The Life and Times of Plod

One of the most genuine likeable people I’ve ever shared oxygen with.

:(

Story here.

After a long day in maidenshead, or somewhere, with Alcatel this pint is required. I now know almost all there is to know about the OxE. It may seem like i’ve been neglecting you dear blog, but it appears that my firewall has banned my home ip. It seems i need to migrate this server back across the pond. Anybody got any experience with 1&1’s root servers?

Sorry to break the story of cyprus, but I moved into my house Tuesday gone (pics to follow). Why is it that everything just doesn’t find a place for itself and go there ? Hired a van yesterday which made things a lot easier to get them here, but god. I have a room now just full of boxes, and it doesn’t seem to matter how many boxes i empty and sort there is still a room of boxes. This wouldn’t be so bad, but the room in question is to be my study, and I need that sorted sharpish in time for my new ordered broadband connection.

Should be online a lot more then though

Well, I’ve been back almost a week now, so I thought it was time to blog about it. Adrian took us down to the airport on the Saturday, which was nice of him. Cardiff Wales Airport was as mediocre as normal, the only place we could sit in the pub, was at the smoking end. My eyes were still stinging when we arrived in Cyprus. I did manage however to use my laptop wirelessly, although there wasn’t any encryption, so I VPNed into work.

The food on the plane was okay on the way out. I didn’t watch the film, Aims and I were too busy playing on our DSs. I must admit that the Nintendo DS is the best way ever to kill time. Oh I forgot to mention, after checking into the flight we didn’t get our passports checked once, I thought this was a little dodgy, but hey. So, passport control the other end was pretty quick, and then after a short bus drive (containing a couple of hairy small gap moments), we arrived right in the centre of Kato Paphos, HOORAY! (see this moblog)
The hotel was okay, a little bit more basic than was expected, but we went for a hotel based on location more than anything else. The biggest thing that pissed me off was that we got two single beds that were pushed together. Ordinarily this isn’t too bad a problem, but these were the kind of beds that once your in the middle its like a hammock, and rolling between beds is both painful and almost impossible. I don’t think I’d have been that pissed, but for the fact I’d specifically requested a double bed and been assured this wouldn’t be a problem.

The first morning we went to Thompson’s welcome meeting, and after some deliberation (I wanted to go to Israel) we decided to go on the hot air balloon excursion and the untouched north one. I was quite impressed with this welcome meeting, as they go, usually the reps try and force feed you trips to earn their bonus. And this guy was quite softly softly. So much in fact that when we were trying to book, he was asking us if we wanted a day to think it over. So triple thumbs up to Thompson for finally getting this right. We spent most of the rest of the day, sunning ourselves and emptying the bar .

The next day we got up bright and early, I had to collect the hire car. We used this car hire company, to book the car from the comfort of my settee at home. The car was pretty nice, although it was smaller than the focus size car I had paid extra to book, which pissed me off. It was some strange Toyota, which was automatic. After faffing around and getting ready we set off to limisol. I had decided that I wanted to visit Alexandria, and Limisol had a port to there. When we finally arrived there after driving on a very empty motorway and past many speed cops with their radars, we decided that it probably wasn’t such a good idea, being as we were there for one week. So we headed for Lady’s mile beach (something like that) and had some lunch by the seaside. I then came up with the bright idea to go to some awesome monestry in the mountains. I wasn’t very specific after only briefly remembering mention in it in the lonely planet guide I’d purchased. We headed off to the petrol station, where the guy did the filling for me, and I grabbed some refreshments and a big map. I then handed the map to Aims and she was left with the magic navigational task. We arrived at Trudos a few hours later, it seems as while it was bloody hot down by the coast up in this mountain range it was freezing (probably not by Welsh standards, but not the weather for shorts, t-shirts and sandals), and after a long and winding journey I needed a pee desperately. I ran off to the toilet, with haste as you can imagine. We visited a few shops here bought some nuts, and some batteries and set off into the void. There was more and more windy roads, but we ended up at mount Olympus so we thought we’d drive up for a look. At the very top, it seems the British have a big radar outpost, and civilians were not allowed to the trig point . We got some lovely pictures from up the top though (they’ll be up later). We finally arrived at the monestry, only to find that we weren’t allowed in. But again we got some nice pictures of outside. Now was the fun task of getting back to the hotel. We had headed into the mountain range from Limmisol, the trouble is, we were now off to Paphos. Aims was a very good navigator, but the terrain was crazy, very windey with rocks on the roads, but we started at last to descend. We ended up in some little country park cafe, got a drink and had a pee stop, and were content to see some signs pointing to Paphos.

(more to follow…)