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damerell at 04:17pm on 27/06/2011
damerell at 04:17pm on 27/06/2011Read some books.
I've been away for a while at the Wave-Gotik-Treffen in Leipzig and cycletouring in Switzerland with my parents down the Rhine route, for which we got nifty little books showing, typically, routes on both sides of the river.
We came down by Eurostar, sleeper to Berlin, and the ICE to Leipzig on Thursday morning, which was all very civilised; I got a nice smug warm feeling every time I heard someone's air-travel horror story, and there were a lot of them...
I won't write much about the WGT itself - Clare will likely write it up - but we stayed in an ex-DDR modular apartment block converted into a hotel. Most of the bands we knew in advance we wanted to see were a bit weak (except, to be fair, for Killing Joke and Zombina) - most of the bands who were really good, we knew nothing about besides Clare's sampling beforehand. Like last time, some other people we knew were in the city but we hardly saw them - with two dozen venues, it's not guaranteed.
Tuesday morning saw me on trains Leipzig->Fulda, Fulda->Frankfurt, Frankfurt->Zurich, Zurich->Chur, Chur->Bonaduz... except the first one was running late and it looked like the whole structure might collapse under its own weight. Luckily, it turned out the third one, which normally passes through Fulda non-stop, was stopping - actually saving me a change, but now my expected half-hour change in Zurich where I'm to buy a ticket for the Chur-Bonaduz leg was going to be about ten minutes.
It got better; the friend who booked the trains had written one set down and actually booked me another (oops) so I was totally confused and expecting to have about 3 minutes to find a train at Chur, which has about 12 platforms. But the extension ticket got bought on the train to Zurich, and the confusion resolved itself with 15 minutes to find the platform at Chur, and I arrived to find the parents helpfully already sitting at a table at a pizza place right next to the station.
The Swiss have stations, it seems, in every very small places, like Britain pre-Beeching (pre-Marples, really). They also still run local goods, and often late passenger trains have one or two goods wagons tacked on the back. They're also quite relaxed about safety at these small stations - on arrival at Bonaduz, and this proved a common arrangement, I got out the train onto the trackbed, crossing a set of rails which I think are used for goods deliveries to get to the platform! They've also got a lot of small request stops, with a button to press which is presumably linked into the signalling system.
On day 0 we got the train up to Oberalppass - the last leg on a rack and pinion railway. Locked up bikes and walked up the mountain to Tomasee, one of the two sources of the Rhine, on a clear sunny day. Free tip: if you didn't go out much in the day before quitting your job and turning largely nocturnal three months ago, you can't be as casual about sunscreen as you were when you used to commute 22 miles a day by bike. I had a hat on, but most of the rest of the trip was spent hiding my neck and arms from the daystar...
We rejoined the bikes and rode down a scary series of hairpin bends - the Brompton, while a fine machine in many ways, has tiny wheels and this produces the inevitable worries about brake heating, especially with my mother descending at a moderate pace with brakes half on. I decided to stop each bend, let her get almost to the next one, and then drop down to it braking only at the last minute.
Then we had a much less scary long straight descent. I have never been at 38mph on a clown's bike before.
We rode much of the way back to Bonaduz, but got a train for the last leg, which turned out to be an involved process with broken ticket machines and my father leaping boldly into one of the few bits of the train not fitted for bike transport...
Day 1 had us going back through Chur to Sargans. We wandered around Chur trying to be tourists but the Rathaus is in use and the bishop's castle is impressive but closed. We also got a bit lost, turning down the right identical-looking unsignposted road from the radweg to Sargans purely by chance. The hotel had three pro cycling teams in on the Tour de Suisse, oddly enough. Food was expensive - this seemed to be a common theme in Switzerland, even for tourist places on the Rhine, and if I was doing this again I'd stay in Germany at night whenever possible. I also discovered that you don't necessarily feel sunburn on your ear until you've carelessly let it roast for a second day. Both ears blistered up, burst, leaked serum - all quite nasty, and from Day 2 onwards I had an improvised layer of handkerchief dangling from the back of my hat.
