Week 60: Altstadtfest and...two castles!

On the day of the summer solstice, yes, the longest day of the year, I was in the city of Vaasa, Finland for work. Vaase is located at about the same latitude as Reykjavík, Iceland. I should have known I would be in for a tough few days, when I landed at 11pm and it barely looked like twilight, despite the fact that the city was completely covered in clouds. The next day was surreal. It looked like mid-afternoon far into the night. I couldn't, for the the life of me keep the light out of my hotel room. My. I had never been so jetlegged when traveling only one time zone. And, the crazy thing about this place, was that people didn't have the rolling shutters on their windows like they do in Germany. I don't know how they sleep...maybe they do it all in the winter, when they have 20 hours of darkness.

Around 9pm in Vaasa

After I made it home and had a good night's sleep on Friday, Jason and I met up with the Luxembourg Ex-Pat group in the nearby city of Trier for the Altstadtfest (roughly: Old-Town Fest). It was the standard German festival, with plenty of food, beer, wine and various forms of entertainment. We watched a couple cover bands at one stage, then visited the cathedral with a few of the ex-pats. One of the cover bands called out Jason for rocking out and playing air guitar to "Breakfast at Tiffany's" by Deep Blue Something. Jason *swears* he was doing it ironically and was composing a progressive interpretation of the song in his head. I'll leave it to you to decide if he was telling the truth.

This band liked Jason's air guitar

So, the next day it was raining. And, what better thing to do in the rain in Germany, than to go to Luxembourg and visit castles? So, we did just that. Our first castle was Beaufort Castle in eastern Luxembourg. We had been here before, about a year ago, but they were having a concert at the castle when we arrived, so we weren't able to to tour it. This time, no concert, so we took our umbrella and looked around.

Jason, an umbrella and a castle

There was nothing particularly remarkable about the castle, but it did have some nice tall towers to climb into and a number of passages to explore.

Jason looks at a Beaufort Castle

Our next stop was the castle in Larochette. We had traveled through Larochette a couple months ago when we were hiking with the ex-pat group. We didn't have the time (or, frankly, the energy) to visit the castle as we walked through the town, so we returned on our own. It was very wet out at that point, so we didn't spend too much time exploring the the ruins, but inside one of the restored buildings were a series of exhibits by local artists--I was particularly found of Alice Niederkorn's work. There were a few pieces I might have been interested in taking home, but we can't hang things on our walls...

Ruined Castle at Larochette

Week 59: Turin

A number of years ago, when a good friend was doing some graduate studying Italy, I visited Turin on a cold, rainy night in late December. We walked around, had some dinner and road the glass elevator up to the top of the Mole Antonelliana to view a cold and wet Turin from above.

Flash forward about eight years, and I am back in Turin, this time with Jason, in the hot, humid summer for about two days of seeing the city in both the light and the dark and again visiting the Mole Antonelliana. I was in the area for work and it looked like a great opportunity for Jason to get his first look at Italy. Since he had never been and my impression, other than the food, is not that rosy, it was important for him to draw his own conclusions.

We booked a place on AirBnB. It was one of the nicest apartments that we had stayed in, though it was a bit of a ways outside the city, so we did a large amount of walking. I had given Jason directions to find places for dinner (which, as I will note again as I come to them, he did admirably), as that, we find, when you don't have a sense for the area, is the hardest part.

We ended up walking to dinner our first night, after we got everything set up with our apartment for the weekend. We had some very good pizza, then walked around the very warm and humid city of Turin for the evening, stopping for a while next to the river to enjoy the lights and the sounds of the city.

Turin at Night

After staying remarkably cool in our room, despite no air conditioning. Air conditioning is generally rare in Europe, especially in private homes. You don't see the warts sicking our the windows nearly as often as you do in the States, even where they could really use it (like Italy). Very few of the companies I have been to have air conditioning, unless it is an internal room--even then, it may only be a fan, instead of full-on AC. (I really don't like AC very much, if it wasn't that obvious...though I admit, I felt a little crazy a couple years ago during that heat wave in New England, where I was working from home and had my feet soaking in ice water to stay cool, since we had no AC in the apartment...as with everything else, its use requires balance.)

