Being treated to a DTM race at the Nurburgring during my european vacation by my brother. On our arrival we both saw a number of vehicles with the a Nurburgring sticker on them, with both my brother and I being fans of Top Gear. I said,
“I’ll give you 10 Euro’s if you can find a Dacia Sandero with a Nurburgring sticker on it. “
Less then a minute later my brother laughs out loud and points! HA! Yes in the thousands of a cars in the parking lot at the GP track a Dacia Sandero with a Nurburgring sticker sits in front of us. I paid up and can only imagine what James May would be saying.
The TLDR version of this post. I went to Courseulles Sur Mer in France, It was awesome you should go too (Image gallery at the end of the post).
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I came to Courseulles Sur Mer because I wanted to visit the beaches of Normandy. I felt it was important to see sacrifices Canadians had made for my freedom.
Arriving in Courseulles Sur Mer late due to the cheezies tornado I didn’t get to see much that first night. (Use the jet lag to your advantage and watch the sun rise over June Beach, I was not disappointed ) After breakfast the next morning a walk around the community. It’s a small coastal community (much like home) and to a tourist / foreigner it’s like everything you would expect to see in a small seaside fishing village of the coast of northern France.
From the fish mongers / poissonniers selling fresh seafood on the dock, to the farmers market on the weekend to Chipie Plage, a cute little shack that lets you rent a bike for 8 euro’s a day.
I had heard before my trip that the people of Normandy wanted to leave the war behind that they didn’t want to remember everything that was the war they wanted to return to their lives on the small coastal villages.
Well after visiting I can only say well that’s why Canadians landed here so many years ago! To help return the French to there way of life.
To completely forget the war had ever happened and not remember the past, I really don’t think so and didn’t see any evidence of that in any of my travels along the coast. I saw as many french and I did foreigners taking in the historic lessons of the area.
Like may other tourists I spilt my time between studying the history of the D-Day landing and enjoying the beach and relaxation of this amazing resort area.
I even met a fellow laser sailor who allowed me to sail his laser for about half an hour just off beach. That never would have happened without google translator.
Language Barrier
I’ve barely spoke a word of French since grade 9 in high school ( 25 years ago) and their are very few residents of the community who speak English. But after day three it was amazing what I was able to pick up. Even if it was only meaning and not the words.
Accommodations:
I stayed at La Pecherie and would highly suggest this hotel to anyone. They were awesome to deal with and attended to my every need. Read my trip advisor review for more info.
In conclusion if you were looking to experience a small French coastal town that amazing seafood and great cuisine I would come to Courseulles Sur Mer.
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I was invited to Seattle by Ben Lobaugh for what I called a Super Sailing Weekend in Seattle.
Ben had told me he volunteers at the Footloose Disabled Sailing Club and if I wanted I could come down to help out as well. The entire venture sounded great so I packed my bag and came down for the weekend.
The thing I really liked about the association was they really made it accessible to everyone possible no matter what your disability and each sailboat is slightly different configuration but all were completely accessible and very stable and unable to tip over (or in sailing terms turtling).
The Access dinghies were similar to lasers just much LESS tippy and the participant sat side by side with the skipper.
The 2 Martin 16 other boats the participants and skipper sit front and back of each other.
The skipper is a volunteer with the association and is completely experienced with the boat. They are there to assist the participant, whether that be teaching them how to sail, co-piloting the boat or just along for the ride while the participant controls everything.
Paraplegics easily operate Access dinghies with a joystick. While quadriplegic can operate the Martin 16 which are equipped with electric winches and can be operated by either a hand joystick, neck joystick or the or a sip and puff method commonly used by quadriplegics.
The two Colombia 21 that are part of the fleet are larger boats and can hold up to six people. They also have a skipper and at least one crew member to help rig the boat. My job was to helping the participants get on and off the boat along with grinding the winch on the jib.
For those with limited mobility Footloose has two davit hoist system with a hoyer sling to transfer participants from wheelchair to boat and back.
It was a real pleasure to volunteer on a beautiful sunny saturday out on Lake Washington. I I didn’t know but from the water you can see Mt Rainier to the south and Baker to the North. It was beautiful!
It felt great to give back and learnt a little bit more about sailing slightly larger boats as well I hope I can do it again on my next trip to Seattle.
Roman Mars of 99% Invisible spoke about city flags at the 2015 Ted Conference in Vancouver. It’s awesome, brilliant and speaks to the urbanization of our culture and our love of design. Give it a watch it is certainly worth you time.
I had even played around with the development plugin Gary Pendergast was creating to solve this problem it was affectionately called x1f4a9 or 💩, I though this is cool, can I make this work on my local installation running trunk and oh my that Gary Pendergast is one funny dude.
Little did I know… Little did we all know…
Except for a couple people on the WordPress security team. No one really knew how important enabling emoji support were going to be to fixing the security with in WordPress until Andrew Nacin spoke at the recent Loop Conf.
I wasn’t able to attend Loop Conf in person but they had an amazing live stream which was completely free (major props organizers) and Nacin walks us through the Anatomy of a Critical Software Bug.
I had a hard time following the code in Nacin’s talk it was well over my head. Ryan D Sullivan tweet exemplifies this completely. But instead I tried following the story. As Nacin walks us through a two year journey to fix a vulnerability and it was a fascinating story.
A lot of patches in WordPress aren’t this hard… but they are similar rabbit holes of problem solving to make something better.