Sorry about the long delay in blogging, folks… I know many of you are waiting for each next installation with bated breath. Have been so tied up with sightseeing, eating, and drinking that it’s been difficult to find an internet cafe.
First up, some current news… I hear my Dad has been selected to win a HomeTown Hero award in The Woodlands, TX. This much deserved recognition comes after many, many years of distinguished volunteer work in local government and at church. One of his lesser-known community accomplishments involved failing to run over any neighborhood children while test driving his rebuilt Model-T in the early stages of its development. Another entailed helping to add “No Power Saws” to the many safety rules that govern physics projects at the local high school (by assisting me in demonstrating that it is, in fact, possible to run one on DC power). Much congrats, Dad!
Blake Ross has seen fit to disparage my sole surviving houseplant, and I think this requires a response. For those of you who don’t know, Blake is a precocious youngster who was recruited from his 2nd grade class to work at Netscape. This makes him almost as clever as my new nephew, Charlie. At any rate, this whippersnapper noted that my sad little houseplant is the only bit of greenery that we asked bryner to take care of while we were away. What Blake doesn’t know is that the sad little houseplant is under my direct care, and is therefore subject to the influence of Rebecca’s Black Thumb of Plant Death. The sad little houseplant is therefore remarkable by virtue of the fact that it has yet to completely die. We actually have a service that takes care of our yard. This keeps it out of my hands, which explains why it’s lush and green and does not in any way remind one of Chernobyl. We use this service out of respect for our neighbors.
Back to the travelogue.
Pompeii kicks butt. After looking at ruin after ruin in Rome and environs, it really stands out. You finally gain some understanding about what all of this stuff looked like before it “got all crumbly”. Dave was running around with his audioguide plastered to his ear. Every so often, he’d look at me with an expression of pure delight and scamper off to go look at some new detail that had just been described. Very, very happy camper.
Random Italy observation… it came to our attention that all of the females were either thin, young, beautiful and over 5’10”, or old, wrinkly and under 4′. Lacking any examples in between, I came to the conclusion that the transformation from one state to the other must happen very, very fast. Overnight. Maybe this is why the little old Italian women are always in such a bad mood. They can be very effective… the easiest way to fight your way through a densely packed crowd is to follow a little old Italian woman.
After Pompeii, we made our way by rail to Luzern, which included getting trapped in a smoking car as far as Milan. This was a complete nightmare. Our railpasses automatically give us first class seats, we had air conditioning instead of openable windows. Under normal circumstances, this is an advantage, but in the smoking car, this meant that there was no place for the smoke to go. Rather like sitting in an aquarium with 200 lit cigarettes. To give you an idea, even the smokers don’t want to sit in the smoking car. They sit in comfort in the non-smoking cars and just move to the smoking cars when they actually want to smoke. It took several days for my lungs to recover. Next time, we’ll just get on the next train.
Going from Italy to Switzerland was a bit of an adjustment. The air was 20 degrees cooler, so we got our first relief from being constantly drenched in our own sweat (yuck). The trains all ran on time. Really on time. You can wake up from a nap and use your watch instead of your window to figure out which station you’ve just pulled into. And people suddenly start obeying things like traffic rules and pedestrian walk signals (and will fuss at you if you do not). Dave and I spent our one day in Luzern travelling to the top of Mount Pilatus. Only 7000 feet, so not that big by Alp standards, but really nice view, regardless. On the way up, we took the world’s steepest railway. The maximum incline of the track is 48%, so this train doesn’t bother with the usual niceties of switchbacks and such… it just runs straight up the side of the mountain. The seats are installed at 45%, so as to prevent passengers from falling into an uncomfortable pile on the rear windows of the train.
Dave and I almost didn’t make it onto the train, despite the fact that we started out near the front of the line (mob) that was waiting to get on. I accredit this to Dave being southern. He let too many people shove in front of him. As he put it, “I need to learn to bat women and children out of the way.” His gentlemanly conduct resulted in his being situated on the last available seat of the car, which was actually in the “caboose”… where the engineer sits while driving the train down the mountain. As a result of this, he got a fantastic view (especially looking straight down the mountain). Also as a result of this, he had access to a fantastic array of levers, glowing buttons, and other instruments. I feared for our lives.
After meeting up with Carey for a quick lunch in Zurich, we were off to Munich. The highlight for both of us was the Deutsches Museum… the largest science and technology museum in the world. We actually went there twice and didn’t even make a dent. Tunnels. Bridges. Trains. Boats. Mining. Musical instruments. In that last section, there was a collection of mechanical musical instruments that I’ve never even heard of… one of them played 3 violins using a rotating disk and suction to serve as the bow. Way cool. They also had on display one of the original Pilatus Railway cars, along with an example of the cogwheel assembly it uses to prevent the train from sliding down the mountain (unless some tourist is sitting in the caboose and hits the Big Red Button).
We stopped in at the Hofbrauhaus. This is the oldest Biergarten in Munich. After sitting down, we realized that the kids sitting next to us were American. This was not surprising… the Hofbrauhaus is packed full of tourists. We got a little suspicious when we overheard one of them telling the others about RSA, though (non-techie translation… this is an algorithm for computer cryptography). Turns out they were all from Cupertino… practically our own backyard. We spent a pleasant hour having an extremely geeky conversation with the RSA guy (probably to the relief of his non-techie friends, who were freed up to have a conversation about something more interesting).
Now we’re in Salzburg. We haven’t seen much yet aside from Mozart’s birthplace, which, as I now understand it, isn’t so much his actual birthplace, but a building that happens to stand in the same place. It was sparsely filled with reproductions of actual Mozart music and portraits of the family. A couple of the things might have been original. In all, it was pretty underwhelming.