"Dog with a Blog"

There’s a new show out on the Disney Channel called “Dog with a Blog.”  No, your first question shouldn’t have been “Is it good?” I have no idea, though I sincerely doubt it.  You’ll have to check it out for yourself.  And no, your next question shouldn’t have been “How do you even know about that show?”  I have kids who beg to watch TV every time we have access to an English language channel.  An ad came on during some teeny-bopper thing that they watch.  Your first question should have been “OK, but what does a new Disney show have to do with your travel blog?” 

Of course, if that really is your question, then I don’t have an answer for you.  All I can say for certain is that hearing about the show made me feel a little hurt, especially when I found out the “dog with a blog” has millions of readers, even if most of them have paws.  I have somewhere around a dozen loyal readers, and a good third of those are my mother.  Most of my family members back home don’t even read this blog.  No, this isn’t a plea for sympathy.  If you are reading this, you are obviously one of the select twelve and given your attention I should be thankful rather than whiny.  Heck, I wouldn’t read the doggone thing either, if I didn’t have to, in order to edit it.  So your dogged loyalty honors me, and I am sincerely grateful, especially considering that the blog itself is not so “full of great”.

I guess my reason for the title of this post is that the dog days of May are just making me feel a bit doggish when it comes to keeping up with the writing.  It’s been raining cats and dogs all day and sightseeing in the rain is really not all that fun.  And it’s tough to remain witty after a couple hundred pages worth of posts when you know that very few people will ever read the stuff.  So I can’t seem to get inspired to write about our latest adventures.  As witty as “Dog with a Blog” may be, “The Blog from Prague” just doesn’t have the same bite.  But I must continue in any case because I really do want to remember this once-in-a-lifetime trip and I can’t remember my middle name without documentation these days.  My future self would kill me if I didn’t get it all down now.  And where would my future self be without me, right?  So here goes nuthin’.

We left Croatia amidst much hoopla.  There was a parade in our honor and everybody was given a day off from work.  They called it Labor Day or some such nonsense, but I’m sure all of the festivities were because we were leaving.  Anyhow, we left the country and once we crossed the border into Slovenia, we decided to stay awhile.  We never really had any intention of spending time in Slovenia.  I mean, who vacations in Slovenia?  But we felt sorry for the little country and decided to give it a few days just for charity-sake.  Big mistake.  We should have given it a few weeks!  We loved Slovenia!  Go ahead, google it.  I’ll wait… It truly is a beautiful country.  The kids loved it.  When the little country grows up a bit, we’re going to introduce it to Luxembourg.  They’d make such a cute couple!  And I always wanted to make Lichtenstein jealous of Luxembourg after that nasty affair with Andorra.

But I digress.  Slovenia is just another one of the pieces of torn apart Yugoslavia.  But this one actually upped the GNP average for the rest of the E.U. when it joined.  The people here have it together.  The entire country feels like a living Hallmark card.  Even the capital city is sweeter than Aspartame.  But we didn’t start there.  We started in the southwest corner near the Italy border where the Lippizaner horses are bred.  Yes, these are the ones that trot around like poodles at a look-down-your-nose variety dog show and are famous mostly due to the shows they have been a part of since the beginnings of the Austrian-empire days in Vienna.  The horses all originally came from this little town in Slovenia and we went to have a look.  We got a tour of the stables and then watched an hour-long performance complete with every canned classical music piece that the average schmuck can whistle along with and that the horses could prance to on anywhere from 0-4 legs depending on the crack of the whip.  The highlight of the show was an announcer who felt the need to walk to the center of the arena and tell us about what comes next in between each of the seven or eight different acts.  The problem was that each time he did so, he would read from a script in six different languages and nobody was listening to him as nobody understood eighty-three percent of what he was saying.  It was all a bit cheesy, but the performance was definitely different and that is what we’ve been going for lately.  And seeing the newborn foals was pretty cool too.  The adult horses are white, but the foals are black.  They change color as they age, kind of like the carpet in my bedroom.

"I was born a poor black child" - see: "The Jerk" w/Steve Martin.

We made camp at a farm complete with tourist lodging.  They served us breakfast and dinner and provided the kids with a soccer field and trampolines and a hoops court and other kids with which to take advantage of the rest.  Needless to say, Josh was in heaven.  Kid contact of any sort is a rare jewel indeed.  Josh was so gung-ho that the next day he was dumbfounded as to why his legs hurt so much.  It seems that this was the very first time he ever had sore muscles after over-exertion, and he was not happy about it.  I was happy though, because at both breakfast and dinner I didn’t have to cook or do dishes, but I also didn’t have to choose among ten different unhealthy options from a menu.  They brought what they brought, and we ate it, no questions asked.  It wasn’t fabulous, but it was healthy and hearty.  They brought too much, and we were all stuffed, but we were a happy kind of stuffed.  Well, except Josh, who was a grumpy kind of sore.

The next day we went to the mildly famous Skocjan cave.  It involved a few hours of walking through what is apparently the largest cave in Europe.  I was the one in heaven now.  I love caves!  And one chamber in this particular sucker was 1000 meters long, 500 meters wide, and 600 meters tall, even though we were under another 500 meters of solid rock.  The rushing river at the bottom brought just the right ambience.  Even the kids were duly impressed.  It was pouring rain outside, so we chose a good day to be underground.  Of course we weren’t allowed to take pictures, but Carol snapped a few without a flash when the guide wasn’t looking; such a rebel, that wife of mine.  We did, as well, get some nice shots outside of the cave looking in.

Looks bigger on the inside than from the outside.

Then it was on to the capital of Slovenia, Ljubljana (pronounced po-TAY-to).  Such a great little town!  It had the requisite castle on a hill with its own museum that did a great job of telling the history of the region.  We even got to take a funicular to the top.  The parks and the squares and the churches and the bridges over the river were all quite beautiful.  But there was something much homier about this town than most of the others we’ve visited.  It felt as if they didn’t take themselves quite so seriously.  And the tourists and the locals mixed more than in other towns.  Perhaps the intermingling was because this isn’t a huge tourist destination yet.  Rick Steves, the indispensible European guidebook man, says that Ljubljana is second in line to become the next Prague, meaning it will soon be discovered by the masses and become another must-see spot on the map.  If you consider that a good thing, then the town and its economy deserve it.  Of course, eventually the overflow of tourists will ruin the feel of the place, making this distinction not such a good thing. But for now, it is charming.

