Munich to Luxembourg via Strasbourg

Sat. 8/18:  Left Turkenfeld (suburb of Munich), where Alexandra's sister lives.   About 4 hours later, had my first flat, which looked like a pinch flat (occurs when you hit a bump with an Under-inflated tire).  The leak was on some ridges on the tube, so, the patch was destined to leak. 
All bike shops are closed on Sunday, so getting a new tire or tube was not an option. 
Within 3 hours of heading out from Gunzburg, it was leaking again.  I was about 1/3 of the way to Stuttgart when I decided to head South to Ulm to catch the train.   By the time I got there, the tire was really flat. 
The earliest open bike shop in town opened at 11, precluding any full day of riding, so I hopped another train with the new tire, and spent Monday night in Freudenstadt as scheduled and had some decent German food for dinner. 



a light German dinner in


  Canal de la Marne au Rhin

  

On Tuesday, arrived in Strasbourg, France...  a country that is serious about fine food.

Great to be back in France!!

There are 3 light shows that run nightly in Strasbourg.  The video below is from the one at Notre Dame cathedral.

Notre Dame Cathedral in Strasbourg, France

Carousel in the square a few blocks from the Cathedral

 with some excellent "dirty dancing"

Along the Marne–Rhine Canal biking from Strasbourg to Sarrebourg

Thursday in Sarrebourg, awoke to rain.  Since the forecast was sketchy for the afternoon, and the rain didn't stop til about 10, I decided to take the 11:30 train to |Metz, and do laundry in the afternoon.

Friday (8/24) arrived in Luxembourg city.  The city festival / fair is going on right across the street from my hotel.  It's huge!

Glad my hotel (Best Western) has a computer that's not "locked down" with that hideous kiosk software, so I could write this blog using Remote Desktop via my computer in Palo Alto.  French keyboards have Q where A is, M where ; is, W where Z is, A where Q is, and the @ sign is accessed by an ALT key +0.  the period and all numbers require shift.  It turns out that when you use remote desktop, the keyboard functions like a US keyboard.  Makes typing the blog much less painful.
It's unlikely I'll find a computer that's this open any time soon, so this may be the last entry for a while.

Getting Ready to Ride

I am in Munich in the lobby of the Hotel Metropol which is a few blocks from Munich Hauptbahnhof.
I just bought a used Giant bicycle.  Finding a used bicycle with a suitable small frame is a challenge in this country of Aryan giants.  Most of the bicycles for sale are 58cm frame size or larger.  My inseam translates into 50cm of smaller.  Fortunately, there was a bike on the German EBAY site I found a few weeks ago.  Since there don't seem to be any short bicyclists, the thing was still there at Haveabike. 
Alexandra and I both went schlepping around to the 2 used bike shops.  I found a suitable rack for the panniers, and a pump at another shop, and assumed I would take it back on Wednesday.   Unfortunately my assumption was incorrect, because Wed. was "assumption day" here in Bavaria (the Catholic part of Germany), so almost all shops were closed.

Long story short, I now have the bike.  The rack's on it, and I'll be ready to roll on Sunday morning.

Click link below for the route plan;

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1k95mH1pxwBwWcjgyZKuaKurpby4YTQV8&usp=sharing

I don't plan to post very often during the bike trip, as composing on the phone is a royal pain.... so check back in a month if you're interested.

My vehicle for the next month

Kandersteg, Oeschinensee, Bonn, Vevey and back to Zurich

Monday 8/6/2018:
A drive from Emmetten to Interlaken, stop for lunch, and to load up on Laderach (best chocolate ever), and we arrived at our lovely hotel in Kandersteg, a bucolic Swiss Alps town in a valley surrounded by mountains.  On our first full day in town, we took the cable car up to Oeschinen Lake, a beautiful Alpine lake surrounded by cliffs and waterfalls.

And lots of cows with bells

We rented a rowboat and did a grand tour of the waterfalls.

Ducks on a log

The next day, another cable car and more magnificent views at Sunbiel ...

Herd of white goats, with full udders, on the top of Sunbiel

The next day, (Thurs 8/9) we headed over to Bonn.  Actually we stayed in Fribourg, which is about 1/2 hr. commuter train from Bonn.  A lot cheaper.. but has its drawbacks.  The first of which most of the restaurants there were closed for summer vacation (from last week of July to last week of August).
The good news is that the heat wave had broken by the time we got down from Kandersteg, so our non-A/C room was just fine.   This hotel tends to be booked by Chinese tour busses, which arrive in the afternoon, and depart in the morning.  The main issue there is their Internet service can't handle the peak load, and it crashes and burns... so I was off-grid for most of the time we stayed there.
So... we schmeid around Bonn for a day, then did a day-trip to Vevey, which is a lovely town on Lake Geneva.  Then next day, we went back to Zurich to

1. resupply the Chocolate (Laderach) 
2. Catch our train back to Munich

Lake Lucerne, and Pilatus mountain

On Friday 8/3 we drove through Lucerne to our hotel in Emmetten, a small town overlooking Lake Lucerne. 

Sunset from our hotel restaurant overlooking Lake Lucerne

The hotel, like most in Switzerland, has no A/C, so our room is sweltering as daytime temps top 90°.  The only ventilation is the balcony door.  No screens.. .so the mosquitos come in.   A less than ideal situation.  There are essentially 2 things to do here :

1. Take a cable car up one of the mountains that overlook the lake
2. Go jump in the lake to cool off

We did some of each.  The high point (literally) of our stay here was the excursion to Mount Pilatus on Saturday.
There are 2 ways (other than hiking) to ascend to the top:

1. Cog Railway up the eastern face.  It's was built in 1890, and is still the steepest cog railway in the world, with a peak gradient of 48°.  It still uses the original track, although the cars were upgraded in the 1930's when the line was electrified.   This is how we went up and down.
2. A cable car from near Lucern ascends the North face.

