Munich to Berlin....

...or, Whoa, Dude, It's Gone All Europe Out.

I've been trying to decide whether what I think about this part of the trip is really about the impact that a strange foreign place makes when you first arrive - land in Munich at 10 in the morning their time after leaving Vancouver at 1 pm our time, not really too sure WHAT time it actually is, blunder around the airport trying to find your buddy arriving on a different flight...it's a strange kind of fun.

We rented a car at the airport and headed out. I was in a daze and have no pictures of the car but it was a nice Ford compact of some sort. First thing I notice: windmills.  Big huge ones like the one up Grouse Mountain, only these ones are all turning. Lots of them, you start to get that "War of the Worlds" feeling.

They're everywhere! If I lived around here I think the first thing I'd do every morning is look out the window to make sure none of them moved in the night.

Then I notice that buildings everywhere have solar panels. Conclusion: electricity is expensive here, and it must be windy, too.

There are other fun things to see, like lots of three wheeled motorcycles pulling little trailers, coming home from their weekend camp-outs. Why three-wheeled motorcycles?  Who can know...

Eventually we got off the autobahn and went into a town called Hof, our first real stop.

This is the city hall for the town of Hof.  I don't know when it was built, but to me it just SCREAMS apfel strudel.

All the buildings and sreets are strange and charming, people are nice, coffee is good. I didn't realize that Dale, my travel partner/guide, came here for more than just coffee. When we got back in the car we stayed on side roads and soon came into some tiny little hamlet that had its own little Wall, and a museum where you got the rundown on how it all worked. This little tiny place, about 50 people, has a brook going through it, you could jump across it in flip-flops, and when they made the deal in '45 on dividing Germany, this brook was part of the border. East and West spent the next 45 years looking at each other across that brook, a Wall, guard towers, a checkpoint, dogs, guns, barriers...the works. We toured it.  Here's a link to a site that sort of describes it...Modlareuth is the name of the place.

See how narrow this road is?  And yet at the bottom of this hill they had a Wall of their own, with a gate and dogs and guards...I think that white thing just left of center is their little Wall, now part of a museum.

There is still a fence and car barrier and patrol road and bare strip of raked earth for a long ways along the border here, even though it can now be crossed freely..

The concrete was to drive on while patrolling, the little post used to be for communications, the bare dirt strip was kept herbicided and raked so footprints were easy to see...fence is to the far left, this used to be East Germany.

Guard tower...you could climb up into it and look out through all the little shooting slots...

Finally, we arrived in Nuremberg and navigated to our AirBNB place.  Nuremberg was very picturesque, and it was some kind of Medieval Days festival at the castle a few blocks from our place. We wandered around, stopped for a beer, looked at old old churches, and had a great dinner at a local place our host recommended. Totally Europe.

Inner courtyard at Nuremberg Castle...It's old here, real old....maybe a little TOO old.

Medieval Days at Nuremberg Castle, between the inner and outer walls.  Note the whole pig on a spit to the left. Close examination will also reveal people in costume. No bagpiping skinheads in this shot, though.

Just a detail on the inner wall at the castle.  I guess "money to burn" has always equated to just "power".

That same wall, just for some context on the worth of doing all that carving, for that one corner piece.

Detail on one of four very elaborate old churches in the old part of Nuremberg.  Again, "money to burn"....and I don't know what that gilded caption says or means other than "1509".

Longer view of that same church.

From a bridge in old Nuremberg, very near where we sat and enjoyed a quiet beer, watching people cross the bridge.  Jet lag can be quite peaceful. 

The view from the 4th floor walkup in Nuremberg.  I particularly like the cabling job across the street on the roof, from the satellite dishes to people's apartments.

I was going to skip this, but since (a) I made such a fuss about it when we were there and (b) we didn't have time to go see what's left of the great rally area from the bad old days, I have to mention it, and ask questions: is there such a thing as medieval bagpipes?  Were there ever bagpipes in Bavaria?  And do bagpipes currently have some connection to skinheads? I ask because one of the tents in Medieval Days at Nuremberg Castle featured a bare chested skinhead in a kilt and army boots screaming out lyrics about death and violence and playing bagpipes apparently made out of wood and animal skin. You can thank me later for not having pictures, because I'm still haunted by everything wrong with that guy in that place. You don't want the visual; the visual makes me wish I could poke out my mind's eye.

The good meal, pleasant host, cool castle, and a sound sleep made most of the bagpiper conundrum dissipate.  The next day, feeling all happy about the reunification of Germany, we resumed the Autobahn.  More windmills and even what looked like a nuclear plant.

Pretty sure those are cooling towers just left of center...

