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Traveling is awesome in large part due to unexpected events, and since I’m the kind of person who spends a lot of time planning and researching and in general attempting to eliminate the unexpected, I like to think that traveling is healthy, even therapeutic, for me. This is a line of thinking that can only be pursued after the fact though, because finding out on day 2 of your 6 day bike trip that late June in Upper Austria contains more than a slight possibility of rain is anything but therapeutic.
The upside of a quasi-rainy day on a bike trip, however, is that you don’t have to worry about getting too hot. Another larger and more important upside of summer rain is that edible crops grow! Our second day biking took us out of the mountains and into farmland, some of the most beautiful farmland I’ve ever seen:
But before you write Upper Austria off as a place filled with quaint farming villages (which it is), consider these people, taking an assumably epic Segway tour of the city of Linz:
I wonder if they made it over to see the “martin luther church”
which was about 1/20 the size of (and about 20 times more charming than) the neighboring catholic church. Growing up in the pacific northwest, I tend to root for the underdog, which may explain why I was drawn to this little protestant church in a heavily catholic region. Or maybe I just liked it for its simplicity.
Not everything in Linz was quite so serene…an outdoor concert of “classic music” the night before meant that our conversation over lunch in the main square was had in conjunction with a construction crew with heavy machinery noisily taking down the stands and stage. Still, the food (and company) was excellent:
Before leaving Linz, we crossed the river and took a newly-rebuilt tram to Postlingberg, climbing 255m at an average 6% grade in less than 20 minutes. The track gauge has recently been adjusted from 1m to 0.9m, and that meant new cars, which meant new instructive signage. I especially like the guy on the far right.
The rest of the day involved biking and eating and getting passed by small-ish pelotons (which I think is probably more fun than trying to keep up with them).
It was hard to say goodbye to Munich after just a couple days, but we had to, so we did. Our real train trip of the vacation took us to Salzburg, traveling 90 miles at about 90 mph most of the way!
Upon arriving in the legendary burg, this was one of the first signs I saw.
Der whopper indeed. I took this as a sign that better sights could be found away from the train station, and we headed into the center of Salzburg. After walking through the house (built in the 12th century) where Mozart was born (in the 18th century), which is now more of a museum encompassing the entire family (countless plaques lauded the accomplishments of W.A. Mozart’s son, oddly), we headed toward the Hohensalzburg Castle, which lurks directly above the old town. Far above it. Upon seeing the price of the funicular ride to the top, we elected to save our euros (or so we thought) and just walk up. The climb was really quite pleasant, except for the hundreds of stairs alternating only with a steep pathway.
Nevertheless, we gallantly pressed on, only to encounter about 2/3 of the way up the hill a faregate which extracted almost as many euros from us to enter the castle as we would have paid to get a ride to the top and enter. Hmmm. Luckily, we could fall back on our pride in climbing the hill under our own power to restore the mood, which is exactly what we did. And the view pretty much took us the rest of the way to a great day.
One last thing I’d like to point out before leaving Salzburg is that not only are their trains on time and frequent, even their bus stops have detailed real-time arrival info for every line.
Have you ever waited at a bus stop in the US? That had this kind of info? Me neither.
By the end of the day, we needed to be back in Germany, which meant a couple more trains, one of which was packed full, seats and aisles, and which we very nearly missed exiting at our transfer point because we had to get ourselves and our lugguage from the center of the car to the end, stepping around, over, or through one person at a time. Somehow, we got out just in time, and made it to this town!
Passau is at the confluence of three rivers (all of which appeared to be very near flood stage when we were there), but the river in this photo is the Donau (Danube), along which we would be biking for the next six days. As any good biker knows, the most important part of any bike trip is preparation, and by preparation I mean eating!
We managed to score this delicacy (nockerl) in our hotel restaurant, and it definitely hit the spot. The next morning, we started riding the Donauradweg (Danube Bike Way) with the following route to accomplish by the end of the day:
The path start out looking like this:
and at various points along the way you can cross the river on bike ferries like this:
climb a couple hundred meters (optional side trip) to castles like this: (only to find that the castle is both privately owned and in disrepair, but that’s ok, because you really just wanted to climb a mountain for the sense of accomplishment. again.)
and pass by residences like this:
all of which makes you very hungry, so by the time you complete the 48 mile ride to the next hotel and stagger into the only restaurant in town which is open, you end up somehow convincing your waitress, through her broken english and your nonexistent german, to read back your order as “everything on the menu, except meat”.
Yes, exactly.
I didn’t know what to expect from this city, especially after seeing this welcome sign while waiting for our baggage:
Welcome to Munich!
With safety it’s a pleasure
Hmmm. I guess that’s good. I like safety. But anyway, for a city that is nearly 1,000 years old, and named after monks (was every european city founded by them???), I should not have been surprised to learn that Munich was the center of the counter-reformation. However, since I don’t know my history very well, I was. This was confirmed by the “heartfelt welcome” I received from the holy father a little later in the trip.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Our first act in Munich, if I remember correctly (which is doubtful given the mind-numbing jet lag that is required to traverse 133 degrees of longitude), was to find a cafe in our neighborhood. We eventually succeeded in getting some coffee and mozzarella and tomato sandwiches from a streetcorner deli, but not before going through the awkwardness of sitting down at an outdoor cafe, failing to grasp the german menu, and having to get up and leave after 10 minutes when the waitress came by and failed to grasp our failure to grasp the menu. Clearly we should have done a little more german language preparation before going on this trip. Luckily, we are possessed with unflagging American optimism, so we elected not to catch the next flight west and instead pushed on to explore the city.
