The second picture is of the outside Theatre and Opera House that was showing a play about the American south called Night Mother. I’ll save that picture for the next post, because I think it is an interesting composition by itself.

Will is actually quite convinced that his “Kelly” heritage comes from the Isle of Man because he was looking at a WWII memorial and there were lots of Kellys on the list. I told him the only thing this proved is that his kin is likely to be on the front lines of a battle and Kellys, by way of this simple embossed illustration, have a greater propensity for death in conflict. After I made this point, he immediately backed off.

There was a closed inner atrium area where all the rooms had balconies hanging out over various plants and fauna. Each of us had a room and we would sit out on our balconies between meetings on our laptops and talk to one another across the atrium. I don’t know why, but we all found this very cool. From this picture below, Will was above me and to the left and Monty was across the way to the right. After we got bored we would do rather immature things like throw candy to each other and see if we could catch it. This is something that would not have happened if our significant others were with us. They don’t allow that sort of activity.

The rooms themselves were very nice, but the TVs only got about 9 very strange British channels. You could either watch the local news, which spent all its time talking about how horrible private companies are, or you could watch strange British soap operas where everyone looked rather old and drained by the goings-on around them.

Here is the exterior of the hotel close to dusk. It is next door to the opera house and one of the best-preserved buildings in Douglas.

The castle was founded by Norse Kings to guard the Silverburn River and saw most of its growth between the 13th and 16th centuries. It was partially destroyed by Robert the Bruce in 1313 and subsequently rebuilt by other rulers that did not have broadband access and must have been quite bored.

Here are a few pictures from before and after the tour:

Here is an interesting candy bar whose tagline appears to cut out about 50% of the market:

Here is a Kit Kat bar that has actually been renamed to a rather cumbersome web address:

Here is Will - he has Nice Biscuits:

And this is some honey that must be made by some distant relative of mine:

I like the tagline on the one below…so mysterious:

And then here is a Cadbury bar filled with a very sketchy looking pink substance:

Here is a picture of the bicycle and my gear at the top of the sound. The bike wasn’t really the best, but I’m sure it was great when delivering telegraphs during the second world war. It was also a bit unnerving riding on the opposite side of the street - narrow streets at that. It was sunny and warm for most of the day, but then some squall blew in from across the Irish sea and dumped freezing rain on me for the ride home.

I set out to ride from Douglas to Laxey to see the giant water wheel, but I had no idea how far it was. It looked close on the map, but I forgot that those things are drawn to scale. I had to ride up a killer hill just to get out of Douglas and at the top I asked some Scottish girl how far I was from Laxey and she just laughed and then went to go find the nearest pub to get drunk.