For our full day in Turin, we started by going to a huge market at Porta Palazzo (translated link--translation done by Google...), which is purported to be the largest in Europe. It was indeed quite big and had very reasonable prices. Jason bought about 1.5 kilos of cherries for 2 Euro (3.3 lbs for about 3 bucks). While it was a good deal, it did mean that we spent the next couple hours walking around Turin, spitting out cherry stones.

A stall at Europe's largest market

We visited the Royal Palace of Turin, which has some really fantastic marble-work in the entry area. Unfortunately, no pictures are allowed, so though I did get one of two shots before the docent told me to stop (the sign was *very* poorly placed--there was no way I could have seen it unless I was throwing something out in the trash can it was hidden behind), they weren't the best, so I haven't included them here. I did include a rather appropriate statue of Pan, that was snapped before the docent's correction of my conduct. 

Shh! I didn't take this picture at the Royal Palace!

Around lunch time, we came across a portion of a Roman road and an old Roman gate. Turin was founded by the Roman's and dedicated to Augustus, and there was a statue in place to commemorate that fact. Jason was very excited to see this pose of Augustus in statue form, as it was included in many of the Latin texts he used in high school. He had recognized it immediately from our table for lunch at a nearby restaurant.

Jason and a famous Roman

After lunch, we took some time to walk around the city, including some time to walk by one of the rivers. There were many locals also doing the same, and others relaxing in the grass. After a bit of walking, we joined those with more sloth-like pursuits and found a shady spot for a nap. After a bit of a rest, we located some coffee and worked our way back into the heart of the city via public transport.

One thing that much of Italy shares with less western countries I have been to (including, actually, some parts of the US), is the desire/need to use capital investments, for *as long as humanly possible* despite the rather obvious safety or other hazards that may result from the use of the investment. Case in point--in the video below, is the door of a street car opening and closing (it is taken sideways...you may need to tilt your head). My, I am glad my toe, finger or arm did not get in its way!

We successfully disembarked from the street car with all limbs and other body parts attached and headed to the Mole Antonelliana for a ride in their great, glass elevator to get a nice view of the city. The building is home to Italy's Cinema Museum, which we only visited slightly, due to the glass elevator ride. Since we had good weather, the view from the top was quite nice and we spent quite a while looking down into the courtyards and terrasses of Turin. 

At the top of the Mole Antonelliana

For dinner on our second and final night, Jason had again found a well recommended pizza joint. This one, we had to wait about an hour for a table, but they were nice enough to put our names in and tell us what time to come back so we went and had a beer and some aps, then came back and had some of the best pizza I have had, especially at about 10pm. It was truly great.

Thumbs up on the pizza!

That pretty much wrapped up our trip. We took our time getting up the next day and just had sandwiches at a nearby mall for lunch, before working our way to the airport and back to Germany. On the way home, there was a fantastic sunset over the windmills in the farm fields. Italy was a nice diversion--especially for the food--but it was great to be back in Germany.

Yeah, I'll say it: Windmills are Majestic

Week 58: Wiesbaden and Mainz

In searching through Atlas Obscura, Jason and I came across the Nerogergbahn a water-powered funicular, located a couple of hours away in the city of Wiesbaden. (As a quick note, Wiesbaden is the location of the US Army's European base of command.) We did it as a day trip, driving our around lunch time, stopping briefly at a rest stop for some food and running across an entire row of fantastic cars in the parking lot. It wasn't clear if they were on their way somewhere or were on display at the rest area for some reason or another.

Fantastic cars...and an 18+ store...

We were very excited to see the funicular, our second in a month or so (the last being the Montmartre funicular when we were last in Paris), since, first off, funiculars are pretty cool from an engineering perspective, as they reduce the needed energy to raise any single car up a slope by having an opposing car attached to the other end of a cable. With the power of mgh (potential energy, not the T-stop), the first car assists in raising the second car up the slope.

Most funiculars use a powered cable system to provide the extra energy needed that is not provided by the difference in potential. The interesting thing about the Nerogergbahn is that it uses only the difference in potential to move the cars, by filling the uphill car with water, making the uphill car heavy enough to pull the downhill car up. The resulting speed of both cars is controlled by the brakeman on the downhill car. Once the formerly uphill car reaches the bottom, it dumps its water and the cycle begins again with the uphill car taking on water.