Ljubljana.  Water fountains in Europe have style. 

The dragon bridge in Ljubljana was a hit.

Cool double helix stairs to the top of Ljubljana castle.  The view once you get there.

We only spent a day walking around town.  We didn’t stay.  Instead we continued on for less than an hour and stayed at the very northern edge of the country in a sleepy little tourist spot called Bled. The lake and the surrounding town have apparently been a European getaway for decades.  Americans are rare.  But we took advantage.  We stayed in an apartment that felt more like a cottage in the mountains.  We had incredible mountain vistas out windows and sliding glass doors on two sides of the apartment.  Each time we passed the kitchen window, we’d find ourselves stopping and staring at our surroundings.  I could have lived here for weeks and never left the apartment and still not tasted cabin fever.  But we did leave the apartment, and we spent a day on and near the alpine lake.  It was finally an opportunity for activities befitting the birthday of a ten-year old boy, so we told Josh that it was to be the celebration of his birthday that never really happened last month.  I’ll leave the telling of the day to the birthday-boy himself:

Josh:

The Ultra Fun Day

This day started out normal with boring stuff like eating cereal and waiting for my family to wake up. But then a gong sounded in the lower middlish left side of the corner on the right side or wherever the memory section is in my brain. It hit me. My mom said we were going bobsledding today! It was going to be my pretend birthday since we didn’t really get to do much cool stuff on my actual birthday.  I was so happy I couldn’t keep sitting in my bed. I woke up my mom and in about an hour our whole family was in the car driving to Lake Bled. On that lake we rented a rowboat that was shaped like a swan and rowed to the island in the middle. We looked around for ten minutes and saw the church, but that was all. We rowed back. Chloe and I did the rowing for the most part, and seriously I felt my heart beating to the heave-ho, heave-ho.  At the time, I thought it was a metric ton of fun. But, I didn’t realize that so much even better fun was coming my way.

C'mon Dad.  Can't you row any faster?

A swan powered by a goose!

Oops.  I think we forgot Mom.

Lake Bled.

After the lake trip, I saw this park filled with fun activities.  I convinced my parents to let us do a couple of them.  I picked this thing called “fun shooters” where my dad and I went inside a room made of nets and we shot each other for ten minutes with foam balls.  We loaded the balls into the air guns from the top and shot them. After a while I had to pick up the balls off the ground because my basket ran out of ammo.  I didn’t want to get shot in the face while not looking as I was filling my basket. We both got shot everywhere possible by the end, so that was enough of that.

In the end, Josh won.  I had better aim, but I was also a much bigger target when scooping up ammo.

Next, I decided to bungee jump with my sister. We got attached to bungee cords and were jumping on trampolines. Man, that was a great ten minutes. We were flipping both ways, accidently landing on our faces sometimes, when trying to do a double flip, and just plain bouncing high. Sometimes I would get stuck in the air and the woman who worked there would have to pull me down by knocking my butt on the trampoline.  It was awesome.  That was Chloe’s favorite part of the day.  But still, the fun wasn’t done!  Not even close!

I wonder why the grown-ups didn't want to try this?

After that… dundundun… it was time to bobsled! We rushed there, got two ride tickets for everyone in the family, and got on the ski lift. In the winter you could go skiing there. We went down one time and up the second, but we decided not to go down the second time until later.  There was a high ropes course at the top of the bobsled ride.  We figured we could save the last bobsled ride until the end. We asked about doing the ropes course, and the man said we would have to wait an hour first. That was fine for us though, since it was way past lunchtime and there was a restaurant on the hill. We ate lunch, and they were ready for us after that.

On the ropes course, you were up high in the trees and you needed to get to the end of the course because there was no other way down. There were five separate courses and Chloe and I did all but the easiest and my parents did all but the two easiest. Yellow was easiest (and only for little kids), then orange (only for kids under 14), then green, then blue, and finally red (which was only for people over 12, but they let me go anyway). The courses were all pretty much the same, though a little higher and a little harder at each step, except for the red one, which was way harder. The basic parts of the course were slack lines, tight ropes, rope walls where you climb sideways across, things like hanging seesaws (where if you don't walk in the very middle it will tilt toward the weight,) and zigzags where it would tilt sideways not forwards and backwards. Everything was high up above the ground. And like I said, every time it got harder. Of course you had a harness but you did everything yourself, even set up the zip-line roller harnesses.

This was the green course, before it was too scary to hold a camera while up high.

I wasn’t supposed to go on the red course at all but they let me, so instead we all went up the hard way. We took a zip-line to an ultra hard test. There were ropes hanging down from a wire above you. Each rope was about eight feet long and they were hanging separately about three feet apart. Each rope had a tiny log attached at the bottom in the middle of the log. The idea was to jump to the next log with both feet at the same time so that it didn’t just wobble under your weight. You had to hold yourself up with your arms on the rope, while you tried to steady the little log for your feet. The problem was that the logs were slippery from the rain and would just twirl around by the slightest touch. You would also get the ropes tangled in your legs when you went from one to the next. It took us each about five minutes to get across the twelve ropes.
 
Next there was a super skinny tight rope and the only thing to hold was a slippery ball on a string as you walk on a cable between the trees. All of us were terrified and there was no way down. The only other one I will tell you about is a path across with branches in the way. The branches were diagonal so it looked like you could go under or over, but no. If you went under, your harness would get stuck. So we had to climb over each of the branches as we balanced on the cables. Remember, all of this was happening thirty feet above the ground! At the end of the course we were all exhaustipated but we were pretty proud of ourselves for making it all the way through. Nobody ever had to get rescued while hanging helplessly from their harness.
 
Finally we got to take our second ride down the mountain on the steep swervy bobsled track. It was just a metal track, like for a roller coaster but attached only to the mountain side, on which your one-person car could slide down as fast as you wanted it to. There was a lever that you could pull back to brake and push forward to accelerate. I had the lever pushed forward to accelerate the whole time, which is pretty scary on the sharp turns. It was ultra-fun. After that I got an ice cream and a coke. Now do you see why the title of my post is what it is?