Day 2 saw us eating breakfast with all the pros shovelling it in. We also got our first puncture - the rear tyre on the B had picked up a cut (in a tyre with, sigh, lots of life left in it otherwise) which had frayed the tube. Fixed it in situ, since the rear wheel's a PITA to get off. We diverted to Vaduz to see the start of the Tour de Suisse (for that day, I mean, it was actually day 7 for them) which zoomed by us in about 20 seconds. This was also an odd day because we had breakfast in Switzerland, lunch in Lichtenstein (sandwiches at the Lichtenstein Model Flying Club, oddly), and (cheap!) dinner at Feldkirch in Austria, which turned out to be a pretty big place with a bunch of old fortifications. I'd also found a replacement tyre at a bike shop (maybe _the_ bike shop?) in Lichtenstein which I fitted that evening. Feldkirch was also too far off the river to appear in the book of maps we had, which made finding it... interesting.
Day 3 was a long (relatively speaking, about 65km) day to Arbon on Lake Constance and also the first day it rained. And boy, did it rain. And, of course, we got a bit lost, ate lunch freezing in a bus shelter, was reminded the Brompton's bag is not really totally waterproof, etc. It was OK, but we were glad enough to finish.
Day 4 was a short leg to Konstanz - just as well, with an intense headwind. By now two things were clear to me; my father's a much better navigator than me, and (unexpectedly) my German is a lot better than my parents' German (at least if you want to order food, etc - I suspect they are better at, eg, discussing the Riemann hypothesis in German). I resolved to start trusting his directions. In Konstanz we went to the tour organisers' HQ (to find their mechanic had the day off) and to Sealife, an aquarium - the latter was OK, but pretty sparse as such things go.
Day 5 was another long leg to Schaffhausen. I got my legs burned for a change. We didn't see much en route, but the place itself has a really excellent castle and a C11th church. It was also the hardest place to eat all trip, with the food expensive even for Switzerland and smokers in nearly every restaurant - a problem most places in Switzerland, it seems, but particularly here, where every second restaurant specifically advertised "smokers welcome" and it's not clear why when they seem welcome everywhere.
Day 6 took us to Waldshut, which turns out to be half of a sort of conjoined town, Waldshut-Tiegen. This was tough going with a headwind and a lot of unexpected hills - the radweg guide has gradient arrows on hills, except that sometimes it seems not to bother - coupled with total confusion about the distance because of signs to Waldshut being mixed up with signs to the middle of the conglomeration, a difference about about 4km. The hotel had a totally implausible brochure, even as such things go, where a family of pod people explains how they visited once and loved it more than sex, or something.
Day 7 had a ferry crossing to the south bank and a preposterously easy run to Bad Sackingen - arriving just after lunch, and that only because it rained as we crossed the impressive wooden pedestrian bridge into the place and we stopped to eat, even with navigational difficulties getting out of Stein, the little town on the south bank. This was just as well - the showers on the ride were fine but the violent hailstorm about 1600 would have been a pain to ride in. Bad Sackingen is basically all about Saint Fridolin (famous mostly for, er, necromancy and usually depicted with a decomposing corpse) and a C17th trumpeter if you are a tourist. We ate at a restaurant called Margarethen-Schlosse which was pick of the trip - normal prices and good food in outrageously large portions.
Day 8 was short again, dry and overcast to Basel, which is full of trams - and our hotel included a two-day public transport pass, a very civilised arrangement. Clare said to go to the Tinguely Museum, but we didn't listen. This was a mistake, especially since the comparative anatomy museum we tried first had vanished and the firemen's museum we tried second appeared to have no entrance, but we did see Tinguely installations in a fountain. We had an utterly exasperating search for affordable dinner but finally lucked out just before giving up.
The next day we got the TGV direct from Basel to Paris, which was a pleasant surprise, both for no changes and because I've not been on a TGV before. It seems jolly quick until you get past Strasbourg and realise they were just idling along up until that point. At the Eurostar terminal seven separate officials accosted me and the Brompton and had to be reassured that yes, it's a folder, yes, I have a bag for it, no, it only has to be folded on the train and it's unfolded now because it's a nuisance to carry... along with the UK passport guy, who frankly should mind his own business.