Passengers Disembarking (de-funicularing?) from the Nerogergbahn

The other neat thing about the Nerogergbahn was the tracks. For most of the run, there are only three tracks for the wheels--each car has one at the edge and they share the one in the middle. A problem, of course, would occur with this layout when the cars need to pass each other. This is resolved by having a section of track where there are two complete sets of tracks, so two for each car. Since the distance of the run is fixed, the cars always pass at the same point, so bone crushing injuries are avoided. The video below shows this point on the track.

We enjoyed some coffee and cake at the top of the hill, then took a walk in a nearby park once we returned to the bottom. We then drove to the city center and walked around for a bit, before going over the river to the city of Mainz. The evening we were there was Germany's first game in the European Championship soccer tournament against the Netherlands. We found a restaurant with an outdoor Biergarten and a big TV to sit tight, eat, have a couple beers and see what it was all about. Germany won, with, what we were later told, was a not a very exciting game, though in finding our way out of Mainz, we saw a large number of happy Germans.

Jason made a friend he never wants to leaf...

Week 57: Abtei and Luxembourg Photographers

Jason's boss is an A-10 pilot. As one coworker of mine said when I told him that "OMG! That is the coolest boss ever!" (That was in front of his boss, so he quickly backpedaled...) But, as happens with most military jobs, he will be rotating out of Germany and out of flying the A-10 within the next few months. As these rotations tend to come in waves, there were a number of pilots who were moving on at the same time, so the squadron had a farewell dinner for them all.

The dinner was hosted at Abtei Himmerod, located about 15-20 minutes from our place and is home to some ridiculously strong beer (10.5% alcohol content--that is much closer to wine...). We had the options of a few different German meals. Jason selected the Moechskloss (potato dumpling), whose correct spelling, with the German letters, is shown in the picture below. 

What would you like for dinner?

The farewell dinner was interesting, as no one wanted anyone to speak for very long, but each person did. And, this was despite the fact that they had a bowl of water full of ice at the front where everyone spoke. While speaking, the speaker had to have his hand in the bowl of water. It seemed to me to not be much of a deterrent since (1) these guys are in the military and have to put up with crap like that all the time and (2) they were sucking down the 10.5% alcohol beers like they were going out of style.

On Sunday we went off to Luxembourg for the afternoon. We were planning on doing Happy Mosel, where the road next to the Mosel is closed and becomes a huge bike way, as we did last year, but when we woke up it was PORING rain, so we decided to avoid making our selves into the wet and, likely, unhappy people we would become after riding our bikes for 2 to 4 hours in the rain. Instead, we visited a photo museum in Luxembourg.

The museum is located in one of Luxembourg's casemates (we've toured other sections on a couple of occasions) and is named, appropriately, Am Tunnel. Two Luxembourgish artists were featured. The first, is a sport photographer, Arthur Thill, who does photography particularly of F1 and Olympic sports (currently his site is showing snaps of the EuroCup). Check out this award-winning series of photos of a Formula 1 race in Germany, where some errant fuel was ignited. Very dramatic.

The other photographer on display was Edward Steichen. Steichen is really only a passing Luxembourger, having moved to the US with his parents when he was very young. He is, though, quite famous (in the right set) for curating a photo exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in NY called The Family of Man, which went on tour around the world and was seen by over 9 million people. They had some information in this exhibit regarding his work, but the actual Family of Man exhibit (the last one left) is located in northern Luxembourg. That goes on our list! For 2013 (it is closed until then...)!

After visiting the museum, we got a coffee and walked around a bit, finding the crew of Asian tourists taking photos of each other in front of Dunk Henri's palace. Sort of a meta picture, I suppose.

The Duke's Palace, in many photos

For the evening, we caught up with the meetup group at a pub and did a pub quiz. We came in second, but by only three points. On the way back to the car, we saw a little piece of home in a shop window...go Celts!