Here's a very short video of a couple of cars in the fast lane passing us as we bumbled along the Autobahn at a turtle-like 140 kph... cars going real fast

Anyway...after that it was a pleasant couple of hrs in Leipzig followed by deep gratitude for GPS having been invented and getting us to Berlin.

I'm not doing Leipzig any favours with this shot...a typically really ugly Soviet-era public building with some kind of inspirational message in Latin next to a kind of latter-day workingman's glockenspiel..."Omnia Vincit Labour"...no mixed up messaging here at all.

Trying to make amends to Leipzig with a picture of an ornate memorial fountain in front of I think their very modern university.

Europe on probably way more than 5€ a day - intro

I see it has been  more than two months since I attempted to foist anything at all off as a post. I can hardly explain where the time has gone, but just shy of three weeks of it went to Europe on a lot more than 5€ a day. I've been thinking about how to frame the whole thing and what keen and novel insight I can bring to the whole experience, and that's probably why there's been no post - because thinking isn't the same as writing, even aimless, unstructured, pedestrian writing...which you will now see.

If you've been wondering about when I was ever going to do anything you can thank my friend Michael for this post. I was slated to run with him last week and didn't want to tell him I'd done nothing at all, so I had to start. If you're annoyed to see I didn't just go away, blame Michael.

So, I went to Europe, with my usual amount of intense planning and forethought, which means I bought some tickets last spring and some Euros about a week before I left and otherwise didn't think much about it. My friend Dale, whom I traveled with, is probably still exhausted from having to do all the thinking and telling me what to buy from whom when. Just to get it out of the way, I DID put on my own pants every single day.

The original impetus for going was a cycling vacation at the Belvedere Hotel in Riccione, Italy. Dale and others had been before and raved about it. Take a look here at the glossy website for the hotel. You ride a bike through Italian countryside (or "citrus idea" to the iPad spellchecker) for a week, and spend the time when you're NOT riding eating sumptuous feasts, drinking free wine, and sleeping. What's not to love?  Here, check out the sumptuous feast menu, just one evening:

It doesn't matter that half the time I couldn't recognize the menu items on the platters I was choosing from.  I just ate, and ate, and it was allllll good.

A bonus shot of the pool and deck...okay, so yes, this was taken on the one rainy day, but you get the idea.  Nice.

Still, flying to the other side of the world entails time zone changes, and finely tuned athletes like us need time to adjust to to those in order to perform at our peak. That meant getting to Europe and killing some time waking up at normal hours before riding. That same flying entails a large cash outlay, which meant thinking about what to see and do while over there and NOT riding. Having seen and done nothing in Europe for 35+ years, I was going to be seeing new everything, so I didn't care WHERE I went. I couldn't lose no matter where I went or what I saw...you, on the other hand, as a reader... well...

So the plan was:
fly to  Munich,

Central train station in Munich

take a rented car to Nuremberg,

Ancient castle in the heart of Nuremberg

stay the night
press on to Berlin the next day and stay 5 nights in Berlin,

Brandenburg Gate in Berlin

flight to Rimini in Italy, short cab ride to Riccione, stay 7 nights there

Belvedere Hotel owner cooking pasta feast, Italy

take a train to Verona,

Roman bridge in Verona

overnight there
take another train to Munich,

Oktoberfest beer hall in Munich

two nights there
Fly home from there.

The plan here is to basically do posts in that order; let`s hope it works!

Smoky Mountain trip to the Kootenays

Or, A brief travelogue.

Last week I went to Kootenay Lake with my youngest daughter and her friend. I met up with my sister and brother in law from California, and my eldest brother lives there. It was a quiet time, a low key, relaxing time. We swam, we saw a few sights, read a few books, ate a lot of food, we hugged, we schmoozed, everybody went home happy. It was good.

It was also a little preview, a little insight, into what nuclear winter might be like.

There were forest fires burning all over the province and in Washington State. That meant that last week, there was a lot of smoke in the air, all the way from the Fraser Valley to Balfour and no doubt beyond. It was over all the summits on Highway 3 and in all the valleys.

The forecast for our week was really hot bright sunny weather, which is perfect for the lake. It's especially perfect for lakes like Kootenay, where getting into the water represents...well, a commitment, even on the hottest days. Remind me to expound on the phenomenon of kids' relative immunity to cold water one of these days.

Got out of the car to get food and gas in Osoyoos about 1:30 in the afternoon. I went back into the car to get my hoodie. Keep in mind Osoyoos is Canada's only real desert. This is what it looked like, on a day that was actually blazing sunshine:

So, it was a little chillier than I expected. Actually, I had expected to roast, not put on a layer.  Basically, that was the story of the week: weird light and low temperatures, because the sun couldn't penetrate all that smoke. The smell was like living within 8 feet of a campfire, except without the heat and only the smell.