I ain't home yet, having stopped in London for a few days, but the end is in sight.
I've been away for a while at the Wave-Gotik-Treffen in Leipzig and cycletouring in Switzerland with my parents down the Rhine route, for which we got nifty little books showing, typically, routes on both sides of the river.
We came down by Eurostar, sleeper to Berlin, and the ICE to Leipzig on Thursday morning, which was all very civilised; I got a nice smug warm feeling every time I heard someone's air-travel horror story, and there were a lot of them...
I won't write much about the WGT itself - Clare will likely write it up - but we stayed in an ex-DDR modular apartment block converted into a hotel. Most of the bands we knew in advance we wanted to see were a bit weak (except, to be fair, for Killing Joke and Zombina) - most of the bands who were really good, we knew nothing about besides Clare's sampling beforehand. Like last time, some other people we knew were in the city but we hardly saw them - with two dozen venues, it's not guaranteed.
Tuesday morning saw me on trains Leipzig->Fulda, Fulda->Frankfurt, Frankfurt->Zurich, Zurich->Chur, Chur->Bonaduz... except the first one was running late and it looked like the whole structure might collapse under its own weight. Luckily, it turned out the third one, which normally passes through Fulda non-stop, was stopping - actually saving me a change, but now my expected half-hour change in Zurich where I'm to buy a ticket for the Chur-Bonaduz leg was going to be about ten minutes.
It got better; the friend who booked the trains had written one set down and actually booked me another (oops) so I was totally confused and expecting to have about 3 minutes to find a train at Chur, which has about 12 platforms. But the extension ticket got bought on the train to Zurich, and the confusion resolved itself with 15 minutes to find the platform at Chur, and I arrived to find the parents helpfully already sitting at a table at a pizza place right next to the station.
The Swiss have stations, it seems, in every very small places, like Britain pre-Beeching (pre-Marples, really). They also still run local goods, and often late passenger trains have one or two goods wagons tacked on the back. They're also quite relaxed about safety at these small stations - on arrival at Bonaduz, and this proved a common arrangement, I got out the train onto the trackbed, crossing a set of rails which I think are used for goods deliveries to get to the platform! They've also got a lot of small request stops, with a button to press which is presumably linked into the signalling system.
On day 0 we got the train up to Oberalppass - the last leg on a rack and pinion railway. Locked up bikes and walked up the mountain to Tomasee, one of the two sources of the Rhine, on a clear sunny day. Free tip: if you didn't go out much in the day before quitting your job and turning largely nocturnal three months ago, you can't be as casual about sunscreen as you were when you used to commute 22 miles a day by bike. I had a hat on, but most of the rest of the trip was spent hiding my neck and arms from the daystar...
We rejoined the bikes and rode down a scary series of hairpin bends - the Brompton, while a fine machine in many ways, has tiny wheels and this produces the inevitable worries about brake heating, especially with my mother descending at a moderate pace with brakes half on. I decided to stop each bend, let her get almost to the next one, and then drop down to it braking only at the last minute.
Then we had a much less scary long straight descent. I have never been at 38mph on a clown's bike before.
We rode much of the way back to Bonaduz, but got a train for the last leg, which turned out to be an involved process with broken ticket machines and my father leaping boldly into one of the few bits of the train not fitted for bike transport...
Day 1 had us going back through Chur to Sargans. We wandered around Chur trying to be tourists but the Rathaus is in use and the bishop's castle is impressive but closed. We also got a bit lost, turning down the right identical-looking unsignposted road from the radweg to Sargans purely by chance. The hotel had three pro cycling teams in on the Tour de Suisse, oddly enough. Food was expensive - this seemed to be a common theme in Switzerland, even for tourist places on the Rhine, and if I was doing this again I'd stay in Germany at night whenever possible. I also discovered that you don't necessarily feel sunburn on your ear until you've carelessly let it roast for a second day. Both ears blistered up, burst, leaked serum - all quite nasty, and from Day 2 onwards I had an improvised layer of handkerchief dangling from the back of my hat.