It felt a lot steeper on the bobsled while you were riding.  Check out the cool castle in the background.  Dead center, up high.

Our river hike, referred to immediately below.

Steve:  The last day in Slovenia we hiked along a whitewater river and then just lollygagged around the apartment in an attempt to chill out.  The girls checked out a local bee-museum, but really the day was about resting up because the next day we drove to Vienna, where there would be no rest for the weary.  We had only one day scheduled in which to tour the beautiful city and weren’t going to waste it despite the pouring rain.  

Vienna was pretty sweet. I wish we had scheduled more time there. The apartment was a trip. The woman who rented it to us obviously lived there and then just checked out to her boyfriend's or some such convenient location whenever she got a bite on VRBO. It was stuffed with her things and she had a lot of things. But it was charming in a way and it felt homier than many of the pristene places we'd stayed at with too many empty shelves and walls. The local neighborhood was pleasant to walk through and the busses were efficient and clean and everything you'd want in public transportation. We were close enough to the happening parts of town, that it didn't feel like a schlep. Good times.

We checked out the magnificent St. Stephen’s cathedral, complete with a cannonball still stuck in its south wall.  We toured the palaces and the shopping district and the opera house and we even went to a museum of music where an entire floor was dedicated to the physics of sound and another was dedicated to stories of the famous composers who lived in town (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schumann, among others).  I am more of a music appreciator than I am a visual arts fan, so this was a good change for me after all that paint and marble in Italy.  Well, I guess that is not entirely true, I am a glutton for good works of architecture.  And Vienna does not disappoint in that regard either.

St. Stephen's in Vienna

Vienna is a very livable city.  They seem to incorporate the ancient with the new more seamlessly than do most Italian cities, in my humble opinion, of course.  And just as in Ljubljana, I felt as if the town didn’t take itself quite so seriously as say Florence or Rome.  Heck, a local is called a wiener.  How seriously could you take yourself with a name like that?  Carol and I got $4 standing-room-only tickets to the opera and were treated to an operatic comedy rather than the melodrama I usually associate with the musical genre.  It was refreshing in its light-heartedness.  But at the same time it was amazing to be in the magnificent baroque theater where once danced the baton of Wolfgang Amadeus himself.

The lobby of the Opera House in Vienna

Before we headed out of town the next morning, we checked out the summer palace of the Hapsburgs, called Schonbrunn Palace.  In case you aren’t up on your central European history, the Hapsburg family ruled the Austrian Empire for about 600 years until one of them got himself assassinated, provoking World War I.  The palace we visited was just a little home away from their usual home in downtown Vienna.  The grounds are comprised mainly of be-statued and manicured gardens reminiscent of Versailles, that encompass maybe a square mile of prime real estate, complete with hedge labyrinths, a zoo, and a greenhouse.  The palace itself has over fourteen hundred rooms, each more elaborately decorated and detailed than Kaiser Franz-Joseph’s own crown.  We did an audio tour of about forty of the rooms and tapped out on account of exhaustion.  Imagine playing hide and seek in that house!  “Has anybody seen Prince Leopold?  I mean, since last Tuesday morning after breakfast?”

Schonbrunn Palace.  That structure in the background serves no purpose other than garden decoration.  Another illegal photo op, inside one of the 1400 rooms of the summer palace.

Our plan was to drive to Prague, via Bratislava, Slovakia.  I mean if you’ve given Slovenia a chance, you have to do the same for Slovakia, right?  It is only fair.  And everybody raves about Prague, but ever since the Czech Republic exorcised its less sociable half, the poor Slovakians have no big beautiful city to call there own.  Their best offering is Bratislava and it would only be a detour of about an hour for us, so we gave it a go.  In retrospect, we could have missed it.  We ate an overpriced lunch in a restaurant at the top of the “UFO bridge,” named for the UFO perched atop its western tower.  We got a birds-eye view of the city, as we hovered high above the Danube, and we endured a really posh lunch that took over two hours to get through.  The food was good, the service was excellent, and the view was top-notch, but it still wasn’t worth the time and the dough. Oh well, live and learn.

The UFO bridge, and the view of Bratislava from within. 

We drove into the old section of the city, hoping to park and walk around a bit.  But after twenty minutes of trying unsuccessfully to find a place to park, we just gave up and headed out of town.  We still had four hours of driving to do to get to Prague, and it was getting late.  There was one really sweet 3^rd century castle (Devin) atop a mountain a few miles north on which we did a hit-and-run, but that was it for our Slovakia experience.  The saddest part of the moment for me was that we knew that Budapest was only another hour-and-a-half down the road, but we just couldn’t justify the three hour detour (on top of the time we would want to spend in Budapest) as we had to get to Prague that night.  Even on a year-long trip, you just can’t see it all.  Now we have a reason to come back.

View from Devin Castle outside Bratislava.

Prague is funny.  Their expressway is simply not.  The speed limit on the four lane wide-open freeway is 50 kph (about 30 mph).  It is not easy to drive that slowly on that wide a road, let me tell you.  That was my introduction to the city.  Drive on in!  Just do it so slowly that you feel as if third gear is more a product of wishful thinking than it is useful.  After that we parked our car at the hotel, never to touch it again until we left, preferring instead the subway system to get around.  Only the subway stations are so large that walking from one end to the other is longer than the actual distance the train travels in between stations.  Transferring trains within a station can take longer than just walking from one station to the next above ground.  And the tunnels are so deep that you could read an entire Kafka novel on one of the escalators.  It seems that the Soviet communist machine that built the system was a bit wanting in the efficiency department.  None of the stations were really that close to any place you wanted to go.  But we rode that sucker endlessly nonetheless.  You gotta do what you gotta do.