Here's what morning on the deck at our cabin usually looks like:

And here's the brightest morning of the week last week. On this same morning, about 10 minutes after this,  my sister got a shot of the lake that includes both the orange sun and the light on the lighthouse across the way, because that 60-watt bulb or whatever it uses is the next brightest thing in the scene:

This isn't late afternoon sunset, it's the middle of the day, just after lunch:

Here's what the Riondel public beach view was like....I suspect in the next year or two there will be a lot of mystic-looking scenery shots like this, no horizons, coming out of the Kootenays and the rest of the province:

This view is from the old lighthouse at Pilot Bay, looking back across the main lake towards Balfour, which is where those low, shadowy land masses are. Look carefully, they ARE there. It's a distance of about a mile and a half west from the lighthouse to that land. The Pilot Bay lighthouse was originally lit with an oil lamp that was visible for roughly 30 miles north and south.

Here's another odd shot: the girls are in the water at 8:30 pm, and that's the moon up there, not the sun. I don't know how to describe this light.

That's pretty much it, folks. I saw some wildlife I've never seen before on this trip: wild turkeys at South Slocan City, and quail (quail!  with those silly little doinkers on the tops of their heads and everything!) just outside Greenwood. I also saw some people at the side of the road wondering what to do with a dead bear cub they'd just hit - another thing I've never seen before, a bear hit by a car. There seemed to be more than the usual number of birds hit by cars, too - hawks and ducks for sure, maybe an owl.

...finally, for you nerds in the crowd and because I was already bored by the time we made the Paulson summit, here's a picture of the bag of taco chips riding shotgun at the top of the summit:

...and here's that same bag when we got down to Christina Lake (which I could at least see from the highway on the return trip):

...your Grade 8 physics teacher can point out the difference if you're missing it.

Speaking of missing it, on the return trip, the primary concern was whether to go back via Highway 3 the whole way or not, given that Grand Forks was on evacuation alert due to the Stickpin Fire just over the border in Washington. If the highway got closed, it would have been a long detour back to South Slocan City, north to Revelstoke, and down to the coast via Highways 1 and 5. We elected to take the chance, had no worries at Grand Forks, and then got as far as entering Abbotsford by the time we ran into that big windstorm. I'm sorry I was driving, and couldn't get any pictures, because there was a lot to see in the two hours it took to get from Abbotsford to North Vancouver. I can say I have a much better idea what my bike rack's speed limit is - about 200 kmh. The bike was trying pretty hard to get off the rack, because we were travelling about 100 kmh directly into winds of about the same magnitude coming at us.

Easy to get in, not so much getting out

Someone pointed out to me the other day that it's remarkably easier to become legally connected to another person than it is to become legally DISconnected from another person.  I hadn't thought about it before.

In other posts in here, I've poked a little fun at conspiracy theorists, even while I continue to respect the "fact" that humans have a deep need to fill in blanks, to have explanations for everything even if we have to make them up.  This whole "you can just float into a legal relationship with someone, but only a formal legal process can get you out" revelation opens up a whole new conspiracy theory opportunity.

The basic idea is that if you live with someone for I think as little as 6 months, you and the other person automatically, without filling out any papers or making any declarations, develop legal entitlements to each other's assets.  It just happens, a function of the rising and setting of the sun, whether you intend it to or not.

When you decide that you wish to not see the sun rise and set any more with that other person, you don't just terminate the relationship by choosing to camp elsewhere forever.  There's at least a little and potentially a LOT of formal paperwork, involving at least a notary public and possibly a whole squad of lawyers and judges.

In fairness to all the legislation and litigation focused in the dissolution of relationships, there's lots of good reasons for all the processes around dissolution.  There are assets and dependencies and assumptions and imposed lifestyle changes and all kinds of fallout that may well need a referee or at least a note from the principal.

But so then how come the relationship entry fee is basically nothing? I kind of wonder whether we should be at least signing a paper that says we know the waters we're sailing into when make the relationship deal.  Maybe just a course in high school about the legal ramifications of love.  It's been a few decades now since we could really count on social structure like people's affiliation with churches to cover much of that "do you really know what you're doing?" ground.  These days the best you can hope for is that some friend who doesn't like your significant other fills you in in the reefs and shoals ahead...and that they have the slightest idea what they're talking about.

