purplecat

"Bring your outdoorsy clothes we might get lucky with the weather," Matryoshka said in one of her emails before this trip.

I therefore packed my walking boots. I considered packing my walking sticks but wasn't convinced they were worth the trouble of trying to get into the carry on luggage. Once here, we consulted the weather and decided that Tuesday was the best day for a walk. Matryoshka then picked us a 13km (allegedly) walk to the next town, past a Vikinghytten where she promised there would be waffles. I murmured a bit about the lack of walking sticks but she insisted we would take the funicular railway up to the plateau and, once up there, "it's very flat". It was only later it occurred to me that, being nearly 10 years younger than I am, she might not have realised I value my sticks more on the down than on the up.

Anyway we got up onto the plateau where the walking was pleasant and easy albeit with a bit more up than Matryoshka had anticipated.



Despite the fact the sign on that cairn reads Vikinghytten, that house is not the Vikinghytten. When we got to the Vikinghytten which was actually off to the left of that cairn, it was resolutely shut and there were no waffles to be seen. Also, the toilets were locked.

However we continued onwards and upwards a bit following a nicely visible line of cairns. Then we took a turn off this path and things became a bit more complicated. It's a long time since I've been on a walk without the combination of solid GPS and an ordnance survey map. I had managed to persuade Matryoshka to load the route to Indre Arna, on her phone and we relied on this quite heavily in what followed as the path repeatedly disappeared leaving us to strike out in roughly the right direction across the bog until we picked it up again.

Then we hit the down which was both muddy and steep and variably pathless, sufficiently so that when we came out on the road and then missed the turning back onto the path we decided to stick with the road which only took us a little out of our way. Shortcuts make long delays, we reassured ourselves, and we were certainly travelling about twice as fast on the road as we had been on the path.



This is the Strava analysis of the walk showing elevation against our pace. The point where we hit the road is fairly obvious.


We ended the walk in a very empty but very clean train station with a very space age toilet but no bar. We waited 30 minutes for a train and 10 minutes later we were back in Bergen, where we went our separate ways, showered and then met up again for burgers and beer. We were both clearly a bit dehydrated when we compared notes this morning, but neither was too stiff though Matryoshka had sore ankles and I have slight numbness in one big toe.





Allegedly this was a research meeting and, to be fair, we did plan out a textbook though we got side-tracked today into writing a paper so the textbook plan hasn't even made it as far as an outline document.

While I was in Texas an old friend and his wife took me out for the day including a trip around Texas' Capitol





( Piccies Under the Cut )

At the start of March I spent 2 Days in Washington at a slightly odd workshop on Incorporating Ethics into Artificial Intelligence. I knew, from following gregmce on Strava, that there was a nice looking run around the National Mall and so most of the photos below are from that - often early in the morning because Jet-Lag.

( Picspam Under the Cut )

A final few miscellaneous images of Delft. Including some of medical instruments, just to warn those who may not like such things.

( Under the Cut )

I've been in Delft for the past two weeks for work reasons but I was able to spend the weekend doing touristy things. I've got quite a few photos, but I need to pack this evening so I'm only posting a handful now. Maybe more later. I also had to take selfies for Corporate Communications, so I may be posting a link to that at some point.

( Pictures under the Cut )

Over the summer I attended another Dagstuhl Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems.

( More under the Cut including a lot of photos of Bernkastel-Kues )

I didn't take many photos when I was in Japan. Sapporo is a tourist city, but it's tourism is based around it's winter ski slopes and focused on the internal market. Visually, it felt to me very much like visiting a North American city, just on a slightly more compact scale which actually made walking from place to place practical. But largely there were just a lot of big modern buildings.

( For the sake of completeness though, here is the view from my hotel window )

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/20660.html.

I've just been on a trip to a workshop at Schloss Dagstuhl in Germany about which I shall no doubt blog in due course. On Wednesday afternoon, when it was pouring with rain and my head was full of cold we went on a day trip to Trier and had a guided tour of the city. To be honest, in retrospect, I should really have stayed behind and gone to bed but that sort of thing is easy to say in retrospect.

( picspam under the cut )