The Adventures of Lorie and Brian Groth

These are only used in the spring and summer, because it gets a bit cold at the North Sea. I think the only electricity is from each building’s solar panels and the only water is at a community bathroom building at the end of each row.

Look close and you can see that some have a deck area and there are a few people cleaning up or even building to get ready for summer.

When it’s tulip season, the city sets out temporary pots full of them. These are near our house.

We had 2 days of work in Dublin, so not much time for sightseeing. However, I did make the 45-minute walk across town from our hotel to my office each morning and afternoon, so I was able to see the city that way. Then, Lorie and I were able to take off early one day and take a walk, sample some whiskey, and grab a meal of Guiness and other Irish foods.

I didn’t pay too much attention to what I was taking photos of, but here is some of what I saw:

The view from the Salesforce office is nice, but I prefer the lobby:

Even the Guiness truck gets stuck in traffic at Rush hour, but it does taste better in Dublin. We found a quiet little whiskey bar, which was a great break from the busy sidewalks.

Today was a different experience as my friend Tim and I took a 2-hour workshop to learn how to distill rum at the Spirited Union Botanical Rum Distillery. Or more specifically, doing a secondary distillery to add in some flavors to a generic unflavored rum. There were about twenty people in the workshop and we each had our own small copper pot.

We had a book with the instructions and the different ingredients were in jars around the room. Later we realized that the book had 4 different flavors of rums we could make, so we started improvising and added flavors we thought would be more fun.

On the left is my mix of lemon peels, orange peels, lavender, rose petals and elderflower. This was added to 500ml of white rum On the right is the result after I cooked it and steamed out all of the ” botanical distillate”.

It took a few minutes of cooking, but eventually the steam worked its way up the tube, cooled off a bit as it spiraled down, and dripped about 100ml into my beaker.

We then poured the botanical distillate into a bottle of generic rum, added a little bit of sugar water, and then some extracts. I chose to ignore the recipe and used only clementine extract.

The end result was a decent rum that will work well when mixed with some citrus. However, Tim chose a dark rum as his base with a mix of various botanicals, but mostly almonds. His tasted much better than mine and you could probably enjoy it straight, like you would a whiskey.

Notice the stack of cars in a garage with chandeliers.

Yes, there is a store in Amsterdam that sells nothing but different flavors of peanut butter and a few peanut butter themed items, like socks. We bought 5 little tasters, which are pretty good.

We just had a lot of walking and touring with life-long friends, and only some of it included dog walking!

Friday covered 23km (28,523 steps) and included a windmill, ship museum, red light district, a distillery, and lots of random Dutch and Amsterdam facts from tour guide Brian.

Saturday covered 18km (22,385 steps) and included the Albert Cuyp Market, watching people get free tulips for Free Tulip Day, and a bit of shopping (or at least browsing):

Mixed rain and snow made for a very wet day of dog walking too.

Rain or shine, dog walks still happen.

Look closely and you can see where the adult stands in the back, behind the handlebars and throttle, which are under a black cover right now. Up to eight kids sit sideways facing each other, all seat-belted in. These even have a cover on the top and front to keep some of the rain off of the kids. These drive on the bike lanes, and are about as wide as most bike lanes too.