Conspiracy?  There's no money in warning people with very few assets and very many hormones about legal consequences, but there is a ton of it in disentangling the older richer people who now want out.  In fact, you could argue that educating people going in might put a lot of lawyers out of work.  And who consults on new legislation?  Who drafts it? There you go, it's a plot.

Sorry about the long silence (vacation), the lack of pictures (pure sloth on my part), and the kind of dry topic....I'll do a travelogue or something fluffy and nice like that next.  Thanks Heather for this topic!

Are Dogs Religious?

I think this dog may be expressing some skepticism on this topic, or at least the wisdom of discussing it.

First, the disclaimer: this isn't intended to be a post that's dismissive of religious belief at all.  I actually think that humans crave the answers to questions, and are genetically programmed to ask more and more and more of them. I don't have the answers to a lot of those questions, so if someone else believes they DO have those answers, who am I to question?

I don't think other animals are this way, generally, where something gets into their minds and they just HAVE to know about it. On the other hand, I do believe that animals think, they make connections between actions and results. They don't contemplate and are not very self aware, but they do apply brain power of some sort to the basic challenges of being alive, like getting enough food to stay that way.

Anyway, this line of thought started with my recent mild infatuation with tidying. That would never have come up if I was working, and didn't have time to think about anything much. That in turn got me thinking about animals that for some reason no longer have to spend their every waking moment hunting and gathering...like pets...or animals in zoos.

What's all the brainpower that those animals used to need for full time hunting and gathering (or avoiding being hunted and gathered) now being used for? I wonder if zoo animals ever think about where the food that appears in their cages comes from, or what makes it show up, or why it's better some days than others? They used to think about the conditions under which prey would be vulnerable, and how to catch it, or how to avoid being caught, so they have awareness of their environment and of course they care about getting food.

Ever see wolves in zoos, some other predators, ceaselessly repeating the same set of movements all day long? You know, trot along the fence to the corner, turn to the right to keep along the fence, get to the next corner, jump to the left and reverse direction, follow the fence back....you can see the grass all worn away along the fence from pacing. I always assumed they were gone mad, obsessively seeking a way out that countless attempts showed wasn't there.

Maybe what's really going on is one day early on they were checking out the fence when the keeper brought food. The same thing happened the next day, and some dim wolfy awareness of a connection between the keeper showing up with food and checking out the fence started to grow...a "belief" that if they pace, and maybe pace ju-u-u-st right, the guy will show up with food. Maybe if they never turn to the right when they reverse direction, the food will be tasty, not half vegetables. Maybe when it IS half vegetables, the wolf starts wondering whether it missed a turn back there somewhere.

Some dogs just comfortably assume the love of those that bring their food.

What about dogs, our title subjects? They're pack animals and dedicated to us as alpha pack members, but what do they think of our ability to produce food? If we miss a day or give them food they really dislike, or yell at them for no real reason, do they assume it's their fault, and start thinking about what they did wrong? They do a million tricks for food, is that their religion? - "I don't know how or when he catches the food, but I know he keeps it coming if I do this when he does that, and if I do it just perfect sometimes it's the really tasty kind of food".

Check out Cash, in the back:  "Have I somehow offended The Bringer of All Things? I must hang back, and abase myself completely."

I get that this may just be semantic somersaults around a specific definition of the word "religion", but given that humans are often passionate believers in things there's no definite proof of, I thought it was fun to wonder if animals also feel passionately about things they can't understand or "prove".

It's hard to look at that face and not think it's expressing gratitude for the comfy new bed he's in.  Okay, hard for me.  Caesar, wherever he is, might know Boo is considering an all-out lethal attack at this moment.

Cash in a rare moment of apparent confidence in his human benefactors.

One final, completely unrelated remark: The Weather Network says it's overcast in North Vancouver this morning.  I just took the picture below from the yard. If this is overcast I can't wait to see what "really bad weather" looks like....

Just look at all those looming thunderheads...

Golden Ears and Mt. St. Benedict

...or "This Is One Way To Figure Out If It's Time for New Trail Shoes".

The real purpose of today's post is to see whether I can figure out how to post a link to a video that ISN'T on YouTube, but my producers, investors, and PR people felt that wouldn't make much of a title. My second choice, above, didn't make the cut, either.

This is a link to a 3 minute video. Click on it - there will be a quiz.

Let's see whether that worked. Or if you watched the video. Or both.

Start with an easy one: What was the video about? There are some hints above.
How many kilometres are mentioned in the opening scene?
Which famous Rat Pack singer provides the musical support?

Okay, that's it. If you haven't been able to see it and have any vestige of interest in acing the quiz, better not read on, because the rest of this post is one big spoiler.

