In the morning, we headed out for Miami Beach,  taking a leisurely drive toward South Beach. As we got there, it became more and more crowded, and it seemed unlikely that we would be able to find any parking, but we lucked into a space, hopped out, and began exploring on foot.

Check out the Whole Gallery

After wandering around the beach for a bit, we stopped for lunch at a local hotel restaurant, where I had a very tasty Cuban sandwich and Charlotte got a gigantic chopped salad with grilled shrimp. We then proceeded to wander south along Ocean Avenue, which is pretty much dominated by restaurants playing thudding club music while patrons sit in outdoor dining drinking out of ridiculous 32oz margarita glasses. It’s crowded, there are people constantly shoving pamphlets at you, and there’s a lot of skin on display from both sexes. Basically it’s like Times Square, only if everyone was wearing bathing suits, which surprisingly doesn’t make it much less awful than Times Square.

Eventually sick of the crowds, we threaded our way through the art deco neighborhood before returning to our car and heading for Downtown Miami … but that’s another photo-set!

Apparently while we were touring, the Sheriff’s office was also practicing their airboat maneuvers. I guess they need the practice, because they rounded a corner and slammed into a passenger boat, tearing off the back of it and sending several police officers flying into the swamp.

No one died, and none of the civilians were severely injured. One of the deputies, however, apparently lost his toe. Our boat driver was coordinating the rescue efforts on his phone while continuing to point out the sights for us, even as several helicopters, ambulances, and fire engines showed up on the scene.

Check out the gallery!

Very exciting. Unfortunately, I have no pictures of the accident  scene itself. We drove by it on the airboat and Gabe was brave enough to photograph the three severely pissed-off looking police offers stained up to their nipples by swamp water. I was not.

I can only assume the toe ended up in some gator’s belly, and that gator now has a taste for man!

UPDATE: Gabe has sent along the pic of the soaked police officers. Here it is!

To Protect and to Serve

View the whole gallery over at Flickr.

We’re really looking forward to the trip. Charlotte has only been to Barcelona once before, for a few days during the winter, and neither of us have ever been to really any of the places in Southern France that we’re planning on going, so it’ll be an adventure for both of us. Charlotte also has a ton of studying to do, so it’s likely we’ll spend a few hours each day in a cafe or similar. I’m hoping to use that time to continue working on my current fiction project (the sequel to The Blood That Bonds), but also to do some photo uploading and travel blogging.

So … if all goes as planned, expect several updates over the course of the next two weeks!

Thanks to campru for the image!

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

That’s all for now, but more updates coming soon!

Dart Publishing

Dart Publishing, Ltd. is the official name of the business I’ve been trying to get started with my friend for a while now. We’ve made huge leaps recently, thanks in part to having some extra time due to the Crispy Gamer implosion. I’m very nearly done with the first draft of the business plan, and will be sending it out to a few folks I know with way more business experience than I have, in order to get their feedback on it. From there, it’ll be revisions, and then probably applying for some local grants. Investor money is good, but free money is even better. Might as well look for that first, right?

Writing

Last month I finished not one, but two novels — my NaNoWriMo projects from 2007 and 2009, “The Broken God Machine” and “Morgan Skylark and the Monster Hunters,” respectively. If anyone out there wants to read the first draft of The Broken God Machine, it’s ready for criticism. Just get in touch. I still need to make some tweaks to Monster Hunters before I open it up for critique from the outside world, but that should be happening soon. I’m also making some progress on the second draft of the sequel to The Blood That Bonds, currently titled “Blood Hunt.” I expect work on that to speed up significantly once I’m no longer spending my coffee shop time filling out competitive analysis forms and burn-rate spreadsheets for Dart. Speaking of TBTB …

The Blood That Bonds

I haven’t had too many responses in my agent search, and so far the responses I’ve had haven’t been positive. I’m not particularly discouraged — people are still reading the eBook and sending very positive feedback — but I’m beginning to wonder if I should revise the first chapter a little to make it a bit more attention-grabbing right from the start. There’s a little too much opening exposition and I think it’s turning agents off. We’ll see.

Photography

Unfortunately, the broken 18-55mm lens that I fixed with superglue for a while has broken again, so we’re stuck only using a distance lens on our camera, which is a pain in the ass, so we’re not taking many pics at the moment. I need to get off my ass and either re-fix the lens using a better piece of plastic (and more superglue), or just cough up the ~$140 it costs to buy a new one. Why does everything have to be so damn expensive these days? Blargh! Rotten kids … GET OFF MY LAWN!

Cocktails

I went on a bit of a beer kick the past few months, trying lots of craft beers and really strengthening my understanding and appreciation of the different types available (turns out I am way more of an ale guy than a lager guy, with a particular fondness for brown ales, porters, and stouts). I’m coming out of that now though and getting back to crafting new cocktails. I’m still experimenting right now, but when I come up with something good, I’ll post it here.

