Prof. Boerner's Explorations

(Originally posted on Sunday, August 14, 2005)

On Monday, 8 August 2005, we traveled to Edinburgh by train… We needed to be at the King’s Cross station at 6:30 in the morning; this meant getting into a taxi at our hotel at 5:15 in the morning for the drive into London…

Getting to the correct train was not a problem and on the way there, we were in a relatively new coach… We were traveling 2nd class, so we had many families in the coach who were on holidays… It was loud, but tolerable… It seems that English families tolerate much more disruptive behavior in their children than American ones…

We got to Edinburgh in about 4 hours and went on a bus tour of the city… The main train station, Waverly Station, was interesting… I am attaching a picture of a large banner on display there for the latest Harry Potter book; I will be bringing back a copy of the English version…

The buildings are phenomenal! Many date back to the 12th and 13th centuries and are incredible sites… The Edinburgh castle was a very imposing view from anywhere in the city… We were there on the second day of the Festival, and Grace encountered many performance groups ‘drumming` up business for their festival productions when she explored the ‘Royal Mile’…

We took lunch in a delightful pub and enjoyed a great meal… The people were very friendly and courteous…

Our train trip back to London was less than spectacular… The train was overbooked, which meant that people were standing in the isles and there was no appropriate storage for mz walker… The coaches were older and the seats wre uncomfortable… AND THE TRAIN WAS FULL OF FAMILIES WITH MISBEHAVING KIDS!

I ended up sitting in the entry way to our coach on my walker (in the cold and isolation) for much of the trip… In addition, the train was about a half an hour late in getting to the station and then was on a track behind a local ‘milk train’ that stopped frequently and traveled slowly… So our ‘Fast Express Train’ was a long, slow and tedious journey… We got into King’s Cross an hour late and didn’t get to our hotel until almost 1 am…

And, then, we had to catch our flight to Frankfurt at 10:40 in the morning… More on that later…

Jerry

(Originally posted on Sunday, August 14, 2005)

Well, just a note about traveling without a computer or laptop… I am making this trip using my IPAQ 4700 instead of taking a traditional computer… So far, things have been working pretty well, but some notable exceptions have been encountered…

In our London hotel, my Fast Ethernet adapter worked well to connect with the Internet… In Kassel, my wireless connection worked in both hotels that we stayed at, but the connection is expensive and tied to a single device! The connections have been very reliable…

Some programs cannot be accessed by my IPAQ´s version of Internet Explorer, but most work very well… Posting to this site DOES NOT work on it, however, so I am accessing it via an Internet workstation at the hotel in Kassel… Windows XP Pro in German has been relatively easy to use, but the keyboard layout is somewhat different! The ´Z´ and the ´Y´ keys are switched, as are several other keys… And the ´@´ character is accessed via a ‘graphic’ character instead of a shift function… So if you see some strange words, please keep this in mind!
I can send and receive email easily, but cannot attach images to my emails…

But you can contact me with my normal email addresses ( jboerner@boerner.net or gerald.boerner@att.net)

Jerry

(Originally posted on Sunday, August 14, 2005)

Well, we have made the initial part of our journey… We flew Virgin-Atlantic Airlines to London/Heathrow and arrived on Saturday, August 6th…

Minor difficulties included leaving my tri-focal glasses in the rental car that we used to travel to LAX and Grace leaving her carry-on bag in the rental car shuttle… Grace recovered her bag, but I have been surviving Europe with my prescription sunglasses, including the wedding!
We got settled into our hotel and toured London on Sunday and took a day trip to Edinburgh on Monday…

More of the latter in the next post…

Jerry