What a city it is! Most of the inner city is pedestrian-only, or at least pedestrian friendly, and the (clean, quiet, frequent) subway (U-bahn) is like nothing I’ve seen elsewhere. The seats look like they came from Ikea (in a good way), and since they use the honor system for tickets, there are no annoying fare gates to pass through. But the most striking thing is the sound – these trains are almost silent, even through curves and underground. For a system that opened in 1971 (one year before BART), it really puts BART to shame in terms of both comfort and efficiency.
But enough about trains. Munich, being the capital city of Bavaria, is the home of Bavarian Motor Works, so of course we paid a visit to the newly-opened BMW Welt on the morning of our second day there. This turned out to be the right time to visit, because in addition to having a fantastic showroom of BMW’s of all shapes and sizes, you can rent almost any BMW currently in production for, well, a tiny fraction of the cost of owning one, and since we were there in the morning, we could pick one up for the entire day. So we did.
Since we hadn’t made any prior reservations, all of the super sporty cars were unavailable…but nonetheless, our 330d wagon did not fail to impress. With more punch and better handling than any car I’ve driven before, this car knows how to be smooth, and it feels rock solid even cruising the autobahn somewhere north of 90 mph. After an entire afternoon of driving, we averaged around 42 mpg, and this is with a 3.0 liter and 240 horsepower! We took it about 110 miles outside Munich to Königssee, a popular lake situated in the Alps just outside Salzburg.
On the way we had the opportunity for our first truly Bavarian meal…käsespätzle.
Literally, this translates as “cheese sparrows”, but it actually is egg noodles with cheese. I know it doesn’t look like that much food on the plate, but I couldn’t even finish more than half of it, which says something about what strong constitutions the Bavarians must possess. I’m not sure exactly what it says, but it definitely says something.
I’m having a hard time summarizing my experience of the architecture of Munich, so I’ll just post a photo and let you draw your own conclusions. This view is from the top of St. Stephan’s cathedral (the 1st of many such named churches we visited on this trip).
The last place we visited before leaving Munich was the Viktualienmarkt, an open-air produce market that has been in existence since the early 1800′s. Clearly that has been costly, as a nice bunch of asparagus will set you back a cool €10.95 (~$16).
Which brings me to my last point: if you’re visiting Europe, make sure you bring lots of money. You will need it!
These might be the most beautiful two pages I have ever read:
Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:
“American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at the backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for the wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers in the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody again.
The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.”
- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
Most days, I leave work with a fairly high stress level and a sense that I didn’t get “enough” done. So today I’m writing everything I do, in painful detail, to hopefully get some traction on where my time is actually going. Hope it’s not too boring.
4:57 – time to meet and greet. should be fun to meet some cal students and try not to let them know how challenging this job is sometimes.
4:41 – getting nervous about presenting, can’t really focus any more. maybe i’ll update my address book to pass the time.
4:32 – helped another PM with his estimate on a much bigger project. finished my deliverables list, now to track down the originators and get the QA/QC forms signed. almost time to head downstairs to meet with future employees.
3:50 – helped field a call from a subcontractor who “really wants to join our team” for a couple projects. unfortunately, those ships have sailed. how do these people get our numbers, anyway? in this case, they actually cold called the office.
3:29 – filled out my timecard. downloaded the latest bridge inspection report from our florida office. almost done figuring out what our deliverables to date have been on this project.
3:21 – just helped a GIS pro translate some existing ground surfaces from .dtm to .xml. these surfaces are for the california high speed rail. really wish i could do some of the engineering for them!
3:07 – also, got sidetracked by this site (haven’t found a US equivalent yet), which tracks government spending and opens that information up in nice summaries to the public. this i like.
3:05 – just got word that one of our project reports has been approved! this document has taken about 30 months to complete, including public circulation and comment, and it means we can now move ahead with design. we got the final approving signature today!
2:51 – shooting the breeze. gossiping about the RFP intel. my e-mail now got forwarded to other offices – hope it was good intel. also, active for life conference call was good. some people are really doing cool things with this program!
2:35 – call finished. check out this quote from earlier linked article: between the dawn of civilisation and 2003, we only created five exabytes; now we’re creating that amount every two days. holy wow.
2:13 – spaced out and forgot to join a 2:00 conference call. just joined, hope nobody notices. got sidetracked by an e-mail that gave away some intel about how quickly the RFP will come out for a major project that we want to win. looks like it might come out next week, which could make me very busy.
1:46 – back on the estimate. got a revised one from one of our subs, updated our estimate. still need to cut a lot more.
1:30 – back at my cube after an extended lunch. some days i feel privileged to work where i do, and today is one of those days. we have a great leader who takes the time to mentor people.
