Italian Drink

May 25th, 2011 1 Comment »

I had toyed with other Italian-based post titles including Wave-ioli and Spag-wet-hi but gave up on them in the end. Venice and the two Croatian destinations were low on the gadget and energy drink front. Very nice places to visit for many other reasons, but not much technology to talk about so this post is mainly just to publish my bad-pun post titles. I shall therefore resort to showing you a picture of a can of Italian Sprite because it made us giggle like school children:

Italian Sprite

And finally… an experiment in childcare:

Joey and Red Bull


McDocknalds

May 22nd, 2011 No Comments »

McDonalds Corfu

I know what you are all thinking, yes, you are thinking that all this cruise malarkey is nice and that, but has Oliver managed to tick another country off the McDonalds International Challenge? Well yes, we can now tick Greece off the list because I discovered a outlet of the restaurant on Corfu. I happily munched on six Chicken McNuggets as I wandered the narrow busy streets of Corfu on my search for as yet undiscovered energy drinks. Corfu Energy DrinksSadly on that second point I was not very successful. They stocked the usual Red Bull in all locations, as well as the common Monster flavours. What I did managed to pick up was another can of Dark Dog (as found in France last year) and a can of Euro Shopper Energy Drink from the supermarket. Not very inspirational so I took a photo of them balanced on the railing of our cabin balcony with a faint outline of mainland Greece (or Albania – the actual country associated with that particular bit of land is in dispute with The Wife) in the background.

Carry on Cruising

May 13th, 2011 No Comments »

SoBe Pure RushI’m still undecided whether or not to blog during this holiday or not, so you may be reading this after I return depending on what I choose to do. I’m going to write the blog post anyway and upload it when I get chance… We started off in Southampton where I discovered a new energy drink. SoBe Pure Rush Energy Drink was found at WH Smith in Southampton Airport Terminal. Before I continue, yes, I am on holiday therefore I will be discussing the new energy drinks I find. As usual should you wish for a more in depth commentary of our holiday then you should read Robbins’ Rambings instead. Right, back to plot. Pure Rush is not a Red Bull clone. It tastes like pineapple, orange and fruit stuff so fits the ‘Tropical Twist’ flavour descriptor nicely.

There’s also a gadget angle to this post too because now we’re on board the Azura we discovered the gym. Located at the front of the ship with running and cycling machines facing out over the ocean it’s quite an experience using them. I opted to use a TechnoGym running machine. An awesome bit of kit – I’ll try and get a photo for my next post. It has the usual speed and incline controls, heart rate monitor and emergency stop, but what sets this apart from the rest is the built in touch screen computer complete with an iPod dock, headphone socket and access to the ship’s TV feed. I ran my 5k whilst watching the ship information plotting our progress across the Bay of Biscay. I could have chosen the feed from the camera mounted at the front of the ship, but as I was already looking at that view out of the window in front of me I saw little point. Using a running machine on a ship is strange when taking the swell in to consideration with the occasional momentary shifts in gravity making you feel slightly off balance. Similar problem if you close your eyes in the shower on board too – it’s a bit like being slightly drunk. The gym also has some VR bikes – exercise bikes connected to a computer with a simulated 3D cycling environment. You can go mountain biking without moving. I hope to try them out tomorrow and will let you know what they are like.

The ship’s TV system is a nifty bit of kit too. Our room has two 22” flat screen, each one connected up with an Ethernet cable providing a (heavily compressed) digitised stream from satellite as well as a number of on-demand programs, ship information pages and your account breakdown.

So far on board we’ve managed to successfully dump the kids in the kids club allowing us to try our luck at the music quiz. With it being Joseph’s birthday today (the day I type this which is not necessarily the day I’ll publish it!) they sang him happy birthday and I’m assured he’ll be given a cake later. His birthday present off us is certainly a hit. It’s the Leapfrog LeapTop, effectively a toy laptop which can be customised with Joseph’s name and some pretend emails and tunes. You have to hope that the name you require is in the list of available names within the software but it seems pretty comprehensive. It loudly states ‘ Hello … Joseph’ when switched on.

UPDATE: I’ve just paid for a few minutes on the satellite internet connection so I will be posting when I can until that runs out.

Bike? In a Tree?

July 23rd, 2010 1 Comment »

Yesterday a select few of us elite athletes decided to go and visit a tree-top adventure course, very similar to Go Ape in Margam Park with a few significant differences. The main difference is that this one was designed by someone who was very drunk on calvados at the time by the looks of it.

I managed to carry my camera around the entire course and have a few photos which I took on the ‘blue’ and ‘green’ difficulty courses. By the time I got to ‘red’ I had to hold on and concentrate a lot more, and once I got to ‘black’ I’d forgotten who I was.

Treetopfrance

All started off well, a unusual down-hill section was a bit tricky as shown in the photo above, but the first two sections were no worse than Go Ape. Oh yes, apart from the amusing Snowboard section on which I got stranded due to my pulley catching on the return guide rope – I was standing between two trees around 50 metres apart, right in the middle, on a snowboard suspended on two wires. Josh attempted to pull me back but didn’t have the weight to manage it so a Spiderman-like course attendant helped instead. Once we hit the red course, Diarra’s Tarzan calls started to sound more like a 14 year old girl at a Take That concert and for good reason – pain… the course didn’t just get higher, it got increasingly more physically strenuous so once off the red course I jumped straight in to the black one without stopping to think… just in case.

