Time for a Ramble

Wake up call at 0330 in Budapest this morning.  Maybe this morning.  I think that would have been 1830 yesterday for this time zone.  Lots of flights, but everything worked like clockwork and it looks like an early flight home... so good.  Tired.  Roughly fourteen hours by train followed by an evening in a hotel before the flights. Three new countries and passed through two more...

Atilla and Armin handled everything.  Each and every detail was handled with care and precision.  Extraordinarily good men.  Very different from each other, but very good men.  And Atilla is doing a seminar somewhere in the UK this weekend.  I'd post the details if he had sent them on.

Thursday night was a low level force class (locks, pain compliance, stuff like that) at the Lower Saxony  Police Academy.  Saturday and Sunday was the scheduled seminar.  Mostly for martial artists, but a quarter (about) of the people who showed were officers (and one I got to meet in person for the first time-- Hi Chris!) and a quarter weren't martial artists or studied only weapons.  And that made it very cool.

Even cooler was the venue that Armin scored-- The headquarters of the Highway Riders MC, Bad Wildungen.  Perfect place for a brawl.

And a perfect juxtaposition-- Thursday night wine and Italian food with one of the senior Academy trainers, an impressive man.  Great talk, great insight.  Monday morning coffee with the president of the motorcycle club and one of his road captains.  Impressive as well, in different ways.  The Prez was an old fighter, now mostly crippled up, did medieval recreation on the side (which the Germans do with an intensity) and, judging by familiar paraphernalia around the house entertained an alternate religious view.  And trained wild birds.

1991, drinking chichu with a reformed cannibal in Ecuador.
2008, drinking scotch with a general heading a foreign intelligence service.
2012, Wine with police trainers and coffee with Bikers.

And every last second of it has been fantastic.

Knee got popped on the trip.  Won't be sure how bad until I can make time to get it checked.  Something else for the 'to do' list.

Meet at Firearms Academy of Seattle tomorrow.  Help them with some research. (Read: "banging stuff out").

Orycon coming up.  Should be fun.

Gigs in upstate NY and New Orleans in November; Orlando first weekend of December.

But, most important, in a few hours home and K.