Tuesday, May 28, 2013

The Great Memorial Day Internet Burn-Up

Lefty Unplugged was scheduled to play the first show and Untolerable Bohemian was to play the second.  Cat and I were in Second Life about an hour ahead of time as there are many things that need to be done by the venue owner.  During the time before Lefty started, I crashed at least twenty times as I would crash out of Second Life almost as soon as I logged into it.

Cat does all the work to set up the shows so my crashes weren't affecting that but in my own little world I was getting highly-annoyed / fed-up / blah, blah.

When I finally got into the world and Lefty was playing, he was doing an original of his entitled "Let It Roll" and it's about meeting the things that come at you and letting them roll.  By that time, I was in no mood to let this Greek internet roll as it's so insufferably slow and so amateurishly erratic that I was ready to hang it from a tree and burn the remains.

Cat and I talked later about the best time to bail out of Greece as Internet access will be better anywhere.  It would be better in Athens as well but I have no interest in going there.  Ruins are cool but taking Cat to a volcano in Italy is outrageous and I definitely vote for the latter.

The objective in starting this adventure is to get to London to register for National Health Service.  It's about twenty-eight hundred kilometers and I've read that you don't think the scooter will make it but, so long as I don't beat it, I'm not clear why not.  Besides, there are zero choices.

Note that the route I intend does not cross the Alps but rather goes up the West coast of Italy and stays with it to break North just before Marseille and go to England through France.  This bypasses the Alps altogether.  That's unfortunate as they would be beautiful to see.  The other option is to go East from Italy to go near Vienna and then go to England via Germany.  This route is much more interesting to me but it's also significantly longer.  I intend to go to Germany after England so there is some merit to going to England now via France as it's not likely I would pass that way again.

The culmination of this roaming, ideally, is to find a houseboat to rent in Germany much like the one Alec Guinness occupied in "The Horse's Mouth."  That houseboat was permanently-moored and was pretty inexpensive.  Perhaps such a situation exists in Germany.  In any case, I have seen flats for two hundred euros which is less than I am paying now.

How to capitalise on this remains the most novel part as it's quite the looney adventure and should make for some good reading but it sucks to back off the contents of the blog so regular readers miss out just when it gets to a really interesting part.  More thinking needed.

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