A church outside of Edinburgh Castle, on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, Scotland. Nice thing about pretty much everything in Edinburgh, is its a small city easy to get around, but all the buildings in the older part of the city have a really nice old feel. Looking well aged, and having a story to tell due to the fact that the Nazi’s didn’t level it like some of the more southern cities during the war.

I would love to go back and spend more time just wandering around. Its a great walking city, with all the hills you’ll get a great work out too!

I got rid of the boat, donated it to a charity for a tax receipt, there were reasons for it, with having zero time, and I wanted to make a couple significant (read expensive) upgrades, I figured it was best to get rid of her, but do something nice for society at the same time.  Plus it saves me a boat load of cash next year which will go to debt reduction, and thinking about the future, which I’m hoping will include moving to the UK.  Can’t take a boat with you!

Other then that, work is busy, my company is busy, life is busy!  I really wish I could win the lottery so I could just concentrate on one thing   Preferably from a beach in Turks and Caicos doing my rebreather training!  Stay tuned, I’ll post some more pictures from the Euro Trip soon.

Photos from my journey through Paris’s underground. In the late 1780′s Paris was in need of a place to move it’s overflowing graveyards, the solution was to put over 6 million of the dead into the old mined quarries beneath the city. The 2km stretch of tunnels you can walk, averaging just over 6 feet in height only represent a small fraction of the 300+ km of actual tunnels.

Finally arrived in the UK for the wedding present trip my parents got Amy and I two years ago. We’d have been here sooner, but works always managed to get in the way, but finally things are stable and relaxed enough in the studio, and we aren’t finalling that I can get away! Here we are in Merry Old London for a few days before tripping off to Paris!

Unfortunately I didn’t get to ride the road, but i did drive it with my buddy Steve who recently moved here from Toronto to help me convert this city to less hippy and more awesome!  We popped into the Hell’s Gate Air Tram and checked that out.  Its a pretty neat location, apparently the deepest and narrowest point on the Fraser River, the history behind it is pretty much insane.  The discovery and exploration of this region was treacherous to say the least, I’ll post more about it later along with some pictures.

Back to the road, we took the #1 up to Boston Bar where the Hell’s Gate is and then continued on to Lytton where we jumped on the #12 following signs to Lillooet where we were finally back on the 99 and headed south to Whistler for some dinner and then home.  The road is well maintained but has lots of twists and turns and threads through the Fraser Canyon with the Coastal Mountains on one side and the Cascade Mountains on the other.  If I’m lucky, I’ll get to ride it before the riding season up there is out and weather starts turning nasty.  If not its on my list for first thing next year when the snow is out, and the roads are dry!

I ended up routing power from the 12v powering the cabin lights, I figure draw across that circuit is low with all my lights being LEDs, plus it was about the only option I had without ripping the interior of the boat apart. One day I’d like some speakers in the cockpit but for now this will do!

You know I found this pretty sad to watch. It really goes to show how the few can really ruin it for the many. Where I watched the game in Yaletown the crowd was in good spirits after the Canucks lost the cup. But as we left there were already plumes of smoke rising above the city. We made our way over the bridge and headed to a friends and the smoke was still rising.

After having the Olympics go off without a hitch, you figure that we could have been less of a douche bag about losing the cup. But no, a few young tards from out of town thought it would be more fun to riot, fight, and loot in the streets. For the first time since I moved here, I kind of wish I wasn’t associated with Vancouver at all. I know it was the few once again, screwing the many over, but still it is disgusting.

Next time there is a big event, I hope the police will finally figure it out and have a bigger presence to help avoid these kinds of situations. What I did see of the police on TV though, I thought they handled themselves well amongst the chaos.

Game One of the Stanley Cup finals down, and Vancouver up one to start the series off on the right foot! There were 40,000 people on Granville and Robson streets last night and as you can see everyone seemed to be having a pretty good time!

Now I had requested the the heat exchanger be serviced when I first got the boat, but after this round of work its debatable that it was done.  I started by draining the cooling fluid out the bottom of the heat exchanger as well as what raw water was still in there, and it wasn’t much!  I got the exchanger off and pulled all the hoses and threw it all into a bag to bring home.  I also ordered new seals, o-ring and the screw that holds the end cap down cause there was significant leakage on the one end as well as lots of calcification.

The hose that runs from the raw water pump to the heat exchanger was actually held in its shape by all the build up that was within it, a good exercising of the pipe and a nice bath in CLR and hot water did an excellent job of cleaning it out.  At the end of the heat exchanger I had a massive pile of buildup so that also received a bath and I used some bamboo skewers to work it all off.  After I took a wire wheel to get all the old paint off the outside of the heat exchanger and any corrosion and gave it a good coat of primer and black indoor/outdoor paint.  It looks pretty good now!

The real fun began after I got it all back together, I had elected to leave the thermostat for now because I didn’t have anything on the boat that I could use to turn the cap screws that held it on, as it turned out they were massively rusted into place, but we’ll come back to that in a moment.  With everything back together, and a new cooling fluid in as well as a new impeller I fired up the iron sail and let her warm up to make sure everything was ok.  As it turns out everything wasn’t ok, I think I had an air trap in the thermostat housing which caused an over heat, I was able to alleviate that by opening up the little valve on the top, but now I was concerned that the thermostat could also be sticking.  I did have a new thermostat and gaskets, and so began stage two!

I went and bought a nice big 1/2″ ratchet drive so I would have lots of torque to try and break the one bolt free, which I was able to do, the problem now was that the second bolt head had been stripped years previous it seemed as well as being rusted in place.  Back out to get some more tools and back to the boat with a dremel tool now to cut the bolt head off.  Once I made it through that, which was a little bit of a chore due to the lack of space to work the housing came up leaving me to just deal with the bolt stem still.  I was getting worried that I would need to drill it out and I really didn’t want to have to do that, so I borrowed a friends pipe wrench and that did the trick!

With the housing now free, and new bolts on hand, I cleaned up the water pump mount and painted it, I left the thermostat housing as it was at this point, I was just tired of grinding metal and painting!  I headed back to the boat and cleaned up the base and put my new gaskets into place and bolted everything down.  Hooked the water pump back up and fired up the engine!

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