That hike was a week ago yesterday, and it was pretty epic in terms of time, distance, and suffering.  Fortunately it was also pretty epic in terms of scenery and company, in spite of the thick pall of smoke that obscured the view a bit even at the top.

A couple of posts back was the hike from two weeks ago, up Mt. Strachan. In that post, I concocted a theory trying to explain the absence of people in the 10-20 year old age range from the hiking trails.  The hike a week ago up Golden Ears peak put the lie to the theory, so now there's a new one: people in the 10-20 group only do really tough hikes, probably just to humiliate old people on the trail.

All the images and video I have of Golden Ears are in the linked movie. It was a long 23 km round trip, big elevation gain at about 1400 m, the "middle" 14 of those 23 km were without ability to add water, and the "middle" 6 of those 14 waterless km were like doing a 3k Grouse Grind up and then down; about 1100 of the 1400 m elevation change is in a 3 km stretch. It's the kind of hike that has an emergency shelter at one end of it. We had to stop, rest, eat, and have a long heart-to-heart with ourselves before completing the last half km to the shelter. The peak was another hour and kilometre past that, and looked pretty intimidating, and we felt okay about ourselves for not even considering it. A lot of people camp overnight before the hard part.

The views were pretty great and would have been fantastic without smoke. The food and beer we stopped and had on the way home were unbelievably super fantastic. In fairness, Kraft dinner would have been life-changing. My feet were sore the next day. I haven't thought seriously about hiking boots in 30+ years, til last week. I think the better solution is to just not do hikes like that.

The day before yesterday was the more moderate but surprisingly exhausting Mt. St. Benedict hike.  12 km round trip, 1000 m gain, took us about 4.5 hrs. The description we were working with was pretty tangled up, so we ended up driving and walking about 1.5 km of road that looked like this, only in reality it's way steeper, twice:


And it moved like this when we were on it, too.  Talk about tough.

The upper (off that road) trailhead was the big mystery, although this picture doesn't convey much of a sense of wonder, other than maybe "I wonder how I was ever supposed to notice that?":


See it, that kind of little break in the bushes?  Oh, all right, yes, it's well flagged and hard to miss, once you have decent instructions on how to get there.  Which we didn't have.

McKay Lake, at about the halfway point, does a better job looking wonderful:

This was the for-sure highlight of the day, McKay Lake. This picture was from Reiner Tecklenburg.  By the time we got up high, the clouds had got down, got funky.  They just would not get back up again.

We went steeply up from there, into the clouds, in fact. I hadn't ever really fully appreciated how wet the bushes and trees hanging over a trail can make you, nor how much the temperature can change with elevation, nor how useless a cotton hoodie is in those conditions, until this hike. Here are a couple of shots of the "view" from the top:

This is where the breath-taking view of something far, far below would have been on a clear day.  We got the danger part but not the exhilaration part.  We got the really, really wet part, too.



Again...I made this one large in case you can glimpse something through the fog, like maybe a Norse god.

That was it! Lots of hiking these past few weeks. Next post, possibly a return to my more esoteric ramblings.  Probably I should not forewarn you like that. 

First kid on my block...

Total change of pace today: this post is just only and simply about me being the first one to say that the current "crow riding on an eagle's back" thing is at best a very lucky piece of photograph timing and at worst a fake.

Background: some guy caught a series of photographs that purport to show a crow approaching, landing on, and then riding an eagle in flight.  When I look at the pictures and consider the possibility that any crow in its right mind could or would fold its wings and simply stand on the back of an eagle in flight, I say No - a thousand times no!  Even the eagle doesn't look right to me in these pictures....

Here's the initial place Rich sent to show me the pictures

Snopes, whose word on the truth or hoax status of everything is gold to me, apparently believes this is true.  Today, July 2nd, they cite Internet and email traffic " from July 2015" as validating this set of photos as authentic.

Here's the Snopes "analysis" that Rich also sent me.

....and here is a Google search on Internet traffic tending to validate this stuff, again provided by Rich.

I'm saying it's a hoax.

You can see how this went: Rich has done all the work and all I've had to do is be groundlessly obstinate in my disbelief.  If I turn out to be wrong, it'll be a little more humble pie, the earth continues spinning....meantime my potential upside on being the First Kid on My Block to call this out as a fraud is HUGE.

Thanks for listening.  As a reward for your patience, here is a picture of Blue Gentian Lake in West Vancouver, taken when Rich and I were hiking there on Canada Day (and arguing about eagles and crows.  Hey, this is how my days go by, and let me tell you, there are a lot worse ways to spend days...):

Blue Gentian Lake, July 1, 2015