Adorable quirks aside, Prague is a wonderful town.  The food is terrible.  The weather was awful most of the time for us.  But I still loved it.  The architecture on the whole (mostly art-nouveau) was better than anywhere else we’ve visited (my apologies to Barcelona’s Gaudi).  Don’t get me wrong, I’d still much prefer to live in Barcelona for the people and the life-style and the food and the sea.  But the skyline in Prague is just stunning.  I took more pictures of random buildings than I care to admit in a public forum.  Everywhere you turned you were struck by another “wow-moment” edifice.  And the history of the place was palpable.  The Jewish quarter closed in around you with echoes of the thousands who didn’t get a fair shake on life.  Sitting on a park bench, you could imagine Kafka sitting there next to you scribbling his depressing, although brilliant stories.  Then there was the central square where tens of thousands gathered in protest of communist repression.  We went to the Museum of Communism and gave the kids a history lesson on Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and the poor Czech who set himself on fire to protest what the Bolsheviks stood for.  It was pretty deep stuff, made deeper by the sullen mood created by the incessantly pouring rain outside.

But Prague wasn’t all about serious history lessons.  On Chloe’s request, we visited a miniature museum inside the local monastery where you could see things like the Eiffel tower forged on a single piece of human hair or a procession of camels actually marching through the eye of a sewing needle.  And then to get even sillier, we went to a local black light theatre, which is all the rage in Prague.  We watched dancers in wacky glow-in-the-dark costumes prance about on stage under a blacklight so all that you could see was patterns and colors rather than whole bodies in motion.  It was pretty cheesy but still a fun experience.  The kids were into it, so it was money well spent.  I would have rather attended one of the many classical concerts offered up, but we’d already done the chamber music in Venice and the opera in Vienna, and Carol can only stand so much multi-centuries-old music in a given month.  I too have my limits with classical music.  It is not as though I have season tickets to the symphony.  It’s just that when in Prague, one should do as the Czechs do, right?

We weren’t too sad to say goodbye to Prague, mainly because the place rained on us so consistently.  But I do wish I could have spent some more time there under blue skies.  The Charles Bridge was so cool I could have spent a day on it just people watching and boat watching and statue watching and well, I guess I’m a bit of a voyeur.  The musicians on the side of the road playing for your nickel are pretty darned good.  The artists painting the surroundings are extremely talented.  There is just so much creativity and culture about, not to mention appreciation of life after communism, that you get all wrapped up in it and want to participate in some way.  But as a tourist, really, voyeurism seems to be the modus operandi.  So we came, we saw, and then we left.

A typical street in Prague.

The world famous astrological clock, complete with a rooster cuckoo, a skeleton who rings a bell, the twelve apostles who parade by, a dial for the phase of the moon and enough other bells and whistles to attract hundreds each and every hour to watch it do its thing.

More typical Prague.

This stained glass window in St. Vitus' Cathedral in Prague Castle was very different than all the others we've seen on the trip.  Carol found it to be extra cool.

Marge, our friendly GPS, took us on a route that included a highway that didn’t exist.  It looked to us like it was still under construction.  No matter how far off course we ventured, she always wanted us to turn around and get back to that non-existent highway.  We had no other recourse but to try and interpret the Czech signage and simply feel our way out of the country.  This is one of few countries we’ve been in where the natives do not tend to speak any English.  For them, the logical second language to learn is German.  So the locals were not any help either.  We were taking some pretty small country roads there for awhile.  I’m sure we added a few dozen extra kilometers onto the journey.  But we did our best. You’d think there would be a main road from Prague to Salzburg.  Both are pretty big cities and they are only a couple of hundred miles apart as the crow flies.  Sadly, we couldn’t find a crow big enough to carry us, so despite Marge’s “help,” we eventually did find our way.  It was never scary being lost in Czech-land.  We had plenty of diesel and plenty of rainy-day daylight.  But this particular quirk of driving in a former Soviet-block country was not quite so adorable as the ones mentioned earlier.  It’s nice to be back in the west where if you claim there is a road, there usually is a road.

So that brings us to Salzburg.  We stayed in a little farmhouse a few miles outside of town.  It was charming and homey, just what we needed after the Prague hotel experience, which came complete with leaky bathroom ceilings and key-cards that rarely worked and only one bank of elevators that were a quarter-mile from our room.  No, we much prefer the farmhouse with the kitchen to any hotel.  Sadly, we arrived again on Saturday night.  This seems to happen to us an awful lot.  By the time we are ready to think about grocery shopping the stores are closed and won’t be open again until Monday morning.  So that particular kitchen went mostly wasted.  But we still liked the “mi casa es su casa” feeling of our converted barn.

Salzburg is another one of those European cities where the old town is smack-dab in the middle of a larger city.  We tend to ignore the city-part and stick to the history.  Old-town Salzburg is tiny.  We were able to walk around most of it in a matter of a couple of hours.  We got to tour the Mozart museum, which is the house he lived in as a boy.  We also did a walking tour of all things “Sound of Music”, retracing the VonTrapp Family’s steps around town.  The cemetery was surprisingly beautiful.  I don’t normally like cemeteries, no matter how many flowers are planted in them, but this one had an appeal I can’t quite put my finger on.  There were horse-drawn carriages clippity-clopping down all of the cobblestone streets.  We caught an Austrian band performing up high on a random stage set up in the middle of nowhere special.  They were cute.  Oom-pah-pah went the tuba and the trombone, accompanying a harp, a violin and an accordion.  That’s it, five guys in lederhosen, drinking their pints of beer as they played for the not-so-insubstantial crowd who seemed very much into the music.  We also found a sweet little playground with a three-story slide and trumped-up swings where the kids got to get out a little of their pent-up energy.  

The cemetary that was in "The Sound of Music".

The Von Trapps walked over this bridge in the "Do Re Mi" sequence.

All parts of the park where they did there "Do Re Mi" lesson.  You can picture Maria and the kids jumping up and down on the steps that Chloe is chillin' on with the unicorn.

Rock climbing wall up to the slide in the park.

Josh's favorite part of Salzburg.

Salzburg was as quaint and friendly as Vienna was grand and impressive.  One can easily grasp how Mozart started out as a big fish in a little pond, only later to be overwhelmed by the demands of an ocean of fans and regal employers in the big city.  Our path has led us in the opposite direction as heir-Wolfgang and we are the much better off for it.