Evidently, the Celtics vacation in Luxembourg

Week 56: Memorial Day Weekend Roadtrip

For Memorial Day Weekend, we headed north. Our first stop was in Brussels, Belgium. Brussels is the capital of Belgium and also home to much of the management of the European Union. We made only a short stop in Brussels, primarily to see the Grand Place, which is a large city square surrounded by the city hall and old guild halls.

The Town Hall from Brussels's Grand Place

From there, we drove toward the Belgian coast and Bruges. Bruges has a large number of canals and buildings that are 100s of years old--most of its medieval buildings are still intact. We spent the evening wandering around the city and found an Italian restaurant for dinner. One thing that was very interesting about Bruges, as opposed to other cities we have been to in Europe, was that the train station was located about a 15 minute walk from the downtown. The city encourages people to park at the train station and take the bus into the town, by giving you free bus fare with your parking ticket. Not bad at all, as it looked pretty impossible to park on the narrow, cobblestoned roads.

A canal in Bruge

Much like New Hampshire, Belgium is quite proud of its diminutive coastline along the Atlantic Ocean. It stretches about 42 miles between France and the Netherlands, with the coast of England only about 84 miles away. We quickly visited the cost north of Bruges, where a ferry brings over UK tourists for a trip to the beach. As you can see, the beach is pretty enormous. We were there at the start of the season, so while there were a number of people relaxing in beach chairs, there wasn't the dense crowds that would be likely later in the summer.

Beach in Belgium

From the Belgian coast, we drove up to The Netherlands, staying on the coast for a bit and even running into a jazz festival in one of the small towns we drove through, where we stopped to have fish, fries and ice cream. Belgium is where fries were invented. They do a sort of double-frying of the potatoes, which results in a fantastically crispy fry. Yum!

Rainbow Over Netherlands

From the coast, we worked our way inland to Grave, Netherlands. We discovered that this area was the focus of Operation Market Garden, during World War II and the bridge featured in A Bridge Too Far, was located only a few miles from where we stayed. We stayed on the edge of Grave and spent the next day and a half riding our bikes around the wonderfully flat Netherlands.

Hey! We found a castle!

The weather was fantastic, so we did a multi-hour ride each on Sunday and Monday. On each day, we spent some time riding along canals and, also, on each day, took a ferry across so we could do a nice loop. We had plenty of company, including roving bands of bikers with matching bikes and uniforms speeding along with skinny tires and tight spandex.

Bike Ferry Across a Canal

Unfortunately, all vacations, and especially short ones, come to an end. On our way home, though, we hit another triple point. Our last triple point was between Luxembourg, Germany and Belgium. This time, it was between Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. This site was a bit more developed than the first and included a number of playgrounds, amusement rides, places to drink coffee and towers to climb to the top of. Part of the attraction was that this spot is not only a triple point, but is also the highest spot in The Netherlands. This point is at 322 meters, just over 100 meters higher than the highest point in Rhode Island.

Just guess which of the 3 countries I am in...

Week 55: Riding the Kylltal

The Kyll river runs very close to where we live. The river valley (in German: Tal) also hosts the regional train and a bike path (link in German) that runs from Trier north about 115 km to Hallschlag. We had biked along portions of the path, particularly last summer when we had a visitor and on at least one other weekend. On those trips we just did out-and-back biking, without using the train. On this weekend we decided to use the train to extend our trip a bit.

On Saturday, we left the car at the Speicher train station and rode from there to Trier--about 32 kilometers via the bike path. A few of you may be asking--wait, don't you live in Speicher? Why don't you just ride your bike right to the path. And those few of you are indeed correct. We do live in Speicher, but we live on the top of the hill, above the river valley, so while it would be easy to ride down to the valley, getting back up there after a long ride is really not our idea of fun. Due to that, we strap the bikes on the back of the car and bring them the few kilometers straight downhill to the valley.

The ride on Saturday was quite nice. Most of the trail was in good repair, those about 5 or so kilometers of it near our destination was really beat up concrete and not the best for riding. We made it through no problem, but would probably avoid that section in the future, if possible. At the end of our ride was the city of Trier, which we have been to many times. We enjoyed a beer and some pizza before loading our bikes on the train for the 30 minute ride back to our car.

