the overcrowding but that didn’t help if you needed to use the facilities or move around at all.
It did help us having the soccer guys onboard because when we went to get off in York, a bunch of them were standing in front of the luggage area where our five bags were. I excused myself and told them we needed to get the bags out (which had others luggage who had boarded after us, on top of our bags) and the guys immediately asked if they could help the old people ?. I (smartly, if I do say so myself) offered that I would get the really heavy ones as I didn’t want anyone hurting themselves with their weight. Well they took this as a challenge and said, “You just get off mate, Neil and I will get you your bags…” and so they did. Placed nicely on the platform in York. Outstanding!
I hope I didn’t make it sound like the train trip was bad, it was just funny how different the advertised First Class was from the actuality of it. We loved the train. I was totally geeking out about train travel in Europe, which I love. We had free, speedy WiFi and comfortable, reserved seats. It was truly a great trip.
Which brings us to York where Paul and Gail were waiting on the platform to greet us and start our tour of their Yorkshire. They had made an awesome sign Gail was holding up with our names and the details of our upcoming tour and it’s upstairs in the bedroom where Kathleen is sleeping or I would take a pick and toss it in here.
As soon as we had put our luggage in the back of their car, we were off to do a walking tour of York, one of the most medieval of British towns, a true walled city. The photos I will add at the bottom of this post will tell a better story so make sure and check them out and view them as a slide show so you can see my captions. After touring York and having a nice lunch (hard to find a place that sells sandwiches on a Saturday—really) we were back to the car (the walk took a lot out of Kathleen—she was wearing the wrong shoes and it killed her back and hip) we were back to the car and off to Harrogate.
Much of this week we will be playing by ear as we are trying to dodge the weather. Paul and Gail have some great plans—some of which will work better if dry and others not so dependent on weather. After four days of glorious sunshine in Edinburgh our weather luck ran out in Yorkshire when the skies kind of opened up. Since we had seen this coming Paul had headed to Harrogate to take us to a truly British institution, Bettys (no apostrophe—really) Tea Room. Bettys is celebrating it’s 100th birthday this year, so I guess they really are an institution. Amongst our Mates they have become almost legendary because you really can’t say you have had the entire Martini Mate experience until Paul and Gail have taken you to Bettys for a Fat Rascal (think really, really good scone…but bigger). Between that and some proper English tea, we were all set except for the obligatory Harrogate picture frame photo. Others who came before us (Mike and Carol) had posed in the same spot, so we we had to do it too.
Then it was off to Knaresborough to see their castle (as Paul said, “Every proper English town has a castle”) and some great views from the castle’s parapets. The pictures do a better job of explaining this. After some time there we stopped by a beautiful old, British hotel where Agatha Christie had disappeared to for a few days in what might have been a mid-life crisis. It was all the scandal at the time. Google it. Really. The hotel was truly lovely even though we couldn’t see some of the historic Agatha stuff because they were having a wedding in the room where we needed to be. (How rude—didn’t they know American’s were coming to see things?) I thought I should just go in and wish the bride and groom a wonderful marriage and take the picture I wanted but I was terribly underdressed so I skipped it (much to Kathleen’s relief).
After that I think our two good friends realized how exhausted their American Mates were so we headed back to their place to get settled in before going out to a late dinner at a wonderful Greek restaurant, not far from their house. Originally Paul was going to grille and Gail had made some great salads so we would eat at their place, but as I said…we go with the weather here and Paul really didn’t want to grille in the rain. So it was out to Greek last night and (weather permitting) a nice grilling tonight after a day of touring…to be determined by…the weather.
PS: One piece of good news health-wise: my knee is doing MUCH better. Hardly any problems with it at all…or the cold has me so worried that I am not noticing it. ?
The gates of York
Clifford’s Tower in downtown York
The inside of Clifford’s Tower
Paul, Gail and Kathleen didn’t want to make the climb
A panoramic view from the top/
A street in York…reminded us of Québec
A street performer
Do they know sweets here or what?
Self captioned
Inside the Shambles. Supposedly Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter stories is patterned after this street.
See what I mean?
This build needs a lift
Yorkminster Cathedral, second largest in England
Always a wedding when we visit cathedrals
And incredible stained glass
Incredible views.
Ran into street dancers advertising a dance school
Paul and Gail could teach the dancers, they are quite good!
Kathleen and I loved this clock we saw while searching for sandwiches
Another street performer, this time in Knaresborough
The castle ruins in Knaresborough
The view from the castle parapets in Knaresborough
Bettys in Harrowgate
Inside with our Fat Rascals
Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather. —John Ruskin
by Jim Bellomo | May 19, 2019 | Uncategorized
This is a picture I took yesterday because I found these (photo above) when I was looking for something else that I wanted to take with us tomorrow when we fly to Edinburgh. What you are seeing is the SeaPass card (combo room key and onboard credit card for you non-cruisers) from every cruise we have ever taken (except the one on Carnival we don’t tell anyone about). Starting in the upper left with our first Alaskan cruise on the old Holland America Westerdam in 2000 all the way through out Fall Foliage cruise last October on Celebrity’s Summit. Those SeaPass cards represent a lot of great times with a lot of great people.
