Month: October 2010

Oktoberfest 2010 – The Best Birthday Layover Ever

Enjoying a Beer at Oktoberfest 2010
Enjoying a Beer at the 200th Annual Oktoberfest

6 years ago for my birthday, Emily and I visited our good friend Charles in München for Oktoberfest. It was a ton of fun with beer to be had, arms to be linked and songs to be sung.

This year, en route to my birthday trip to Italy, we planned our layover to be in München, where we once again met up with Charles.

After meeting us at baggage claim with a Lebkuchen for Emily and a Glückskäfer with chocolate for me, Charles informed us that there was a 40 minute express train to Oktoberfest from the airport and we’d have just enough time to leave the airport, enjoy a beer or two and get back in time for our flight to Pisa. Continue reading “Oktoberfest 2010 – The Best Birthday Layover Ever”

Festa dell’Uva in Impruneta: The Annual Grape Festival

Float with a huge bottle of Chainti
A gigantic bottle of Chianti on a float

Every year since 1926, Impruneta, a small town in the heart of the Chianti area of Tuscany, has it’s annual “Festa dell’Uva” or “Grape Festival” which I can only think to compare to the opening ceremonies of the Olympics.

Before our trip, I poked around online to find out about any events that would be going on during our visit and found a random site that listed the festival, which from the looks of it seemed like just a fun thing to do on a Sunday. I envisioned something like an Italian farmer’s market, with perhaps a heavy focus on grapes. Boy was I in for a surprise…

As we followed a rural side road off of already rural SR 222, we noticed that the sides of the narrow back country twisty road were starting to fill with parked cars. There were no signs for any event, or any indication of what was up ahead.

After we found parking, scaled a grassy hill and took a foot path into town, we hopped a fence and found ourselves smack dab in the middle of the event. Continue reading “Festa dell’Uva in Impruneta: The Annual Grape Festival”

NavDroyd for Android Review

Driving Directions on NavDroyd

After reviewing a bunch of options for “offline” GPS use on my Android phone, I settled on NavDroyd, a paid, albeit powerful looking application that didn’t need to be online for anything.

Using just the built-in GPS and offline Open Street Map data that you download and update from their servers for free from within the app, you can do all the normal GPS functions like look for points of interest, get driving directions, have it read out turn by turn directions while showing you on the map, etc…

There wasn’t a good way to test how it would work in Italy, so I downloaded all the maps and data for Italy (under 100MB in their compressed form), played around, simulated drives, and got comfortable with the interface.

Continue reading “NavDroyd for Android Review”