We left Salzburg and continued west into the pan-handle of Austria, known as Tyrol.  As I write this, we are still here, up in the mountains, enjoying all that the hinterlands have to offer.  Majestic snow-capped peaks above the timberline lord over lush green rolling hills dotted with village after village of orange roofs and bell-towered churches, ring-ding-aling-ing into the night.  Seriously, the damned bells still ring at 3:00 in the morning here.  Every fifteen minutes!  I’d say “like clockwork” only that is a bit obvious, considering that they literally are a part of the clock works.  But cacophony aside, the vistas are never-ending and awe-inspiring.  I remember how breathtaking the views were in Cinque-Terre and Amalfi, where we stood at the edge of cliffs gazing out over the ocean.  But I cannot at the moment fathom how I could possibly prefer those scenes to the majesty of the mountains.  We bought another jigsaw puzzle.  We haven’t broken it out yet, as there will be more time to build it at the next place, but I’m itching to get working on it so I can spend so much time with the scene.  It shows Neuschwanstein Castle perched in the foothills under the Alps.  We’ve got pictures of nearly the same scene, though the season is different and the angle is off a bit.  But wow, scenery like this leaves a mark on you.

Tyrol.  Sorry about the ugly dood in the foreground ruining an otherwise lovely landscape.

Our latest place is again a farmhouse.  This time the kids are all about the bunnies, though there are also pigs and cows and goats and chickens and horses to be fed, which they do every evening with the farmer.  The owners of the farm actually set up a barbeque for themselves, us and the one other family staying here.  It was nice to eat home-cooked food and have conversation with people that extended beyond “do you want fries with that?” or “please sign here to pay for the cleaning deposit.”  We sat at their picnic table for hours watching the kids ride around on bigwheels and dissecting the differences between American and Bavarian living.  Good stuff.  Best meal I’ve had since we left our elf-host in Amalfi, and I’m not really talking about food at all.  It is just amazing how we can take for granted time spent with friends.  Carol isn’t going to want to eat alone (with just the family) for weeks once we get home.  She is starved for conversation that I can’t provide.  So clear out your calendars in July, people.  

I think the kids in overalls are cuter than the bunnies.  But I may be biased.

The rest of our time here in the little village of Wald, in Tyrol country, has been about taking walks and breathing in the fresh mountain air.  No real destinations.  We flew through Innsbruck on the way, just to see what a winter-Olympics town looks like in Europe.  But that was a shorter stop than some restroom breaks on the highway.  We did go to the southern edge of Germany to check out the “romantic road” which really is beautiful but would probably be more romantic without a couple of bickering kids in the back seat.  As I mentioned, we toured the unfinished Neuschwanstein castle of Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria.  Apparently, this is the building that inspired Disney in his attempt to recreate Cinderella’s castle in Anaheim.  Personally, I think Disney did a better job of it.  But Ludwig wins hands down for picking the better setting.  And really, it is all about setting for me as we continue to roll through Europe.  We’ve replaced human architecture with the beauty of nature at its finest, but the result is the same.  My lower jaw seems to be permanently stuck in the “dropped” position.

Neuschwanstein Castle from Mary's Bridge.  Never found Cinderella.

A view from the castle's windows.

Inside the castle.  This is the room where concerts were supposed to have been given for the king. 

Tomorrow, we leave Austria and head back to Italy.  We’ve got seven days at Lake Como.  Why back to Italy?  It makes sense, trust me.  If you don’t (and why should you?) check out a map and follow the route and all will come clear.  First, back to Northern Italy, and then up through Switzerland and into Germany.  But don’t be jealous yet.  You can save that for when we hit Paris and London!  Auf- Wiedersehen for now!  Thanks for reading. 

Oh, and by the way, I have now seen an episode of “Dog with a Blog” as the kids have gotten into it.  The show is worse than I feared.  And the blog really isn’t that witty.  So where are my millions of adoring followers? 

Our farm in the village of Wald, near the town of Arzl-im-Pitztal, in the Tyrol region of Western Austria.  Got barn?

Italia – Part II, Plus a Little Balkan History Lesson, Just for Kicks

We’re in Croatia now.  Of course, by the time I finish writing this we’ll probably be in Slovenia.  And by the time I finish fighting with the blog site and with the inevitable bad internet connections, it probably won’t be posted until we are in Prague.  As it stands now (while in Croatia) I still haven’t posted Part I of the Italy blog.  This is because we have no internet here, so I can’t upload the pictures, even though the prose was finished a week ago.  And then there is the delay between the time of my posting and the time you get around to reading this.  So assume, as you read, that we are now in Austria somewhere, and Italy is but a distant memory.  That said, this post is about Italy.  So don your cheesy moustache, grab a slice of pizza, and pretend we’re all in Venice together…

No, scratch that.  I’m going backwards for once.  Why?  Why not?  I’ve got to mix it up every now and then or the blog starts to smell like last Thursday’s fish dinner.  So we’re not talking Italy yet.  We’re talking Croatia.  We’ll do today first and work backwards.  You don’t like it, don’t read.  I’m not twisting your arm or anything here!  Sheesh!

Still here?  Good, I shall proceed.  Today we took a tour of Brijuni Island.  This was a vacation home for Marshal Tito for over thirty years.  It was a playground for the rich and powerful between World War II and the end of the Cold War.  We all got a killer history lesson on Balkan politics and a look at a cold-hearted killer from a completely different perspective.  I’ll give you the extremely condensed version. 

Tito came to power in the early ‘50s, resorting to Stalin-like persecutions to gain control.  His “partisan” army wiped out tens of thousands of soldiers who had supported the Nazis or Mussolini or anything that wasn’t what Tito was supporting at the moment.  He appointed himself president for life, and “dictated” with a reign of terror.  Then, when he finally had full control, he got out his warm and fuzzy side and ushered in three decades of peace to a region that otherwise has known nothing but aggression and hardship for the last century.  When he died in 1980, more heads of state attended his funeral than at any other funeral in history.  That’s a popular dude. 

