farlands | traveling near and far

So, I've learned my lesson.  When ordering green tea at dinner soon after arriving in town, don't go along with the waitress when she says 'hot tea?'  I assumed she meant 'did I want my green tea to be hot' - but what I think she brought was exactly what I had agreed to...hot (black) tea.  The kind with more caffeine.  The kind you should not drink at night, but I did mindlessly, because you might then watch the entire Titanic movie, finish a book, and keep reading another, just to try and get sleepy. The following morning after finally getting some sleep in, I took a relatively easy drive down into the downtown area of Pittsburgh, for a lunch meeting at the Duquesne Club. I asked the front desk before I left the hotel how to pronounce it, since there are some French words, like this one, where I have no clue. (Note, it's "du-CANE") and when you Google it one of the first pairings that pops up is 'Duquesne pronunciation '.  I thought if ...

A friend recently spoke dismissively of Orlando, and I felt compelled then, as I do now, to say that the past few times I have been in Orlando I have been impressed.  The climate, especially when I was there in late October, was perfect.  The food was delicious.  And the service industry, driven by that behemoth Disney, provides excellent service at most every turn. Since there are so many takeaways from my trip, which was a combination work conference/personal vacation, I'm making a list: The good: The weather.  Seriously.  I would love to pull John out of school in the middle of October just to visit the theme parks when they are the perfect temp and not horribly crowded. Half-day passes to Disney.  Available through my conference, I went with several of my co-workers to the Magic Kingdom from 5 to 10 p.m.  It was just enough.  Same with going to Epcot over the weekend - was there from 2 to 10, and that was almost too much.   ...

Tonight I started poking around on the stats area of Blogger, to get a better feel for who might be stopping by this blog.  This month, I saw that people from several countries had viewed a page: Entry Pageviews United States 34 Russia 14 Brazil 7 Poland 3 Germany 2 France 2 Italy 2 Ukraine 2 Australia 1 Ecuador 1 It made me smile to think that people I don't know from all around the world were interested enough to click through to one of my blog posts....no telling who read what or if they backed out after realizing it wasn't what they expected or wanted to read.  (Just like I did with a Nautical Living blog - intriguing but not for me). Some of the things I am thinking about are: Writing schedule:  it's approximately once a week right now, on Wednesdays.  Not counting busy weeks when I don't post.  Need to decide if I am truly going for once a week or not. Family and Friends i...