The black course started off with a rope ladder…… on an under-hang. Once you made it to the uneven ledge at the top of that, you had to negotiate several braces hanging from ropes, each on too far to easily reach. Next was a 15ft climbing wall to a bridge. The bridge itself had to be traversed on a bike which if you didn’t pedal, wouldn’t make it all the way. You try riding a bike on a bridge two-feet wide and fifty-feet up. Next up were more braces on ropes, only a little easier this time as you could do a left-foot, right-foot approach. Now came the interesting part. I say interesting, I mean bl**dy difficult part. Seven logs hanging horizontally by a rope attached in the centre – the idea is to use upper body strength to grab the ropes and jump from log to log. Sounds simple, easier to cheat and just hang in your harness and pull yourself along. The course supervisor advised us that the record for that section is 6 seconds – funnily enough he happened to hold that very record. Most people crossed it in about 5 minutes apart from Mat who took 25 minutes whilst he ‘rested his muscles’ and let a few people go across in front of him.

To get down from the black course you attached yourself to another rope, and the course supervisor gently lowered you down, as demonstrated by Diarra in this video:

Diarra’s Treetop Descent

“The Curse of Thai” and other stories

July 21st, 2010 1 Comment »

We’re back! (sort of). We’re back at the gites anyway, recovering from our manic few days at Disneyland Paris. We stayed at hotel Cheyenne this time, a nice cowboy themed hotel which was much better than Hotel Santa Slum where we have previously stayed.

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Disney standards however were not up to their usual high standards unfortunately… The rooms are in need of renovation with peeling wallpaper, televisions that don’t really get a signal even on the internal information channels, dodgy electrics which make fizzy sounds, and flickering lights – perhaps that’s all part of the American Western theme?? They also forgot to put any towels in our room on the last day… tut tut. The rest of the trip was very memorable though. We started off well going straight to Pirates of the Caribbean. It was a bit dark, but Poppy enjoyed herself:

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There were of course two slightly adjoined families taking part in this trip, the Shinglers and the Hewitts/Nguyens. Myself and Thai decided to leave behind the under-height ones and their baby sitters to test out a couple of the more interesting rides in the park. Starting with Space Mountain, we queued for about 20 minutes before wondering why the ride was quiet…. yup, it had broken down. The next day we tried our luck with with Big Thunder Mountain and that broke down after about a 30 minute wait. Hmm, our fortunes did pick up as we managed a ride on Rock’n’Roller Coaster and Space Mountain eventually. Anyhows I’m blaming Thai for them breaking down – I’m convinced he had a word with the park management as he was a bit nervous Smile.

Back to the kids and Poppy enjoyed herself lots, taking her autograph book and shoving it in the face of every character she could find.

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Or even just shoving her face in chocolate mousse.

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We managed to see lots of performances and shows including the night-time parade, a Playhouse Disney live show, and best of all, a ‘Welcome Princess Frog-Snogger’ parade as viewed from the windows of Walt’s American Diner on Main Street. Our table had prime viewing over Main Street as the parade passed below us, and despite young madam’s protests that she wanted to be down on the road watching it, she liked watching it from that vantage point really.

And speaking of that meal out, it was well posh innit. I had a burger (more on burgerage later) topped with peppers and foie gras. Now…. I’d never had that before so thought I’d give it a go. I’ve given it a go and I’ll cross it off the list. My best description is to liken it to eating a slice of tenderised slug. The burger and lattice fries were amazing though as was the chocolate cake and brownie ice cream I had for dessert. Sadly the chef wouldn’t cook the pigeon who was sat on a nest outside the window. Shame, it was quite plump.

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Shooting Wobots, or “Buzz Lightyear’s Laser Blast” as it is correctly known was the holiday’s most popular ride for all concerned I believe with babies Joseph and Tyson becoming obsessed with Buzz. I managed a decent score of around 139000 when sitting with Poppy, however with Joseph controlling the direction lever my score plummeted to just over the 100000 mark. Poppy’s high score was just over 3000 – a definite improvement over the last trip to Disney. Joseph’s other highlights included It’s a flippin’ monotonous small world, and the Dumbo ride (on which I thought I saw the mother-in-law but it turned out to be a false alarm).

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And finally, I give you the saddest news of all. You may remember my fascination with the culinary genius that was The Pizzaburger. Well, some eejit at Disney has decided that they no longer need to sell such a product and have converted the perfectly perfect Buzz Lightyear’s Pizza Planet restaurant in to an all you can eat pizza, pasta and salad buffet. R.I.P. The Pizzaburger:

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I made up for that disappointment by eating five none-pizza’d burgers in two days. With chips. And Ice creams, and an all-you-can-eat buffet at the Lucky Nugget Saloon. And Chicken Tikka strips with rice at the Hakkuna Matata Restaurant. And a few hundred complimentary breakfast pain-au-chocolat. With Nutella. Oh, and there was the extra few chocolate brownies I sneaked out of the Lucky Nugget wrapped in napkins and placed carefully in the pushchair. And the coconut chicken I had on the first night too. Mmmm, that was in the Blue Lagoon restaurant next to Pirates of the Caribbean. Can anyone work out how far I need to run to burn that lot off?

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