Tito is revered among the peoples of the former Yugoslavian nations and in many cases, for good reason.  He had to toe the line between communism and capitalism, between East and West, never taking a side, and never antagonizing either side enough to risk a fight.  He was the father of the non-aligned nations movement that eventually included half of the world’s nations.  In his makeshift nation, Yugoslavia, he held together eight or nine separate peoples who devoutly followed four or five different major religions and who held a seemingly infinite number of personal grudges against one another.  The conglomerate of Yugoslavia flourished under his rule.  But very soon after his death, the whole kit and caboodle quickly fell apart and now we have Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovenia, Slovenia, and Kosovo instead.  The racial cleansing that followed hasn’t been pretty.  So, I guess if you are a Machiavellian sort, then you can be swayed to the general opinion of the locals (at least those in northwestern Croatia).  The extreme means were in some ways justifiable in the end.  Not that killing is ever justifiable, but it did most likely mean avoiding even more deaths with bloody in-fighting amongst the separate nations that occurred before Tito came along and has bloodied the region since.

Okay, enough of the lesson, and back to the blog.  Brijuni island (which was once a Roman playground for senators and generals and such) was bought around 1900 by a rich Austrian entrepreneur and built up with hotels and health clubs to be a playground for the rich and famous.  When Tito took it over, he kept the posh and added pizazz.  He had a golf course put in, which is still in use.  I played with the idea of using it myself.  There was also an enormous garden filled with hundreds of species from all over the world, mostly gifts from heads of state on official and often unofficial business.  He created a giant zoo/wild animal safari park complete with every possible animal you can think of, almost all of which, again, were gifts.  The bears and the big cats are gone now, but the kinder gentler animals and in many cases, their offspring, are all still there. The elephant given to Tito by Indira Ghandi gave Josh and I a bit of a show.  We have no pictures though, as Carol and Chloe were busy taking pictures of sheep and stuff elsewhere.

I guess this is who Carol and Chloe were hanging out with.

There is a museum that we meandered through that shows picture after picture of Tito with the entire “Who’s-who” in world politics from the second half of the twentieth century.  American presidents, Indira Gandhi and Queen Elizabeth were on one wall.  Nasser, Nehru, Qaddafi, Arafat, Brezhnev, Castro, Ho-Chi-Minh, and so many others were on another wall.  All were obviously enjoying Tito’s company and hospitality.  Official visits by heads-of-state to the island numbered in the hundreds.  We were walking in some pretty impressive footsteps.  Not bad, for a little known island in a little known country in southeastern Europe.  The museum provided the kids with their schooling for the day, and I got what was to be for me, a highlight of the trip.

Tito (L) w/Nasser&Nehru (signing the non-aligned nations pact), (C) "high-five"ing yours truly, and (R) w/Queen Elizabeth

A couple of days ago, we toured Rovinj, the town we’ve been living in for the last few days.  It is a sleepy little fishing village with a lot of character built upon the ruins of a medieval castle-walled stronghold, built in turn upon the ancient ruins of a sleepy little Roman Empire fishing village.  There are also still signs of the eras that the land was ruled by the old Venetian Republic (before Italy was Italy), the Austrians, the Italians, and even the Byzantine Empire.  Who didn’t rule this little town at one point?  I’m pretty sure Costa Rica never had its turn.  We ate lunch right on the water after watching a kids’ dance group competition on the grandstand in the town square.  We biked along the cobblestone streets.  The kids played in the local playground under the enormous monument paying tribute to the Communist Era.  It was an eclectic group of experiences, to be sure, but all good stuff.

Communist era art on the square.

The next day Carol and I went back without the kids and took a Rick Steves’ Guidebook walking tour of the town.  We entered the requisite cathedral complete with the obligatory martyred saint’s sarcophagus.  We climbed the two hundred plus steps of the bell tower to get sweeping views of the peninsula, which used to be an island until they filled in the channel separating it from the mainland for easier access to the fish markets.  The bustling marina and the tourists shops made it feel as much like Sausalito as it did like a European town, but it was still picturesque and worth the trip.  We stopped for a drink at a bar that was nothing more than piped in Stan Getz music on a rocky cove at water’s edge.  A Bailey’s in one hand, and a camera in the other, we lounged on cushions on the rocks, the bar all to ourselves, for a long relaxing respite from the grind…  That’s a joke.  There is no grind.

A look at the staircase that led us up to the highest point on the Ystrian Peninsula, and the view once there.

The view from our seats at the Stan Getz Bar.

When we drove in to Croatia from Venice we finally got our passports stamped (Remember, we’re going backwards here people.  Please, try and keep up).  This is the only time we’ll be out of the European Union for the rest of the trip.  Not that this would be of any significance at all, if you were allowed to stay in the E.U. for more than three months as a tourist.  But you’re not.  So this is how we escape the long arm of the immigration police.  Of course, the U.K. and Switzerland, though both in the E.U., are not “Shengen” countries (whatever the heck that means) and so therefore do not count as E.U. in terms of passport visas.  It all gets very confusing.  Croatia doesn’t use the Euro, well at least not for the next six months.  I guess neither does the Czech Republic.  If every country we visited still had its own currency, we’d probably be out a thousand bucks in money exchange fees by the end of the trip.  As it is, its hard enough to keep track of which countries require driving permits and in which our cell phones work and which town we are waking up in every morning, for that matter. 

Carol does the lion’s share of the planning.  Which animals on the savannah get the other shares?  Once the lion is done, there’s not much left, I’d guess.  Perhaps I do the vulture’s share, or maybe the hyena’s share.  Whatever it is that I do, it’s not much.  So how Carol’s brain is not completely mush at this point is a mystery to me.  We are really planning on the fly these days.  We book each next place less than a week before we arrive.  Up until this morning we still didn’t have a place to stay two days from now.  Costa Rica planning was done months in advance.  In Asia, it was weeks in advance.  In Eastern Europe, it’s been only days in advance.  At this rate, we’ll need a time machine to book our spots in June. But hey, if I can go backwards in the blog, why not book reservations after we've already used them, right? Wrong. That's why Carol is in charge, I guess.

