Blogging Roller

Andi arrived yesterday (Friday) and decided to forgo sleep and walk around Dublin while I attended the last day of ApacheCon. I was occupied until 6PM because I didn't want to miss Craig Russell's talk (excellent, BTW), one of the last talks of the day. After that, Andi joined me and some Sun and IBM folks from the Apache Derby dev team (Manyi, Olaf and Sateesh) for a very nice dinner, drinks and conversation ranging from religion and politics to open source dev processess. Making some new friends was a great way to end ApacheCon.

Today, we drove across Ireland from Dublin to Clifden stopping in Athlone for a couple of hours of walking around and taking pictures. After a shaky start and almost getting lost in a maze of roundabouts outside of town, the trip went well. We had sunny weather most of the way and made the trip in about 7 hours total (including our stop in Athlone).

After we passed Galway, we started to hit mist and rain but the scenery was fantastic, if a bit desolate and sheepy. Just as we were about to check into the Buttermilk Lodge the sun came out for a bit, which was encouraging.

So now we're uploading photos and emailing the kids and getting ready to enjoy some music downtown. We'll check in again tomorrow if we can. Next stop is Kilkee.