Sack the bloody diary

Okay, so we're going to sack the diary entries for a while.  After all, it's been Bath, Bristol, a beer festival in Cirencester, a tour through the Cotswolds, Galway via Liverpool, Dublin, Edinburgh via Belfast and Troon, and I'm presently sitting in a pub called The Three Legged Mare, in York.  In other words, there is much to catch up on, and if I keep up with the damn diary approach, I'll be home in the real world before I finish blogging Dublin.  So I'll have to do all that by memory, and hope for the best.

Meanwhile, York itself is charming to the point of sickness.  Mine, not theirs.  I mean, the whole city is a period piece, kind of like Leavenworth, Washington, only for real and on a shocking scale.  Setting aside the number of rabbits in Edinburgh-more on that when I get back to the diary entries-it's worth taking a moment to consider, as Vincent explained to Jules in Pulp Fiction, the little things.

The little things: In the Kingdom, they use this ceiling-mounted "intelligent water system" instead of the all-seeing blind eye in the men's rooms, except it's just as stupid.  Like at the Patriot, in Dublin, just off Kilmainham Gaol, where I stepped up to the urinal and the three to my right all flushed.  Or earlier today, in The Golden Lion, when all six urinals flushed-five being empty-as I zipped up.

Never mind.

For all the green fever in Europe, water isn't near the top of the list.  To the one, they have the little placards to just make the beds at the hotel instead of changing the sheets, and the This Juice I had this morning also paid for a month's worth of water for some poor sod in Malawi, but the toilets in the hotel flush an amazing amount of water, and I've already mentioned the (un)intelligent water system in the pubs.

Then again, 'tis time to set out for ... um ... something, so that's where we're at.  The Three Legged Mare.  I'll start posting photos when I have time, but we're packing up our gear for the next stop in York.  Hopefully, there will be more beer.

Which is another little thing.  Budweiser is strangely popular here, though it might have something to do with the 5% alcohol content.  I won't laugh too hard at the poor SOB who wrote in to the editors of The Irish Independent lamenting the six Euros per bottle for the "King of Beers" on the train.  More importantly, though, the beer is outstanding.  Crushingly good.  I just finished up a JHB, which I think stands for Jeffrey Hudson Bitter, and if it ranks among the "weak" beers I've had here, I'll have to ignore the ... um ... was it Tetley's? ... that I drank from cans on the train from Edinburgh to York.  The TLM also serves a wonderful local brew called Centurion's Ghost, and the Wonky Donkey that Drew enjoyed tremendously is apparently exclusive to this particular institution.

But, yes, the beer is good.  More-and more coherently-later.