The trip we leave on tomorrow will include our 26th cruise. Not as many as many of our friends (including our buddy Seth who has taken more than 65 cruises) but we think it’s pretty good. This time we will be adding a SeaPass card from Celebrity’s Reflection headed from Dublin to Belfast, on to two ports in Iceland and then back to Cork and Dublin Ireland before we fly home. Before we ever get to the cruise we will be staying five nights in Edinburgh, six nights with our fellow Martini Mates, Paul and Gail in the Yorkshire region of England and then three nights pre-cruise in Dublin,. Lots of travel and that’s just how we like it.
We invite you to join us as I will try my best to (and since I won’t spend my entire days driving like I did in Arizona) post some pics and notes every day we are on the road. So come back here often and let us know what you think by commenting.
Enthusiasm is excitement with inspiration, motivation, and a pinch of creativity.
—Bo Bennett
by Jim Bellomo | Mar 18, 2019 | Uncategorized
Old Tombstone Courthouse
My favorite door
The view as you enter the Arizona-Sonora Museum
Ram
At Arizona-Sonora Museum
Cactus blossom
Well I had high hopes of posting everyday on this trip but unlike a cruise, there is no real downtime. If we aren’t touring, then I am driving. When we go on a cruise, the captain drives and I have time to post. Evenings have been full of just downloading and processing photos so those get taken up as well.
Today we are in Sedona and I don’t have anything to do while a wonderful young lady cleans our room. Got a bunch of photos processed and now I can tell you about our adventures in Tucson, where we spent three days.
We got down to Tucson just before noon and met up with Lee who used to live in our condo complex in Redmond. He and I were on the condo board together for a few years. He sold his place about three years ago and moved down here where he bought a beautiful home. We stopped and saw his place and then we were off to lunch with him at a great restaurant called Wildflowers. It’s one of a big conglomerate of unique restaurants that started in Tucson and now stretches all over the place. I did a link to the restaurants because during our stay we would end up eating at three of them and they were all outstanding…and fun. You should check and see if they have one of them near you.
After lunch we headed into our Tucson AirBnB (I need to do an entire post on why we are now using AirBnBs most of the time) which was in the University district of Tucson. It was a very funky, cool, bungalow and it was huge. One of the best parts of AirBnBs is that you get an entire place for a great price. So we had a living room, dining room, almost gourmet kitchen, TV room, bedroom and bathroom for a lot less than the price of a hotel.
I covered the rest of that day in my last post which you can read here if you like so on to the next morning. Our good friends Bob and Judy from Chilliwack, BC headed down the next morning to meet us and then we were going to take a long “tootle” as Bob calls it (a nice long drive) to Tombstone and Bisbee even further south in Arizona. Bob and Judy arrived around 10:00, we swapped cars and headed south.
Had a great drive and a great time yakking away at each other for most of it. Just about every topic in the world comes up when the four of us are together. It took us about 90 minutes and we arrived in historic Tombstone, home of the OK Corral. Bob had been there a few years back (I think he said 1984) and back then then did fake gunfights out in the streets. Today they do them all either indoors or in outside areas that you have to pay to see them. I am sure this is because of two things. First to make some money on them them and second because of the proliferation of mass shootings around the world. The idea of having everyone in town shooting at each other is not really a good one.
It was cool and very windy so we decided we weren’t going to stay very long. We had lunch and walked around a little as well as doing a little shopping before we headed further south to Bisbee, a cute little copper mining town and scene of an entire series of books by JA Jance that came up a bunch that day. I just wanted to see all the places I had been reading about for years. Got to take some pics, we stopped at an old copper mine and then headed back by way of Sierra Vista (also in the books).
After a quick stop to get refreshed at our place, we were back out looking for Barrio Historico in downtown Tucson. We didn’t have a clear idea of where it was because the books and websites we had read about it only gave us streets that bordered it, not really great directions. You can’t put a street without a number in your GPS. After driving all over the place and never finding what we were after, we gave up and headed for dinner at another of the restaurants that was part of the Wildflower family, Culinary Dropout. Totally different than Wildflowers in a big way and totally cool. Had a great meal before heading home and sending Bob and Judy off on their way to a hotel and then the next morning, back to Sun City where they are staying with friends.
Our Saturday started with me taking a long walk around the University of Arizona. It reminded me of my walks around Oregon State in Corvallis or Auburn University in Alabama in that it is a actual campus, with a gate and an entrance. It has spread outside of the original place but it still feels like a “real” college as opposed to a commuter school like the one I went to (Cal State Fullerton).
Around 10:00 Kathleen and I decided to take a stab at finding Barrio Historico again because we wanted to see some of the doors we have photographs of in our home. If you have ever visited us, you know that we are cuckoo for door photos (we have almost 50 hanging in our place) and some of them came from this famous barrio. This time we found it and spent about an hour driving through and taking door, window and gate shots. Some of them will be in my Flickr feed later on. My favorite is in the group a the top.