A mug of beer in Trier

On Sunday, we started in the same spot, with our car in Speicher, but this time took the train ride first, getting off in the town of Gerolstein--located in the Vulcaneifel and famous for its bubbly water. As we were on the train, we could see the bike path for much of the way and one section looked particularly nasty--all crushed stone and sand--due to some repair work on the road in  the area. We discussed if it would make sense to avoid that section, especially since Jason's bike is more of a commuter bike and isn't the best on uneven surfaces, such as crushed stone. Even on my mountain bike, it wouldn't have been pleasant.

Well, we got off the train in Garolstein and worked out way south. between the town of Birresborn and Densborn, there was a big sign referring to the missing road section, which included a table of train times. We decided to ride to Densborn, where we arrived about 10 minutes before the next train headed south. We were planning on taking the train a bit further south--from Kyllburg to Erdorf--due to a very steep hill that is part of the route (at the bottom of the linked .pdf is a profile of the ride--note the hill between Kyllburg and Erdorf), so we stayed on the train until Erdorf.

At the Erdorf station, we had some lunch (Currywurst for both of us). In finding the path again, we rode through the train station parking lot and came across the 50 degree parallel. Wasn't expecting that there...

50 degrees North Latitude Line

From Erdorf, we then continued our ride back to Speicher. Part of the bike path went by a section of rode that we travel quite frequently. In this section, we found the sign shown below. The 25% grade is over my right shoulder. Despite requests for bike riders to please dismount, there was plenty of evidence that the guidance was not strictly followed. The steep grade ended at more-or-less a cliff that fell to a stream. At the top of the cliff, was a heavily reinforced, though quiet obviously regularly impacted, chain-link style fence. With a little less mature frontal lobe, I would have been tempted to try it out, but, alas, I am over the age of 25, so will generally think better of such acts. Unless, someone, of course, offers me a dollar...

25% grade--about 14 degrees

In total, another 30 or so km and some nice train rides. It was another nice day, with maybe a spit or two or rain, but no big rain drops.

Week 54: Adventure Park!

As you can probably guess, when we get any chance of a break in the weather, we like to spend as much time outside as possible. We had the opportunity a couple of weekends to go with the Luxembourg Ex-Pat group to an adventure park (okay...that is crazy...I can't believe there is actually a Wikipedia page for adventure parks). An adventure park is also known as a rope course and is where that special group of kids went in high school to learn "leadership" skills (or, I can only assume...I was never part of that group...they always talked about some awesome thing called a ropes course, so I figure this was it). The idea is you have a bunch of platforms up in trees with "elements" between them that you need to navigate. These will be things such as rope bridges, or other methods previously only seen in movies for crossing deep ravines.

Jason crossing a lava pit

The park we visited (Parc Le'h Adventures) is located in Dudelange, Luxembourg. This was not our first time at such a park. We had also visited one on the MA, NY boarder (Catamount) a couple times in the last few years--it is equally as awesome, so if you ever have the chance, I *highly* recommend it.

Zipline!

One of the best parts about the adventure parks we have been to, are the zip lines. (Quite frankly, I work my way through the other elements just to get to the zip lines.) You can see me on one in the photo below. In the US, they give you gloves with your other gear when you check in, so you can slow yourself down a bit on the zip lines without chewing up your hands. In Luxembourg, they didn't give us gloves, but instead had well padded trees, so injury was (generally) avoided.

The end of a zip line

There are a number of different courses at these parks and each varies in difficulty, starting with the kiddie courses for the young ones and those not so comfortable with heights, going to those primarily intended for Navy Seals or teenage boys. Since Jason and I had some experience with them, we started with the second hardest, which was pretty good for us. We then did the course two levels below the first and then the one one level below the first, making it through 3 courses in total. Most of our companions weren't quite a quick/comfortable and made it each only through 2. We did, though, have one member of our group who tried the hardest course, which included a "Tarzan" swing, which required swinging from about 35 feet in the air on a rope to catch a 4 foot wide cargo net that was hanging opposite at a similar height (don't worry, there is *plenty* of safety gear). Unfortunately, he missed grabbing the cargo net, so the staff had to pull him down with a ladder, but he had a great time trying, which is really all that matters.

Oh, and did I mention we had a perfect day out in the woods?