Venice was a kick in the pants.  It was also a kick in the wallet.  That romantic forty minute gondola ride was $135.  We had to take a second mortgage out on our house in order to afford the twice-a-day gelato habit that we’ve all developed.  But at least we’ll go to the poor house fat and happy!  The water taxis aren’t cheap either.  But here is what really gets me.  In Rome and Venice, and even on the Amalfi Coast, you pay for the bus tickets in advance at a tobacco shop or a bar that isn’t necessarily even near a bus stop.  No ticket, no ride, as we found out in Amalfi (read the last post for further details).  But when you board the bus or the waterbus or even a train (as was the case into Venice from the mainland) nobody ever checks your ticket!  I guess they have random checks that when and if you are caught ticketless, you need to pay a large fine.  But other than that bus in Amalfi where we unwittingly announced that we had no tickets, we were never once asked to produce one.  We took maybe thirty buses of one sort or another in Italy.  It seems like a pretty dumb system.  I imagine that over half of the locals just risk it and don’t buy tickets.  I certainly saw quite a few people duck through the turnstiles without a ticket in the Rome underground. The fine amount was posted on the boat-buses in Venice, and was only about five times the ticket cost.  You certainly aren’t going to be asked for a ticket one out of every five rides.  So why not work the system if you are lacking in scruples or short on cash?  The result is undoubtedly prices that are much higher for those who do pay, in order to make up for all the free-loaders.   And what’s more, it is really inconvenient to get those tickets when you suddenly need them, especially when the tobacco shops run out of them (as happened to me in Rome) or are closed at inconvenient hours (before 10:00 a.m., between 1:00 and 4:00 p.m.)  The kicker? You are supposed to “verify” the ticket in a machine that date-and-time-stamps your otherwise generic ticket.  These machines are on the buses or, in Venice, on the docks.  Why not just provide a ticket-machine instead?  OK.  Rant over.  I guess I’m just so bitter about the Amalfi fiasco that I wish that at some point somebody would have asked to see the tickets that I so diligently bought every single time after that.

Walking 'round Venice.  Well, I guess, technically, Josh is riding 'round Venice.

The ubiquitous symbol of Venice - the winged lion.

If you are familiar with Venice, then you know that there is a whole lot of walking involved.  Before I arrived, I thought it would be all water taxis and gondolas.  I figured I’d ride every canal two or three times and have enough energy left over each night to compose another opera.  But that wasn’t the case.  You can pay a whole bunch for a water-bus to take you where you aren’t really headed anyway, or you can walk.  You’ll get lost five or six times on the way, usually running into a dead-end at some minor canal.  You’ll cross bridges just so that you can cross another over the same canal, but in the opposite direction, a block down, and then you’ll cross some more, which is especially fun with luggage in tow.  But any way you slice it, you’re going to walk an awful lot.  If you are keeping track, yes, my foot is still broken.  If you’re not keeping track, well, good for you, you have better things to do than to read every word of my often-way-too-lengthy blog.  To catch you up, I’m 95% certain that I broke a bone in my foot at a waterfall in Thailand and have been hobbling around ever since.  It is not painful enough to figure out how to get it fixed in a foreign country.  But it is just painful enough to be an ever-present nuisance and to be a good enough excuse to complain, every chance I get, about how much walking one must do in Venice.

Ceiling inside St. Mark's Cathedral

The walk across the "Bridge of Sighs" at the Doge's Palace.  The last look at freedom, and finally, the cell in the dungeon.

We did the Doge’s Palace and St. Mark’s Cathedral.  We even caught the beginning of a big deal mass at the Cathedral (the procession of bishops was over a hundred miters long, see what I did there? :), as we just happened to be inside at the wrong time on the Feast Day of St. Mark, or some such special day involving San Marco.  We did our best to sample every gelateria in town, including the ones on the outskirt islands of Murano, Burano, Torchello, San Michelle (OK, this was just a cemetery – no gelato), and Mazorbo (not sure I got that last island name right, but lacking an internet connection, we’ll go with it).  On Murano, they do glass craft.  The island has been known for its glass-work for centuries.  We watched a couple of demonstrations while there.  In one, the guy made an unbelievably intricate, beautiful glass horse, while we watched, in a matter of maybe sixty seconds.  It was an unreal display of artistic talent in a crazy medium.  How does one harness that kind of talent?  Do you just wake up one day and say, “Hey, I bet I’d be really good at sculpting glass!”?  And if it is to be handed down through the generations, so that the talent can be molded from early on, then what if your kids are all artistic losers?  Just because my dad could wail with the best of ‘em on his saxophone, doesn’t mean I’m not a total hack.  He could.  I am.  I’m pretty sure I couldn’t blow glass either.

Typical glass art.  The 1000 degree furnace.  The first few seconds in the making of the horse.

Venice is so different from every other city I’ve ever been in that it is hard to compare it to any of them at all.  But in the end, I’m not sure it lived up to its hype.  Everyone falls all over him/herself proclaiming its virtues.  And I’m not about to go on record saying it isn’t romantic and beautiful and all that jazz/opera.  Carol and I even went to a classical music concert (harpsichord and seven piece strings playing Vivaldi and such) in a gorgeous Renaissance style church.  It was super cool to experience the music in a setting that actually matched the period in which it was written - perfectly. Some of it was even written in that very city.  Statues and frescoes and marble columns and arches really make the music come alive.  But still, my expectations for the town were somehow not quite met. 

Maybe it was the fact that there are five times as many tourists as locals, even in the non-touristy sections.  The town is apparently dying as people move out for lack of funds to live there.  It is also slowly sinking back into the Adriatic, as the streets flood over fifty times a year.  The buildings are losing a battle with Mother Nature and you can somehow feel it as you cruise the canals in overcrowded buses watching the many deserted buildings float by, with six layers of mold and mildew creeping up their bottom floors. 

I know what your thinking.  “That Steve, he’s a wet blanket.  I’m not going to let him “glass is half empty” my warm and fuzzy memories/feelings about the most romantic city on Earth (apologies to Paris).”  Well, fine.  My purpose is not to ruin a good thing.  I am merely reporting how I felt, not how one should feel.  Even Carol, the eternal silver lining girl, made mention repeatedly of how things did not quite feel how they did on her last visit twenty some years ago.  But then again, when your expectations are so high that you need a ladder to realize them, there is no shame in coming up short when the ladder doesn’t fit into your luggage.