In the cog railway ascending to the top of Pilatus

The views from the top of the mountain are nothing less than spectacular.  There are lots of hiking trails and even playgrounds for children.  We did what we do best... walked around and then had an excellent lunch at Hotel Pilatus-Kulm. 

Cog railway base station

It was nice and cool up top, with some breeze, but stinking hot at the base... so we found an area along Lake Lucern that we could swim from (with very slippery concrete at the water's edge), and spent the rest of the day there.
On Sunday morning, we took the gondola from Emmetten to Stockhütte.  At first we were going to go up to Niederbauen, where the hang gliders launch from, but the line was too long, so we went for the less youthful option.  The hang gliders land about 300m from our hotel:

After lunch and a short hike around the top of the mountain, we returned to the swimming hole we had found the day before, and spent the rest of the day there.

Zurich - Hot Chocolate and Cool Water

Monday   7/30
The bad news:
Europe has been in the grips of a record-setting heat wave... both in length ( began around 6/25 and is still going as of 8/5), and severity.  Parts of Spain have hit 45°C (113°F).  Here in Switzerland, very few buildings have A/C, since summers are typically mild.  Enter Global Warming... Highs were above 90°F every day since we arrived in Switzerland.  That's the bad news. 

The good news:
Zurich has many public beaches.  Some are free, some have a nominal fee... so most of our days in Zurich were spent swimming in cool water.   Also, there were several Laderach chocolate stores a short walk from our apartment... that's the chocolate part.

This past school year I was the AFS liaison for Alessandra from the Zurich area.  She attended Woodside High in Redwood City,  joined the cheerleaders, and had a fabulous time in the Bay Area.  She arrived back home in late June, and starts school next week... so I invited her to come into town (they live about 20 min away by train) to join us for a beach day at Strandbad Mythenquai on Tuesday.   We spent pretty much the whole day there relaxing, cooling off in the water and talking... then, after all that swimming, we went to old town for a very late lunch / early dinner.

Wed, Aug 1 is Swiss National day and is typically celebrated similarly to July 4 in the US.   We were invited to spend the day with Alessandra's family in Lenzburg.  Lunch was served under a lovely arbor in the back yard covered in grape vines.   Alessandra's extendedfamily was there, including 2 cousins, her aunt, and grandmother. 

Alessandra in the back yard arbor

Alessandra's dad presses the grapes and they make a strong liquor from it, which we, of course, sampled.  Before leaving, Roland, Alessandra's dad gave us some recommendations of what regions in Switzerland to visit... which is largely what we based the rest of our time in Switzerland on.

Aug 1 was also our 25th wedding anniversary.  You could say we did nothing special.. although I would argue that everything we did that day was special.

On Thur we tried Flussbad Au-Höngg, another swimming hole, which is up the  Limmat river, which flows north from Zurichsee.  River.    The park / bathing area is just downstream from a dam.  There's a grassy area with shade trees, changing rooms, showers.  And it's free, and a short trolley ride from downtown.  

Summer in Dubrovnik

On Wed 7/25 we spent most of the day travelling to Dubrovnik.  Apparently Durbrovnik became a wildly popular destination after Game of Thrones became a wildly popular HBO series (we never watched it...) Game of Thrones was filmed on location here.  Now there are Game of Thrones tours, souvenir shops, etc.    After a 4 hour drive that included passage through Bosnia and Herzegovina (that's one country with a compound name) with 2 passport checkpoints, we finally arrived at the Dubrovnik airport to ditch the car and take an Uber back to Old Town Dubrovnik.  No cars are allowed inside the city walls, so we were dropped off outside the Pile gate and walked down to the fountain where our AirBnb hostess met us and walked us about 50m down to the apartment.

Our main outing on Thursday was to the cable car, which takes you up the mountain overlooking Dubrovnik.   A high-priced lunch at the restaurant on the top, and our day was complete enough.

The next day, we took a ferry to Cavtat (promounced "savtat") to have lunch with Jack and Nane, who have a flat overlooking the water there.  There were a lot of huge yachts in the harbor there.  I think this area of Croatia is where the high rollers spend time.  Some of these yachts were so big that they had speedboats on the deck... kind of like an RV towing a smaller car to go around town in.
Jack is quite an accomplished artist, and showed us an apartment full of his creations.

We also paid a visit to the Dubrovnik synagogue.  It's modest, with a small Jewish museum on the lower floor.   Dubrovnik synagogue currently has only 30 members.  See https://www.dubrovnikcity.com/dubrovnik/attractions/synagogue.htm for the history.

Dubrovnik old synagogue

On Saturday, we did the "wall walk" around the top of the Dubrovnik   It was pretty strenuous (lots of steps) and very hot in the morning before a breeze kicked in.

View from the top of the old city wall - ocean side...

Must have dessert

The "Jewish Fountain" .  The first thing you see as you enter the Pile Gate into the Old Town

Sunday was beach day.  We escaped the crowds in Dubrovnik old town and took a bus north to the Lapad area of town.  Most of the beaches up there are associated with hotels.  I chose the Dubrovnik President Hotel, which has a lovely beach.  All beaches here must be accessible to the public.  In return for having a hotel on the beach, the hotel must allow non-guests to use the beach and other facilities for no charge.  They can make money by renting you an umbrella or lounge chair, and selling food / drink, but you are not obligated to buy any of that.  You can come, swim, shower, etc.
The water was cool and clear, and the beach was busy, but no overcrowded like the beaches near the old town.

On Monday, we hit the road again to fly to Zurich.