[Stevie] But one can buy a passage on cargo ships as a non-working passenger. There used to be a website that listed the ships offering it and their destinations. I now know how I'm going to spend my next break from writing this dull thing today.
[KagomeS] If you ever get the opportunity to make a road trip, drive north (a long way north) in midsummer. It's fabulous.

I like summer morning walks over the meadows before 5am. I saw a deer last week, which I never saw there before in many years of living here.

[Raak] Impressed. I thought 6:30am is an early time for a walk. The lack of people at that time allows a lot of wildlife to be spotted. I often see muntjac deer and hares.

I’m lucky. I saw hares in the field behind the house from bed this morning, and watched buzzards riding the thermals from the kitchen window as I was making pizza last night.

[pen] that must be one hot pizza oven to produce buzzard bearing thermals via your windows!

(Boolbar) ROFLMAO. This is why we have Global Warming.

Traveling the world by tramp steamer is a staple of my secret vice - the Call of Cthulhu RPG. Pre-website, one had to use a shipping agent.

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Of course, inevitably the ship would be becalmed in dense fog or lost in the Bermuda Triangle or fetch up on the rocky shore of an island newly risen from the stygian depths and then the screaming would generally start and only I would survive bwahaha

[pen] Unless there are some MAJOR upgrades to cars, it's goig to take a lot more than driving to get to where it is light past 10pm for me!

[Boolbar] *<nods>* Were I to observe thermal-riding buzzards o'erhead I might suspect a roof fire. I was once driven from Mrs Stevie's gas barbecue by a very threatening praying mantis, all of 1 inch long.

How it reached the pedals with its tiny legs remains a mystery.

(KagShuk) Even here in the south of England there is quite a lot of light at 10 pm BST (9 pm GMT) and in the north of Scotland it barely gets dark in June, given a clear sky.

Ay, why wud ye want the dark anyhoo, tis only fer miscreants ter get oop ter evil deeds in (Playing Calvinist card kept from my NZ upbringing)

Shurely the dark is the bist time to have six.

I lived up near Sunderland for a while, and what the summer days lacked in warmth, they made up in length.

That, I'm afraid, is a false equivalence. The same could be said for winter at the North Pole or even southern England.

[Rosie] Well, that's nice, but I live in the United States. I find that it even gets dark fairly early in the northern states. I don't know about Canada, but I've heard that it's around 8pm or 9pm at the latest when it gets dark there.

(KS) The 49th parallel misses us by some way. The latitude of my place is 51.318 and Edinburgh and Glasgow are not far of 56°N. The clocks are an hour ahead of the Greenwich meridian in summer but not in winter. There are few things more gloomy than a cloudy December afternoon in Britain. Pretty well dark at 4 pm.