OT: Our trip to Spain andItaly (Rome) - with pics...

[Bob Stockler]

So, you went to Europe instead of Kentucky this spring.  We'll
miss your being here.

I've been to Europe twice, courtesy of the Acousticon Hearing
Aid Company (earning enough points to have my trips paid for
by selling enough Acousticon Hearing Aids during the prior year).

The trip to Italy was delightful, but the other one beat it [1].

It celebrated Dr. Miller Reese Huchinson's invention of the
electrical hearing aid [2] (he also invented the Claxon Horn [3]).

In honor of his hearing aid invention he was invited to London
and to Paris to receive awards.  Our trip mimiced his.

Three things stand out most in my memory of the latter trip:

  1 - We were supposed to fly from London to Paris, but some
      kind of airlines strike converted that to a train-ship-train
      journey.  On the first train we (me, my wife and pre-teen
      daughter) were in a 4-passenger compartment with a young
      Frence lady who professed to not speaking/understanding
      English - until my daughter spilled a Coke in her lap.  After
      that we were a foursome on the boat and train to Paris.

  2 - The dinner we had at resturant (the name of which now escapes
      me) where our Sales Manager and his wife were served with the 
      gold table ware used by Douglas Fairbanks (Jr,?) and Mary
      Pickford when they dined there.

  3 - An encounter with a lady on our way back from the subway to our
      hotel.  She asked me direcions, in French.  I replied, in broken
      French, that I didn't speak/understand French.  It turned out
      she was a Britisher, on holiday, and we led her back to the hotel
      where we were all staying.

Bob

[1] - The best thing in Rome was the Etustran Museum, where - in mixed
      company - we came upon a display of goblets decorated around the
      rims with men, in obvious sexual arousment, were chasing women.

[2] - His electrical hearing aid was an analog of the physical one, in
      which a large horn captured sounds and passed them through to a
      tube that directed them to the listener's ear.

[3] - The St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote an editorial sugessting that
      Dr. Hutchinson invented the Claxon Horn to provided users for his
      Acousticon (though the inventions were bass-ackwards for that).

John Esak wrote (on Tue, May 02, 2006 at 12:54:38PM -0400):

| If there was ever a reason for OT: this is it! (Do NOT read further if you
| want only filePro and tech tips... this is NOT that!) It's just that many of
| you in the FP Room are asking about our recent trip... so, if any out there
| want an incredibly boring read... go to:
| 
|     www.valar.com/europe
| 
| There are about 500 photographs... but you aren't allowed to view them until
| you read the blogs... both of them... :-)  There will be a quiz.

-- 
Bob Stockler  +-+  bob at trebor.iglou.com  +-+  http://members.iglou.com/trebor