Waterfall, grave, and halloween

It's been awhile and we have been to many places and I am afraid that I will not be following the time line, however, here is a couple of pictures of some of the things we saw.

The waterfall was not exactly an easy walk. The path was 3km long and for the most part uphill! What they should have done was provide either a golf cart to take people up and down, oxygen, or at least a pint of Guiness.

Here is Maryann sitting on the grave of Finn McCool's son. This also was a bit of a hike up through a side of a mountain. It was an adventure but totally worth it!


Lastly, here is Don with his new pal, he has made many new friendships here with the locals!



Gotta run, more to come, today is a shopping day

Giant's Causeway and Bushmills

Just a quick update. Yesterday we first hit the Giant's Causeway and it was a lot of walking but well worth it. In the first two pictures I marked them with a tiny arrow showing you the two furthermost points. we took a picture at the beginning looking at the end of the hike and another picture from the end looking at the start point. We started the walk along the top of the ridge and about 2/3 way hit a stair case that was 162 steps down the cliff edge.





Here is a picture of Lori sipping Bushmill's top dog, 21 year old whisky. She gives it 4 livers (in case you don't get it 4 stars)

And lastly, here is a picture of Patrick who everyone in my group thought was me walking back and forth. We stopped him and asked for a picture and while talking he told me he has 2yr old twins, so in the picture he is holding up a cell phone with a picture of his twins, pretty funny! By the way the pub was great with traditional Irish music mixed in with songs like John Denver's that goes like "take me home country road to the place where I belong West Virginia....." and the Monkeys "Sleeping Jean" along with "come on Eileen" I was really surprised to see a bunch of well lets say very happy Irishmen singing and dancing to a song about West Virginia, however, it was awesome!

The Crown Bar

Our first night out in Belfast and most of us were dragging. Keep in mind that we left NJ at 3:30pm Tues. and arrived in Dublin at 9:30am (4:30am our time). Then we got on a bus and headed right out to start seeing sights. When we got to Belfast and checked in most of us were afraid to sleep considering we didn't want to not sleep through the night. So, after dinner some of us headed over to The Crown Bar to enjoy a pint. The Crown itself was a very well built pub, the extent of the workmanship (woodwork) was beyond compare. The quick story is that the workers at the ship yard would moonlight and built this pub. Anyway, very cool place to be and they even had very private booths for those looking for a little intimacy. I just couldn't get a picture that would do it justice. Calling it an early night we crashed! Now we are off to Bushmills and the Giant's Causeway.

IRELAND

After a long travel day, we made it to Belfast! But before we ventured to Belfast we went and saw a bunch of high crosses and a Monastic round tower. We also saw a Dolmen which was pretty cool. The dolmen itself is a tomb that was once covered in earth and the body would be placed inside, however, after all this time the earth has been washed away.


Now, we are off for dinner will update again later!

Found Jesus, in Vegas

Who knew that I would have found the son of god, the almighty, the man who walks on water walking down Fremont Street Las Vegas, but I did!



Other than finding JC we hit the Neon Museum, Pinball Hall of Fame (again), Fremont St., car show in the Imperial Palace, few clubs, and lastly none of us won at gambling. The Neon Museum was a place not yet opened to the public, but they offered private tours. We were able to get in and got to see all the old Vegas signs from the years past.




The Pinball Hall of Fame was very cool as usual but this time we had a bit of a different experience. While playing Iron Man a new pinball game the guy working at he place came over and cranked up the volume as well as giving us all a free game (which he played with us) While he was playing he was teaching us exactly how and what to do. He was very impressive considering his score was 50+million and the rest of us were like 2-5 mil.




That's it for now!

One of these things is not like the other!

I had the pleasure of golfing with the Dix brothers over the weekend and they are very much a shoe in for the 2010 version on the tv show the ODD Couple!



and

Bottling Day

Almost one year ago Lori and I had begun the process to make wine for real and you may remember that post on on this blog, if you want to revisit it click here. Fast forward to Sept. and we were ready to bottle #240 bottles of wine. We could not have done the bottling alone as there was a fair amount of work involved. Our wine was transferred and filtered from the barrel it slept in the prior year to a stainless steel holding tank to await the bottling process.

First, the stainless steel tank was hoisted up high and the next step was to fill the bottles by way of gravity.

Then they were corked and RTB our heat sink master double fisted the wine bottles and heated the tin foil caps on
From here they passed down to get their labels



Once the labels were spun on we had our finished product and Tom's special bottle Notice his great attention to detail!

That is it, except we had to repeat that process a total of #240 times and once the tank was emptied we ventured over to our table to enjoy some food and great wine!

The entire bottling process took just about one hour however, taste testing the other wines available and enjoying the food we made an afternoon of it.

All in all we had a fabulous time and really appreciated everyone who helped us bottle and moved the wine! Now, the hard part is allowing the wine some additional time to age in the bottle before we drink any of it. Optimally the wine should "bottle age" anywhere from a few months to a few years to enhance and further develop its unique flavor. Here is a little explanation regarding aging of wine.