Video Games

I went out and picked up BioShock 2 the other night at my wife’s urging (one of many reasons why I married her!) and have been playing through it. I’ll post a full review here when I’m finished, but I’m pretty far in and while I’m enjoying it, I’m kind of disappointed in how much more they’ve chosen to focus on combat. You’re constantly being swarmed with enemies, and while I’m not dying a lot, it’s just not a whole lot of fun to be in non-stop firefights. After BioShock 2, I’ll be picking up Mass Effect 2, and Assassin’s Creed 2 … apparently it’s all about the sequels right now.

Reading

Sadly, given how many activities I have going on, I haven’t done much reading since Christmas, when I burned through Bill Simmons’s Book of Basketball in a week or so. I’ve got three novels and a short story collection all waiting for my attention, not to mention a non-fiction book on real estate investing that I really should finish

French

Mon francais n’est pas superb … but it’s getting better. I do a half an hour of studying per day almost every weekday, and Charlotte and I are beginning to try to speak to each other more in French. We’ve also found some French cultural events to go to around town, and I’m about to start in on French grammar in addition to speaking/listening. It’s still a halting, frustrating process — I don’t like being bad at things — but all these little steps should hopefully add up to me being able to hold something of a coherent conversation with her friends and family back in the homeland, sometime within the next couple of years. Hopefully!

Travel

Speaking of the homeland, Charlotte and I will be making another France trip in May. Her sister is getting married in the south of France, which gives us the opportunity to fly into Barcelona in Spain, and spent the next week driving to Toulouse (actually, the nearby town of Albi), where we’ll attend the wedding, hang out for another day or two, and then I’ll fly back while she goes to Paris to take her finals for the French Lit program she’s working on. We’ve also got a trip to Florida happening in March, to visit my parents and sister, and a trip to Syracuse happening … sometime. Then as summer rolls into fall, we’ve got a wedding in New York City and a wedding in New Hampshire (I think) to attend. Yeesh!

… So that’s what’s up with me, in case anyone was wondering!

Anyway, here they are:

Christmas Food

Christmas People

Paris in Winter

Freezing Versailles

Enjoy!

Yum!

We awake bright and early (for Charlotte and I, at least … so 8:45am) and find that the heavy cloud cover from the previous day has lifted, and the sky is clear and blue. This means it’s going to be a bit warmer out, which is good, because we end up spending quite a bit of time outdoors, as it turns out.

We grab breakfast with Gabe and Brett — Starbucks again, and then head off on the fairly lengthy drive to the Maker’s Mark distillery. This takes us west out of Lexington, a drive which will continue until we’re south of Louisville, which is kind of nice since it shaves a bit of time off the trip home. Also, we get to drive through some very pretty country on a nice fall day. Not bad!

We eventually leave the Bluegrass Parkway and turn onto rural route 555, which is also pretty and takes us past a weird combination of golf courses, gigantic mansions, and trailer homes. I guess when you go where the land is cheap, you find all sorts of people willing to take advantage of that fact. On our way to the distillery we start seeing signs for “Historic Lincoln Birthplace” and decide that we might as well stop. This turns out to be a minor detour in terms of actual distance, but eats up close to an hour of our time, which is a good thing since we otherwise would’ve been incredibly early for the first distillery tour.

The “Lincoln” in question turns out not to be Abraham, but Abraham’s mother and father, who were born and lived within a mile of each other out here in roughly the middle of nowhere, Kentucky. The Lincoln family log cabin has been reconstructed on its actual spot, while the Hanks family cabin (Abe’s mom) is original, but was picked up and moved in order to create the historic site. We stop in at the gift shop and pay the $2 per head to tour the grounds, then wander around. The Lincoln cabin is one big room with a small and inaccessible upstairs section. The Hanks cabin is practically a mansion by contrast, having four defined rooms downstairs and a big sewing room upstairs. Both cabins are decorated with period antiques. Both are also freezing, dank, dim, and depressing. As Brett put it succinctly after a few minutes in the Lincoln cabin: “Okay … this would suck!”

We spend some time checking out the cabins and the grounds, which butt right up against a golf course upon which a bunch of guys are driving their golf carts in a most hazardous fashion. This proves amusing, as do the remains of what appears to once have been a well, but is now a creepy stone cavern with a spring at its base. Done exploring, we head back off toward Maker’s Mark.