12:00 – lunch. love lunch. vegetarian double-stuffed baked potato today!
11:30 – starting from scratch creating a deliverable list for a pretty large project is really awesome! just got a call that another person I’m having lunch with is here early, so I need to go kill some time with him before noon rolls around.
11:16 – sidetracked into monitor shopping. still watching the radar. now it’s time to fill out a spreadsheet with deliverables and track down the QA/QC forms for each one.
11:03 – here’s the link for how heavy the rain is. now, on to other things. having lunch with the regional manager today, need to come up with a few specific things i’d like to discuss. would salary be too obvious a choice?
11:00 – rain has been coming down really hard this morning. checking weather and river status sites, and yes, we have an urban and small stream flood advisory.
10:52 – discussion with PM and others, important project document might be approved today by important approver. also, celebration mugs that were ordered have shipped already. this is important stuff.
10:34 – I am like a quantum particle. When I observe my own behavior (by writing this post), my behavior changes to meet the expectations of the observer.
10:33 – ok, sent very watered-down e-mail asking for estimate reductions. i think i like negotiating. hopefully this will get us to where we need to be.
10:20 – about to lay the smack down via e-mail over this cost proposal. well, probably won’t actually, but I really would like to.
10:11 – updating cost estimate for upcoming BART project. trying to get our fee (and everyone else’s fee) down to a level that they can accept.
10:01 – just finished previous article. outstanding! our company puts an extremely high priority on safety, so I actually forwarded the blog to our safety officer. work accomplished? yes.
9:51 – loving this article (via schvin). reminds me of this blog.
9:44 – responding to e-mail and twitter about this post. *STILL NOT WORKING* 
9:33 – discovered http://thinkquarterly.co.uk/ via twitter trending topics. looks interesting!
9:28 – checked facebook on my phone (blocked on company internet), linked to this post from twitter. must. do. real. work. now.
9:23 – finally, actually got around to putting presentation on thumb drive. procrastination strikes early and often, it appears.
9:18 – read strangers’ comments on blog posted by our wedding photographer. got warm fuzzies remembering the weekend.
9:13 – checked college basketball bracket, discussion about the possible fate of Arizona in tonight’s game. Consensus: Duke wins.
9:05 – finished presentation edits, saved to thumb drive.
8:55 – first hear about 6.8M Myanmar earthquake (3/24), read news, USGS site.
8:50 – start updating powerpoint to use at tonight’s student open house in our office.
8:44 – finished reading new work e-mail, surf internet.
8:38 – glance through shared magazines, initial and pass on.
8:35 – log in to my computer, open web browser, log in to work e-mail.
8:30 – arrive at work, stop at restroom.
A Frank Gehry building just opened in NYC…
…and with over 900 residences, if you can handle $2,650/month for 500 sq ft, there’s probably room for you.
Somehow, I didn’t feel this 4.5 magnitude earthquake yesterday at 6:20 pm. Strange.
We happen to have this amazing dog, a chocolate lab named after a president (Ike), who pretty much demands no less than our full attention during his waking hours. Even a brief history of our life with him would fill a book, but since I don’t have time to write one, this recent picture will have to suffice:
Like most dogs, walking is his bread and butter, and his style of walking is the kind that will either strengthen or shatter most human shoulderblades that are on the other end of his leash. Basically, he pulls. All. the. time. We found this out when he was a puppy, and eventually found a workable solution in a “choke” collar, a device that would be an instrument of torture if his level of pain tolerance weren’t so high. Anyway, he doesn’t pull too much with the sharp teeth of the choke collar on, unless he sees another dog, or a cat, or a bird, or the wind blows, or a person a couple hundred yards away looks his direction, or a fly sneezes, or…you get the idea.
After nearly two years of doing these shoulder-strengthening exercises, I have developed a physique worthy of a world logging champion:
But, there’s more to life than being a world logging champion, so we have resumed our search for more humane methods of helping Ike slow down, preferably something that doesn’t include sharp self-tightening mechanisms that wrap around his throat. We seemed to have found one in a recent purchase ($31.99 for $1 dollar of nylon and $30.99 of packaging, shipping, and profit) that when installed simply loops two harnesses around him, one in front of his front legs and one behind them.
Somehow, this simple contraption causes him to change from a endlessly-bounding dog into a docile, sheep-like being who is content to walk as slowly and leisurely as one wishes. Evidently that $31.99 was well spent.
Except that now, going out on a walk with him on the new leash doesn’t even feel like walking with the same animal. Somehow, seeing him attempt with each step to infuse his normal energy into walking only to get discouraged by the hampering effects of the harness is a torture of a new kind. It’s like watching his spirit get slowly crushed into submission by a stupid little piece of nylon. Somehow, it seems like the choke collar is the more humane solution. Or, even better, we should just always go to the beach with no leash whatsoever.
I guess this about sums it up:
The flu is currently “widespread” throughout pretty much the entire country (except, of course, Hawaii). Somehow, this helps me feel slightly better about being sick.
This week’s predictions – and for the record, I don’t actually want the Steelers to win, I just think they will.
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Last Rainy Day April 12, 2012
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