Conventions And Conversions

IF YOU’RE NEW TO THE SITE, PLEASE READ THIS FIRST.

I started this blog to write about my 2013 trip on the Trans-Mongolian Express. Its first expansion was to include my June 2012 trip to Malta. The momentum from that carried forward to ultimately encompass most of the trips I’ve taken subsequent to 2013.

The first trip, taken in May and June of 2013 began in the Washington, D C metro area, moved to Beijing through Frankfurt via airplane and then across China, Mongolia, and Russia by a train that took me as far as Saint Petersburg before finishing back in D C by airplane again passing through Frankfurt.

Conventions I will follow.

I will use local currencies when writing about expenditures and I will conform to the preferred local measuring systems. Thus, outside the United States I will use the metric system and report temperature in degrees Celsius. For travel within the U S I will use the Imperial system and Fahrenheit measurements for temperature. Because the 24 hour clock, aka universal time is common internationally, I will use that notation throughout. My preferred date order will be d / m / y. Thus, 4 July 1776.

If you are unfamiliar with these measurement standards referenced above, they are:.

Temperature: 0 Celsius = 32 Fahrenheit. To convert to Fahrenheit, for every degree Celsius add or subtract 1.8° (or 18° for every 10) to 32°. Thus a temperature of 20° C converts to 68° F (32+18+18=68) or -30° C converts to -22° F (32-18-18-18).

Distance / Speed: 1 Kilometer (Km) = about .62 miles so 1000 Km = 620 miles. 80Kph = about 50 Mph. Using two-thirds in converting kilometers to miles will give you a very rough estimate.

Weight: 1 Kilogram = about 2.2 pounds.

Area: 1 Hectare = about 2.47 acres.

Time: 0:00 – 11:59 are a.m. hours.   12:00 – 23:59 are p.m. hours. Thus, 15:30 would be 3:30 p.m.

When writing about certain geologic events, archaeological time frames, or historic times, I will use the following conventions:

BCE – Before the Common Era (e.g. prior to the western calendar year 0).

CE – Common Era (e.g. after to the western calendar year 0).

BP – Before Present – Sometimes I simply don’t want to do the arithmetic or the arithmetic isn’t relevant. Thus 10,000 years BCE could become 12,000 BP.

M Y A – Million Years Ago – Most geologic events occur on massively long time scales. Think of the extinction event that ended the age of the dinosaurs that occurred 65 M Y A. I have spaced the letters so the TTS won’t read this as the name Mya.

I will try to include reminders and prompts of the above in some individual posts.

Although my opinion will be prevalent throughout, I will italicize rants about things that irritate me. In some of the entries, you’ll see segments written in green italics and others in blue italics. The green italicized text contains either a casual aside or supplemental information that I think is interesting but not necessarily crucial to understanding the surrounding subject matter. Passages in blue sometimes represent a rant but are always expressions of my personal opinion. Read them at your discretion.

This blog has no monetization and videos and images are provided for educational purposes. Thus, videos such as those from YouTube are included under the fair use provision of the copyright act. Image and video and copyrights remain the property of their owners and I will remove them upon request.

My growing list of travel tales.

As a rule, I will group the entries for each trip into a descriptive category. You can find shorter trips, such as the first one below, under the label “Other Trips“.

The first addition to the site includes my Thanksgiving trip to Atlanta in November 2013 and a stop in Whitwell, Tennessee. No conversions are needed. However, on that trip, my grandniece Maya, pointed out that I’ve omitted the story of the origin of the site’s unusual name. And since she inspired it, I’ll include it below.

In 2014 my summer trip included the Badlands and Black Hills of South Dakota and an unusual cross country route along the Great River Road. The latter follows the Mississippi River from its source in Lake Itasca, Minnesota to Venice, Louisiana which is as far as one can drive in 2014 – thus traversing the country from north to south.

In the summer of 2015, I traveled to Scotland – mainly to see at least one round of play of the Open Championship on the old course at Saint Andrews – and then on to Scandinavia with a brief day trip to Helsinki. (Finland is not part of Scandinavia.)

I’ve included a summary of the weekend blitz to Iowa on Halloween weekend with my friend Arnie when we took in three Maryland versus Iowa sporting events in two days. I again use local time and measurement conventions. This is in the other trips category.

In 2016, I returned to Europe traveling to the Balkans and Budapest. For those interested, I booked the trip through Overseas Adventure Travel which specializes in small groups. Our group consisted of a dozen travelers plus the tour leader.

All my travels in 2017 were domestic and brought me closer to a goal of visiting all 50 states in the United States. Because I didn’t want to abandon Zicomo (my cat) for six or seven weeks, I took the uncharacteristic step of splitting the trip into two stages. In the late spring, I went to the Rocky Mountain states of Arizona and Utah then, just before Labor Day, set off on a second trip west that included Alberta, Canada, and a bit of South Dakota. However, I spent most of the time in Wyoming and Montana.

The next year, 2018, saw me return to Europe on a trip prompted, oddly enough, by my second trip to the Western US in 2017. I heard a promotional announcement for this trip while listening to the APR show Performance Today and was so intrigued by the prospect of a musical river cruise from Paris to Normandy that it displaced any other plans I might have been considering. The trip was organized by Earthbound Expeditions and Pat T, whom I met on the OAT trip was my traveling companion. This probably includes my last cruise of any kind.

I had a second trip to Europe in 2018 when I spent a delightful and inspiring week in Spain as a volunteer English teacher for Groupo Vaughan or Vaughan Town that I supplemented with an extra day or two in Malta. I’d read about this volunteer opportunity in the magazine International Living and am happy I took the opportunity that had presented itself.

