The Adventures of Lorie and Brian Groth

While walking Milo on Sunday we saw the Thames at the lowest we had ever seen it. This means a variety of junk was visible, such as the bicycle pictured here. People live in the boats that are sitting in the mud, even as they sit there at a slight angle. The current in the river seemed pretty strong too, but the birds enjoying the temporary mud beaches didn’t seem to mind.

Near our place is an old Citroën 2CV (I think that’s the model) that says "It’s only rock & roll, but I like it" on the back, and has the Rolling Stones lips on the doors.

 

Angelina and Daniel took some cool photos when they were here visiting. Here are a couple of Picadilly at night.

  

Click the satalite photo below to see a map of the Picadilly area in London:

Sorry Michael, I mostly got a bunch of work done in the offices outside of the city. We did go out for dinner in an industrial are, but there wasn’t much to see there even though it was a cool restaurant. We had some good local beer at a pub in town one night and walked around a bit, but nothing else and I didn’t even have the camera. This just means we need to go back to see the sights and really experience Amsterdam!

Hey familiy and friends who will hopefully get a webcam to use with Windows Live Messenger to do full-screen chats with Lorie and I…. here is how to set it up and use it with us:

Inside Windows Live Messenger:: Holiday Shopping, why a webcam is a fabulous gift and how to use it

Today Daniel, Angelina, and I took the train one hour south to Brighton. It’s a pretty big town on the beach, which is rocky, not sandy. The best part is a huge pier with carnival rides at the very end of it. It stayed cold and sunny most of the day, but wasn’t crowded. 

 

 

This is an arial view of the end of the pier:

We saw Spamalot here in London and enjoyed most of it, but a few of the songs could have been cut. There were a few good scenes if you are a Monty Python fan and a couple of good songs. They even did the song "Always look on the bright side of life".

You can listen to it here while watching some football (soccer)

And you can read the lyrics here

We were finally able to get a car via our lease program (it was a pain) and while it isn’t the new Volvo C30 that Lorie really wants, it is a nice and sporty little diesel Mercedes-Benz. We got a black C 220 CDI

It can’t seat 4 people plus Milo, but it can seat 4 people or 3 pus Milo. It does have two sunroofs though! We didn’t get the in-car navigation system, because the TomTom that Lorie bought is way better than the built-in thing, which we started referring to as the Random Direction Generator (RDG) that was in the rental we were driving for a while. And when I say "we" were driving, I mean Lorie, since she is the rock-star driver and I avoid it. :-)

Absolute Vodka is from Sweden and they have a bar made entirely of ice called the Ice Bar. The only drinks they serve are made from Absolute Vodka and they give you large shall/blankets with hoods to wear inside. We went there after some good halibut and raindeer for dinner with the Swedish team.

       

So the ice bar is interesting, but certainly a toursty thing, since it is basically a very large walk-in freezer. The Ice Hotel though is a real structure made from ice that we would like to visit sometime.

After having had fresh lefsa in Norway, we took off to Sweden. After a day of work for Brian and a day of rest for Lorie (actually mostly Internet time for Lorie as she hunted down other airplane tickets for another trip), we spent Tuesday night walking around the old part of Stockholm.

We picked a place for dinner that looked like it had some traditional Swedish meals and good drinks. The owner makes his own snaps (basically what American’s call schnapps) and tonight it was raspberry and bitter (licorish). We really liked the raspberry snaps, and the barley wine was good too. So were the salmon, potatoes, bread, and chocolate truffle.

   

The lefsa on the left is fresh from a grocery store in Norway (Lorie had never experienced fresh lefsa before – she liked it) and on the right is a street in the old part of Stockholm.

By the way, Oslo and Stockholm are both like Seattle and London this time of year: rain 

There are new photos of our trip in the Scandinavia photo album.