We eventually arrive at the distillery, which is somewhat larger and a bit more industrial-looking than Woodford Reserve, but still pretty quaint and picturesque. We hang out in what used to be the owners’ house, which has now been turned into the central tour location, waiting for things to get started. Eventually we’re herded together and begin our tour. It’s similar to the Woodford Reserve tour, albeit in somewhat larger numbers. Where Woodford has three fermenting vats and stores about 5000 barrels, Maker’s has something like 36 fermenting vats and stores a correspondingly higher number of barrels. They’re still “small batch” though, because they only bottle using 160 barrels at a time. Oddly, given that it has so many more barrels, their aging warehouse doesn’t smell as good as Woodford’s. Maybe the stone walls do a better job of trapping in the scent?

At the end of the tour we get to do a tasting, which includes a small glass of Maker’s and a bourbon ball, but also includes something interesting: a small glass of “White Dog” (aka: White Lightning, aka: un-aged whiskey). It has an odd, ferment-y smell … like a combination of corn and yeast with an alcohol finish. On the tongue it lacks much flavor, and burns a bit more than the aged product. Overall, I wouldn’t recommend it compared to the finished version!

Gabe and Brett buy a small bottle of Maker’s to hand-dip in wax at the gift shop. Charlotte and I go for a full 750 ML bottle, which has a horrible label featuring the founder’s face on it, but is otherwise identical to a regular maker’s bottle. Gabe dunks theirs, Charlotte dunks ours, many pictures are taken, and I buy a bourbon-dipped cigar that I will probably forget to smoke until it is dried out and revolting. WOO!

We finished up our tour by visiting the Maker’s Mark cafe, where we acquired various bourbon-barbecue sandwiches, along with some sides and drinks. Pretty tasty for cheap cafe food. Charlotte and I each bought a bourbon cookie for the road, and I decided to eat mine while driving fifty-five on a twisty rural route. This caused a bit of a problem when we came up over a hill and I had a moment of indecision when faced with a fork in the road, finally decided to slam on the breaks and screech around to the left, still hanging precariously on to my cookie with one hand and turning the wheel with the other, all the while bumping over potholes and road debris, since we were now on a median rather than on the expected road surface. Ah, road trips.

Eventually we found our way to 65 north, and spent the next three hours or so making our way home. Our trip to Kentucky was over, but it will remain forever in our hearts. And our livers … at least, until that bottle of Maker’s is gone.

» Links: Lexington Trip Day 2 Pics

Lexington’s a pretty town, not too huge but big enough to feel like a city. There’s a nice touch of Southern Hospitality without it being grating or overbearing. The presence of the UK campus right in the center of things helps keep a fairly youthful, modern feel to the populace. It’s also currently responsible for a LOT of construction … apparently UK hasn’t heard that we’re in a recession, because they’re putting up new buildings like crazy. Also, there is plenty of sausage gravy to be had which, from my point of view, is a definite plus.

On Friday night we stopped by a local UK pizza joint and had some dinner before retiring to the aforementioned deluxe accommodations to crash for the night. The next morning we got up, ate breakfast, and headed out to the Woodford Reserve Distillery, where they make some of the most delicious bourbon ever to grace this green earth. They are a small batch distillery, working with only 140 barrels at a time and storing only about 5000 barrels at once. Each barrel holds about 120 liters of bourbon, or about 160 standard-sized bottles, so each batch is about 22.4 thousand standard bottles. To give an idea of why that’s “Small Batch,” the largest bourbon producer in Kentucky stores about 1.8 million barrels at any given time. 5000 is damn near artisan level by comparison.

We toured the mixing and fermentation building, the distilling building, the aging warehouse (aka: the best-smelling place on earth), and the bottling facility. Then we went up for a free tasting and a bourbon ball. Delicious! We bought some bourbon-chocolate-cherry candies in the gift shop, and headed for our next stop: Keeneland, a gigantic horse-racing track.

We arrived and, after looking for a free parking spot for about twenty years, finally managed to get inside the building. Two things needed to be accomplished before the fifth race began. One: Charlotte and I needed to put some money down so we could say that we’d officially bet on a horse race. Two: we needed to get some food up in us, because we were all starving. I put ten bucks on horse #6, “Artisan” to win, and Charlotte told me to put ten bucks on Horse #3 to show … but I got flustered at the betting window and accidentally put it on horse #2, “Irish Ridge” to show. Oops. Next we went upstairs and acquired stew, a brat, a burger, and a couple of beers. After wandering around trying to find a place to eat them AND see the race at the same time, we finally managed to procure a bench just minutes before the race started.

And they’re off! The horses go running as we shout encouragement in between bites of food and sips of Bud Light (it was all they had). #6 – Artisan – My horse immediately falls into second to last place and never contends. Sonuva … fortunately #2 – Irish Ridge- the horse we accidentally put ten bucks on to show, ends up winning the entire thing. We make $12 on that $10 bet, so we’re