Alaska — Summer of 2014

This was a strange up and down sort of summer. The time I spend in Alaska is always good but this summer was special for several reasons one of which was because, for a change, I had a very nice place to stay. Thanks to Paul & Jenny my summer quarters were new, nicely furnished, and wonder of wonders, had running water and a flush toilet. On the sad side, my mother's death in June cast a pall over everything that I'm still trying to deal with. I'm thankful that my family and I got to spend a short time with her before she passed but my mom was constantly in my thoughts as another Alaskan sojourn wound its way to a close. The high point of the summer was having my son Tuli and grandson Harper came up for two weeks, a much anticipated and long overdue visit. I finished up with a 6-day car camping trip over the scenic Denali Highway, a repeat of a trip I made during my first summer in Alaska back in 1983.

Almost as soon as I jumped off the plane in Homer my cell phone rang. It was my good friend Jambo inviting me to dinner. She also had a suggestion, "Let's do a hike on Tuesday, my day off. We can maybe make it a regular thing, bring a lunch, ..." We had a couple of hikes in June and later after our Homer buddy Alice from Eugene, Oregon, showed up for a 2-week visit, we did a nice hike from Emerald Lake on the other side of Kachemak Bay, across the Portlock Plateau then down to the ocean. In order to do that trip in one day we had to hire a float plane to drop us off. Although it's not far in distance from Homer, there are no roads anywhere near Emerald Lake so it was a fly in, water taxi out deal. We contacted our friend Mark over at Steller Air and set up our 15 minute "commute" to the lake. Captain Lance of Mako's Water Taxi would pick us up at Humpy Creek at 6 pm. It was to be an Alaska style hiking trip.

Homer Boat Harbor on the Homer Spit

With Jambo and Alice at Emerald Lake (N59.63031, W151.07683)

After the obligatory photo session, off we went. We climbed from the lake to about 2000 feet above sea level while enjoying stunning views of Emerald and Grewingk Lakes and the surrounding mountains. In the screenshot below our flight and return by boat are shown in blue. Homer is about 16 miles SW of the lake. (click to see full size images in a new window)

Our track with Emerald Lake situated on its high bench

The Homer Spit from the Portlock Plateau

Aurora Lagoon and the barely visible trail ahead

About midway through the hike we noted a squall advancing from the direction of the spit but it ran out of steam soon after that so our walk ws as to remain pleasantly cool and dry. Except that the long, 2000 ft descent was tough on my knees. And my rigid, Vibram-soled hiking boots bludgeoned my feet, feet habituated to wearing flip-flops most of the year. By the time we got back to tidewater I had reached the lamentable conclusion that my old body is no longer the dependable vehicle it once was. At one point, a hidden tree branch lying across the trail caused me to lose my balance and sent me reeling headlong into the brush. My daypack weighed no more than 10 pounds yet there I was, staggering along the trail like a drunk trying like hell to stay upright. Next time I venture out for a hike I'll be using trekking poles and wearing lightweight trail shoes. 

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Tuli and Harper arrived on July 5th. I had occasionally wondered if we would be able to find enough interesting things to entertain a 5 year-old for 2 weeks. No worries; we played tennis, we went fishing, Tuli hung out with his two best friends from high school, Max and Lance, giving me a chance to bond with Harper over bedtime stories, and Lance, now Captain Lance, took Harper along on water taxi rides. Tuli left Homer in 2002 after graduation and with work and family demands has only been back a couple of times since. Their entire visit was uplifting, a blast, and a very special time for me. 

"Harpzilla" striking the ball

My two wonderful boys at the Homer High courts

 With Harper at the Anchor River

I haven't been fishing in the Anchor River for years. I thought Harper would enjoy it so I dug through my storage area and pulled out my old fishing gear, my lightweight pole and XTraTuf boots, a few of my favorite Vibrax spinners (#2 silver) and we took off. Back in the day, my buddies and I didn't miss many chances to go fishing and as we left my place I boasted to Jenny, my gracious hostess for the summer, that if the dollies were running I could catch them standing on my head. Well, I never could stand on my head but I can (and did) catch dollies.

Dollies for dinner!

On their last day in Homer we went fishing in Tutka Bay with Lance. We caught a bunch of red salmon and had a ball on a picture perfect summer evening. Alaska is always beautiful but to be out on the ocean on a day such as this one was a special treat. Thank you Lance-o-later.