Our gondola ride on the Grand Canal wasn't too shabby.

And if measuring up to expectations is going to be the theme, then I’m happy to report that Assisi scored high marks across the board.  We left Amalfi with no clue where we going to sleep that night.  We weren’t going to make it all the way to Venice, as it was simply too long a trip after we included a stop in Pompeii along the way.  So we kept typing in new cities along the Adriatic coast into the GPS, to see what we could find.  When I finally stumbled upon Assisi, I had a surreal moment of channeling my inner-Catholic.  I’ve spent too many years teaching in Catholic schools and attending mass to not have some of it rub off.  And my memories of discussions about St. Francis of Assisi were of the warm and fuzzy variety.  He is after all, the guy they named San Francisco after.  He’s the main man for all those wacky Franciscan monks and what I think is the number one largest order of Catholicism.  Why not check out his hometown?  There has to be a pretty sweet basilica or something dedicated to him.  I know it is a destination for pilgrimages for thousands.  There could be some good restaurant choices, right?  Forget the Adriatic, we’ll see that soon enough.  I really had no expectations, and it was a hoot.

The approach to Assisi was tough.  We were already behind schedule when Pompeii took two hours longer than expected.  So it was getting late.  And we ran into some heavy traffic (we were stopped for a while with Italians getting out of their cars and starting a soccer game on the highway), so when I called the woman with whom I’d booked our lodging, she wasn’t there to help us find her.  Her mother did do a lot of screaming at me on the phone in Italian, as she spoke not a word of English.  So we were on our own in finding the place.  When we pulled into town, we soon discovered that one cannot drive within the walls of the city if one doesn’t own a local permit.  So we parked in the nearest parking lot, hoping we weren’t too far of a walk from our apartment.  Well, I was hoping that anyway.  Carol was insisting I learn Italian and call the mother back to see if there was a better place to park.  We decided to remove the clothes and things we’d need for the night from our suitcases and bring it only in backpacks, just in case the hike up the hill was longer than I anticipated and exactly as long as Carol dreaded it would be. 

Arriving at our cute little apartment.

It all turned out OK.  The parking structure had a machine in it that sold tourist maps.  The walk wasn’t too bad.  We found the correct street without trouble.  It did take a while to find the correct number as the address system only made sense if you were fluent in hexadecimal Roman-numeraling or something.  But we found it, and it was a perfectly charming place.  The woman who did speak English was incredibly friendly, and her mother turned out to be even friendlier.  She kept pushing chocolate on the kids.  So much so, that I wondered if she had some hidden ulterior motive for getting them sugared up.  They pointed us in the direction of the main square and a nice place to eat.  Assisi was beautiful and peaceful and romantic and tranquil and (insert upbeat adjective of your choice HERE), especially under the moonlight.

The next day we took a walking tour of the town that included the Basilica of St. Francis and the church of his nearly-as-famous protégé, St. Clare.  The architecture was top-notch.  The feeling of the history of the town was palpable.  The views of the green valleys below were breathtaking. I, for one, was sad that we only had an evening and a morning there.  I could have stayed for a week and got lost in the nooks and crannies and been as happy as a monk at communion.  But Venice beckoned, and St. Francis would have understood.

The basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, and some Franciscan monks enjoying the sunshine.

I’ve already mentioned Pompeii, a couple of times, so I guess I need to give that a shout out.  We didn’t stay overnight.  We just showed up, checked it out, and then checked out, all in one whirlwind of a morning.  For those who don’t know, Pompeii was a thriving Roman city, until the top third of Mt. Vesuvius got unceremoniously blown off from the rest of the volcano in 69 A.D., burying the city in pyroclastic ash. Unfortunately for the tens of thousands of residents, there was nowhere to run.  But there is a positive twist to the story for the Thies clan and the zillions of other tourists, because the ash perfectly preserved the town that it buried for two thousand years.  Not only did we get to see the houses and the temples and the shops and the roads and the baths and the theatres almost as they were in the first century, but we also got to see some of the residents themselves.  When excavating, the archaeologists found holes in the layers of compacted sediment.  They carefully filled them in with cement which they let dry, and voila, instant statues!  Only rather than being in the pose of “The Thinker” or of Michaelangelo’s “David,” flexing his glutes for posterity, they were in the fetal position as they huddled instinctively, shielding their faces from the onslaught.  Again, it was too bad for them, but morbidly fascinating for us. 

Buried alive 2044 years ago.

Walking through the city was eye-opening.  Remarkable details were preserved.  One example is the grooves in the stone roads, ever deepening from the stress of the wagon wheels that rolled along them, wearing them down, until suddenly there was no groove at all. It seems as though they had just finished repaving part of the road, and were in mid-project until they were so rudely interrupted by Mother Nature or by Vulcan (the god of fire, hence the word volcano), who can say?  Details like this made the ancient Romans come alive for us.  They did public works projects!  Heck, they ate fast food!  We visited the local pizza joints, complete with brick ovens and take-out counters.

Here's where Josh asks if I want fries with that coke.  I hope he realizes the manager of the establishment is no condition to pay him for manning the counters.

Look for wheel grooves and watch them disappear back where I'm standing.  The kids are on one of the many stones placed in the road by the ancient Romans for easy crossing when the road is filled with water due to the regular washing of the streets.

Other than the public bath houses, for lack of means to get everyone their own private showers, and the lack of electricity and combustion engines, it seems that life in Pompeii was not so different than life in the 21^st century.  The butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker would all chew the fat at the local pub and they’d argue about their local sports teams and they would go to work and come home to their families and bitch about taxes and back-aches and that couple next door who made too much noise at all hours.  We think we live in an advanced civilization, but it really doesn’t feel all that removed from the ancient ones.

OK. So that is it for what I have to share about Pompeii. If I continued to go back in time, before we visited Pompeii, but not quite so far back as before Vesuvius visited it, we would come full circle to our visit to Amalfi.  As I have already waxed so eloquently about that experience in my last post, I guess that means my work here is done, at least until we trudge on to Slovenia.  This permanent vacation thing is a real bear.  OK, maybe not.  Until I write again, arrivederci!