Since the Performance Today trip was earlier in the year than I normally travel, it presented one of the better opportunities to travel to the southern hemisphere and I took advantage of this with my cross continental (east to west this time) journey to South America in 2019. This was another small group tour and, as it turned out, had only a total of four people – me, two solo travelers from the UK, and our guide. It was organized by a UK based company called Journey Latin America.

I planned a three week trip to Portugal with a scheduled departure in late March 2020. The Covid-19 pandemic shut down travel and delayed this journey until 2022. In the interim, I was tempted by another trip offered by Earthbound Expeditions. I pared down the Spring 2022 Portugal trip to 10 days so I could spend the subsequent 10 days in Vienna, Salzburg, and Prague.

Also, since Covid-19 had effectively shutdown all travel, I added a new series to the site inspired while watching the 2020 (actually 2021) Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Among the cities I’ve visited, 19 have hosted either Summer or Winter Games. I’ve built that series in the category called Olympic Host Cities & Me and will expand it as I visit new host cities.

I returned to Lisbon in late 2022 and for the early days of January 2023. I’ve recounted that trip in the series Two weeks in Lisbon 2022-2023.

For 2023 I had planned to join a journey to the Baltic Republics in June. Unfortunately the tour operator canceled that trip and since I also planned an extended stay in Lisbon at the end of the year, I chose not to try another foreign excursion. Instead, I went to Michigan where I spent just over a week. I’ve recounted that trip in a chapter called Michigan October 2023 – SiT, Sites & Sports.

As noted in the above paragraph, I had an extended stay in Lisbon that began in December 2023 and lasted until mid February 2024. You can find stories about that trip in the section called Winter in Lisbon 2023-2024.

Some miscellaneous housekeeping items.

Please keep in mind that clicking (sometimes double clicking) an image or map within a post should enlarge the image and might make points of reference easier to spot. In some instances you will need to right click and open the image that way. (I don’t know why this happens.)

Most entries contain a hyperlink to a photo album with pictures appropriate to that post. From time to time, I will also provide links to other web sites that provide supplementary information or images or that might substantiate my research. Usually, these links are to the front page of the site and not to the specific research. They should open in a new browser tab. If they don’t, it was an oversight and I will correct it if you let me know. Although I try to maintain the links, I cannot guarantee that they will always be active. If you come across a dead link, please let me know and I will delete it.

Because of persistent efforts to hack the site and daily attempts to post comments that I classify as spam, I moderate all first comments. That is, if you are posting a comment for the first time, that comment won’t appear until I have manually approved it.  Once your IP address has received approval, this is the only time the site will generate an identifying cookie which simply allows any subsequent comments from that IP address to post immediately. Additional information is available in the Privacy Policy. Please note that since I don’t track visitors to the site in any way, my sole resource in that regard comes through your comments or direct communication with me. Otherwise, I have no idea who visits the site or how often anyone might do so.

In May 2024, I added two features to the site. The first is text to speech (TTS). It uses basic technology. Thus, the voice will have odd inflections from time to time and will usually inaccurately pronounce words and phrases not in English. Close readers might notice unusual punctuation both present and absent, Arabic numbers used in places where one might expect to see Roman numerals, words and numbers written out where another form might be more common, etc. Close listeners will hear inconsistencies in its reading of years (1867 can be eighteen sixty-seven in one reading then one thousand eight hundred sixty seven in the next phrase!) and in verb tenses especially where the written form can be either present or past such as the word read.  These oddities were my effort to modify the flow of the TTS so it sounds a bit (and I stress a bit) more natural. However, there were some things I simply couldn’t make work the way I intended and others that I left as they were because they were direct quotes or because I couldn’t settle on a comfortable alternative.

Note: If you are using the TTS feature, you will have to manually put it on pause if you want to listen to any of the linked videos without the feature talking over them.

The second feature is a sort option for trip categories. Posts on the site appear in reverse chronological order with the most recent post appearing at the top. This is the default sort order for the categories as well. Since there is a narrative arc for nearly every trip, I suggest you use the sort option and choose “Oldest First” to ease the process of reading the posts as I intended.

I have, whenever possible, provided credit for images and videos not my own. This might not be the case for some of the early trip posts. This absence reflects my ignorance of creative commons and other internet licensing regulations. As noted above, because this site is principally for education and secondarily for entertainment purposes and is not monetized in any way, I hope and believe the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act apply. However, I will remove any external material at the copyright holders request.

Gruncle-odd – the etymology of a name.

At a Thanksgiving dinner some years ago our family began discussing a bit of confusion arising in nomenclature for certain family members. Parent is clear. Grandparent and grandchild is a clear relationship and great grandparent to great grandchild is a natural progression. However, uncles and aunts skip the “grand” stage and go right to “great” while nieces and nephews remain grand in relation to their great relatives. Maya (my grandniece), who was I believe seven at the time piped up that she would settle things and I would henceforth be her “gruncle.” She was also experimenting with pig Latin so I was Gruncle Odd-tay. And now you know the origin of gruncleodd.com.

Note: Having come to the realization that long posts are difficult to read, in 2022, I began editing most posts longer than 1500 words into shorter segments. The process required more time than I anticipated and continued well into 2023. Sometimes I modified the post to a shorter format. Other times I cut the post into two or more parts.

When I split a post into more than one segment, I backdated the edited section so it would continue sequentially with its parent. Comments made on the original post don’t transfer. Thus they might be applicable to the newly independent segment(s). Some posts, such as this one because it’s cumulative, or the music revelations don’t lend themselves to this type of editing and will exceed my arbitrary 1,500 word ceiling.

When I completed the project in mid 2023, I tried to remove any links that pointed to sites that either no longer exist or have themselves moved to a different url. I also replaced any blocked YouTube videos. At the time I finished the project, all the remaining links were still active.