We’re off to Vienna and Prague!
Madrid – Thursday
We’ve been here a week now. It’s been a lot of fun so far. The hotel room is situated such that it’s pretty late in the morning before the sun lights up the room. On several occasions it’s seemed that it should be around 6:00 am and it ended up being 9:30. Thank goodness we’re not on a rigid schedule. This is a vacation after all!
This morning we actually got up around 7:00 since we had gone to bed relatively early last night. Checking the balcony and looking down the street we were able to tell this was going to be a glorious sunny day.
After breakfast we headed out to go see the Egyptian Temple of Debod because you just don’t turn down an opportunity to see a 2000 year old Egyptian temple in person, especially with things as tense as they are in the Middle East right now.
There was plenty to see as we made our way to the temple. Right off the bat I noticed this statue of an angel standing on it’s head…
*edit* we discovered later that his was a privatlely owned sculpture of Icarus and that it belongs to the sculptor who made it and that is his private residence.
Just a bit further down the road we came to the Royal Palace of Madrid
Then William had to get in on the act…
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Tip: It’s always good to visit sites like this early in the morning. You beat the throngs of tourists and get a better view of the thing your going to see…
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We walked on down the side of the palace and headed to the park
Cynthia and William got to ham it up with the local constabulary…
Before long we reached our destination, The Egyptian Temple of Debod
After that we hiked back to the Puerto Del Sol for some lunch and then headed back to the hotel room for a nice long siesta, but not before spotting an “old friend” at Kilometer Zero…
Sighting of The Vagrant
Spotted The Vagrant outside of Galway.
As it happened, I was joining my friend Owen and his family at their lovely home for lunch.
Wouldn’t you know, Mr. Finn and The Vagrant are old pals.
An Irishman? A sheep? No good can come of this!
Trust no one….
The Vagrant
I was approached today by an operative from our UK branch (code name “The Brit” and sometimes referred to as Tin) who worked with me while conducting surveillance of one William the Sheep.
It was suspected that William might be a high level officer of the notorious BAA! network and might be engaged in subterfuge and espionage operations here in America and abroad after travelling to the US via unsuspecting souvenir seeking tourists.
I followed William to Europe and after extensive monitoring was able to clear him of all wrong-doing until his picture showed up on a Russian web site and raised suspicion once again.
Tin had come to inform me that there was a lot of chatter being picked up amongst known operatives in the BAA! network which would tend to indicate something big was happening.
That’s when he told me about another suspected BAA! agent known as “The Vagrant”
The Vagrant first came to our attention sometime in 1998; caught on surveillance video waiting to be “˜picked-up’ at Sheep World, located just North of Auckland, New Zealand. It wasn’t long before his “˜merging with the crowd’ tactic worked and he was able to turn his back on the rolling, verdant hills of Warkworth for the metropolis that is Sydney, Australia. Spurning the “Collective” he emigrated sometime in 2000 to Wiltshire, England; a county with tenuous
connections to the Australian and New Zealand Baa networks. It’s possible The Vagrant was the nucleus for clandestine “˜BAA in England’! recruiting sojourns to Cranleigh, England; Lugano, Switzerland; and LochCarron, Scotland finally lead to Houston, Texas in 2002 where he’s been “˜sleeping’ for 5 years.
I’m not sure what this all means. It would certainly appear that William and The Vagrant share a similar modus operandi. Two sheep passing themselves off as mere tourist baubles? You might recall that William found passage to the United States after being “purchased” from a vendor at the Edinburgh Woolen Mill. This allowed William to arrive in the U.S. in 2002, the same year as The Vagrant. It was only a few short years later that William was jetting off to Amsterdam and Paris with a stop over in Belgium where he was spotted consorting with a possible BAA! network splinter cell in Bruges.
We lost track of him for a brief time before he was spotted on the night train from Paris to Venice where I proceeded to follow him to Florence and Rome.
Tin informed me that Galway, Ireland was coming up frequently in the chatter. It appears I will be off to Aerfort Na Sionna on the morrow to do a little investigative work…