Day 2 saw us eating breakfast with all the pros shovelling it in. We also got our first puncture - the rear tyre on the B had picked up a cut (in a tyre with, sigh, lots of life left in it otherwise) which had frayed the tube. Fixed it in situ, since the rear wheel's a PITA to get off. We diverted to Vaduz to see the start of the Tour de Suisse (for that day, I mean, it was actually day 7 for them) which zoomed by us in about 20 seconds. This was also an odd day because we had breakfast in Switzerland, lunch in Lichtenstein (sandwiches at the Lichtenstein Model Flying Club, oddly), and (cheap!) dinner at Feldkirch in Austria, which turned out to be a pretty big place with a bunch of old fortifications. I'd also found a replacement tyre at a bike shop (maybe _the_ bike shop?) in Lichtenstein which I fitted that evening. Feldkirch was also too far off the river to appear in the book of maps we had, which made finding it... interesting.
Day 3 was a long (relatively speaking, about 65km) day to Arbon on Lake Constance and also the first day it rained. And boy, did it rain. And, of course, we got a bit lost, ate lunch freezing in a bus shelter, was reminded the Brompton's bag is not really totally waterproof, etc. It was OK, but we were glad enough to finish.
Day 4 was a short leg to Konstanz - just as well, with an intense headwind. By now two things were clear to me; my father's a much better navigator than me, and (unexpectedly) my German is a lot better than my parents' German (at least if you want to order food, etc - I suspect they are better at, eg, discussing the Riemann hypothesis in German). I resolved to start trusting his directions. In Konstanz we went to the tour organisers' HQ (to find their mechanic had the day off) and to Sealife, an aquarium - the latter was OK, but pretty sparse as such things go.
Day 5 was another long leg to Schaffhausen. I got my legs burned for a change. We didn't see much en route, but the place itself has a really excellent castle and a C11th church. It was also the hardest place to eat all trip, with the food expensive even for Switzerland and smokers in nearly every restaurant - a problem most places in Switzerland, it seems, but particularly here, where every second restaurant specifically advertised "smokers welcome" and it's not clear why when they seem welcome everywhere.
Day 6 took us to Waldshut, which turns out to be half of a sort of conjoined town, Waldshut-Tiegen. This was tough going with a headwind and a lot of unexpected hills - the radweg guide has gradient arrows on hills, except that sometimes it seems not to bother - coupled with total confusion about the distance because of signs to Waldshut being mixed up with signs to the middle of the conglomeration, a difference about about 4km. The hotel had a totally implausible brochure, even as such things go, where a family of pod people explains how they visited once and loved it more than sex, or something.
Day 7 had a ferry crossing to the south bank and a preposterously easy run to Bad Sackingen - arriving just after lunch, and that only because it rained as we crossed the impressive wooden pedestrian bridge into the place and we stopped to eat, even with navigational difficulties getting out of Stein, the little town on the south bank. This was just as well - the showers on the ride were fine but the violent hailstorm about 1600 would have been a pain to ride in. Bad Sackingen is basically all about Saint Fridolin (famous mostly for, er, necromancy and usually depicted with a decomposing corpse) and a C17th trumpeter if you are a tourist. We ate at a restaurant called Margarethen-Schlosse which was pick of the trip - normal prices and good food in outrageously large portions.
Day 8 was short again, dry and overcast to Basel, which is full of trams - and our hotel included a two-day public transport pass, a very civilised arrangement. Clare said to go to the Tinguely Museum, but we didn't listen. This was a mistake, especially since the comparative anatomy museum we tried first had vanished and the firemen's museum we tried second appeared to have no entrance, but we did see Tinguely installations in a fountain. We had an utterly exasperating search for affordable dinner but finally lucked out just before giving up.
The next day we got the TGV direct from Basel to Paris, which was a pleasant surprise, both for no changes and because I've not been on a TGV before. It seems jolly quick until you get past Strasbourg and realise they were just idling along up until that point. At the Eurostar terminal seven separate officials accosted me and the Brompton and had to be reassured that yes, it's a folder, yes, I have a bag for it, no, it only has to be folded on the train and it's unfolded now because it's a nuisance to carry... along with the UK passport guy, who frankly should mind his own business.
I ain't home yet, having stopped in London for a few days, but the end is in sight.