At 11:30 we met my old high school friend Randy again for lunch at her son’s restaurant, Reilly’s Pizza. (That’s her with us at right.) If you are ever in Tucson, it’s right downtown in an old, completely refurbished mortuary. The food is amazing as is the decor and service. Of course it helps if you are eating with the bosses Mom. We had eaten there four years before (to the very day) and had a wonderful lunch and the food was still just as amazing. Truly with a visit to downtown.
After lunch Randy took us to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum high in the hills west of the city. It’s much more than a museum and definitely worth the 30 minute drive and admission price. Not only is it a museum, it is also a zoo, aquarium and more featuring desert animals, fish and birds. We spent almost two hours roaming the grounds and of course with me taking pictures. I have included a few above and the rest are (or will soon be) on my Flickr feed (at right). After a wonderful day with Randy, she headed off to meet her husband for a business dinner and we went to our third restaurant related to Wildflowers, Blanco way up in the foothills above Tucson. Great food, atmosphere and service one more time. The Fox Concept Restaurants are outstanding and we will look for them again as we travel. Guessing we will get to try both of them in San Diego on our next trip down.
And that concludes day two and three in Tucson, the next morning we were up early and headed to Sedona on the backroads with a stop at Biosphere 2. More about that later.
by Jim Bellomo | Mar 13, 2019 | Uncategorized
Back Camera
I have written in the past about the Martini Mates but I am just not sure I have written about them on this site. So here’s a short bit of explanation about who we are and a sad bit of news about one of our best friends—a Martini Mate.
Back in 2005 we booked our second Celebrity Cruise on Infinity that would take us on a short repositioning trip from Vancouver, BC to San Francisco, CA. As is our habit, as soon as we booked the cruise, we joined the Cruise Critic roll call (click here if you don’t know what that is) for it. Little did we know how life changing joining that roll call would be. There were about 100 people posting on the roll call but one day (about six months prior to the cruise) we started discussing the Martini Bar on Infinity. Now none of us were big fans of martinis but it was fun to discuss all the different kinds that X serves in its many martini bars throughout their fleet.
During that discussion someone suggested that we (everyone on the roll call) start calling ourselves the Martini Mates. This caught on and pretty soon we were all a bunch of Martini Mates. By the time we all arrived in Vancouver for the cruise, a bunch of us who had done a TON of posting felt like we were good friends. Many of us gathered the night before the cruise for a pre-cruise cocktail party that was organized by Carol Preisman who is the wife of the god of shore excursions Mike. We met in the bar at the Sheraton Wall Center hotel and when I walked into the hotel, Carol came up and I put out my hand to shake hers. She said, “I’m from the South honey. We don’t shake, we hug.” And she did. And I did. And I made a friend who lasted from that day until last night when we lost Carol.
Carol would always say that she wasn’t sure why she and I were friends. Neither was I. We were pretty much the opposite of each other. She was a conservative, reserved Southern Belle of the highest order and I was a liberal, loud, ex-hippie from California. And we became friends. And every time we saw each other or she would introduce me to someone, she would say, “Not sure why Jim and I are friends…but we are.”
Of course there were many Martini Mates on that cruise but for some reason, six of us stayed Martini Mates. We still correspond with others from that 2005 cruise. We have sailed with some of those people as well. Over the years we have added more folks to the Martini Mates but the six of us were the core—Bob, Jude, Mike, Carol, Kathleen and me.
Those four people have been a huge part of our lives since the day we met them. We have sailed with Mike and Carol at least eight times and done a couple of land trips with them as well. They have stayed at our place and we have stayed at theirs. Yes, we were closer to Bob and Jude but that’s just because we were geographically closer since they lived in BC and Mike and Carol lived in Florida but the six of us were still the best of friends. And when we were able to travel to all the parts of the world together, we felt like no time had passed between trips.
When we returned from the original trip in 2005, Carol wanted us all to be able to have a place to keep talking to each other on the original Cruise Critic roll call so she started the Martini Mates “friends of Cruise Critic” board that we still post on to this day. This morning it was filled with love for both Carol and Mike.
I am posting more photos than I usually post because when I went to look for them, I found so many that I loved of us with our Mates all over the world. Bob and Jude never did the really long and adventurous trips—Bob hates to fly. But we still went everywhere together.
This morning after I had found out about Carol passing I took a long walk and was thinking about all the places we had been with Mike and Carol. Besides the initial Martini Mate foray in 2005, we sailed with them to Alaska twice, to SE Asia from Singapore to Hong Kong, through the Panama Canal in 2014, to the Baltic a few years before that, on the eighth voyage of Solstice in the Caribbean and Hawaii.
So that’s kind of a short history of the Martini Mates. The Mates suffered our first huge loss when Jude passed away a few years ago. Today we lost Carol. And she will be missed but I like to think that she is undoubtedly in a heavenly Martini Bar, sipping her chocolate martini with Jude and another of our group, “The Straw.” She and Jude are rolling their eyes as “The Straw” (that’s a whole other story) tells the story of how she became “The Straw” for the 1 millionth time.
We love you Carol and will miss you. I wish I could see you right now to give you that hug because you taught me that “we don’t shake hands, we hug.”