Tutka Bay - 10 pm

"Hanging" with Captain Lance on the M/V Mulligan

End of the day on Tutka Bay

After such a long day, Harper fell asleep 10 minutes after this pic was taken ... LOL

After they left I fell into a funk despite the fact that it had been a wonderful visit and a lovely summer. Some of my dearest family members were gone now and I was already preparing to leave my Homer friends. Like I said, it was an up and down sort of summer. But I had added some sweet traces to the old memory bank, memories of scenes I will always treasure.

Before I left Alaska, I packed up the old Ford Explorer and during my last week there I drove the Denali Highway. Stay tuned...

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Addenda:

GPX file : Emerald Lake Hike

Click on the file link and select Download from beneath the cleverly hidden "More" menu (those three blue dots), at the top right of the resulting page, browse to a folder or your desktop where you want to place the file and click on the Save button. You can open them with Google Earth or any other application that can display GPX files.

The file contains only portions of the Emerald Lake Trail and the Humpy Creek Trail that we hiked.

Danube Bike Trip — In Vienna

Although I'm posting this weeks after the fact, I want to do it before moving on to other things. My desire to have this blog be both a journal and a timeline of events in my life demands it. My mother's death has put me in a weird place concerning the blog and pretty much everything else I do. In better days, my sister used to read these stories to her so she would know where I was and that I was okay. Life goes on, yes, but mine feels distinctly different now and the little adventures I write about seem so banal — lately it's been difficult to take them seriously. Consequently, this will mostly be a photo essay of my 4 day visit to Vienna last April.

After my night at the Park Inn, the last prepaid hotel stop on the bike tour,  I hopped on the subway and went to Helga's apartment. Helga was a gracious host and a most knowledgeable tour guide of her city.

Helga

Almost as soon as I got settled in she said, let's take a ride and I'll show you some sights.  She got on the Internet, located a rental car that was convenient to the apartment, and we walked a few blocks to pick it up. She passed her membership card in front of a barcode scanner in the windshield, the doors opened and off we went. A few of the larger cities in the U.S. have rental services like car2go but not any of the ones I frequent. (See also this Cool Tools article about car2go in the U.S.)

Big Dave in a small car

Statues in a museum garden

Some of Vienna's fine architecture

Mozart's grave (photo by Helga)

We ate grilled pork leg at the Schweitzerhaus
(N48.213870, E16.401560)

We visited the famous Schweitzerhaus Biergarten and had the house specialty Hintere Schweinsstelze frisch vom Grill. It was quite a meal. Austrians eat quite a bit of meat and consume vast quantities of beer.

Schweitzerhaus taproom

The restaurant is in the Wurstelprater, a giant amusement park in the center of the city. We wandered about and stopped to see this merry-go-round that had live horses. The kids were really enjoying it and often reached down to pat their steeds — one little girl even whispered into her pony's ear. While I was watching two of the ponies were taken out for a break and fresh ones brought from an adjoining stable.

No visit to Vienna would be complete without a look at St. Stephen's Cathedral, a splendid example of Gothic architecture dating from about 1350. The interior, which has been recently renovated, was awesome.

The so called "Giant's Door" of St. Stephen's Cathedral

Monster pipe organ

Some of the faithful light votary candles

Below are a few shots of the Schoenbrunn Palace and its grounds. It's Vienna's most famous tourist spot that's also sought out by locals who enjoy its spacious gardens, quiet walkways and leafy bowers. It was occupied by the Habsburgs, rulers of the once powerful Austro-Hungarian Empire from about 1570 until World War I ended in 1918.

This modest 1441-room home was the seat of Austria's Habsburg Dynasty for hundreds of years

Detail of the Sun Fountain at Schoenbrunn

Helga is a big fan of walking and she tired me out every day. We walked until my feet were sore. And she talked about Vienna, its history, museums and the Danube until I could absorb no more. On one of our walks we met these two waitresses in a fine restaurant. They both spoke English and the lady on the right had been to Alaska and worked in a cannery. Small world.

On my last day she took me to a nice cafeteria that she said most people, especially tourists, don't know about although a Google search for Justizcafe turned up quite a few hits. It's located in the big courthouse, the Wiener Justizpalastes and offers a scenic view of downtown Vienna as well as a helluva fine breakfast:

Justizcafe breakfast

The tab for breakfast and the espresso came to $9.63 USD, not bad if you're used to Alaska prices. But of that total, $1.23 was taxes, 10% on the food, and 20% on the coffee. (Yikes!) Helga tells me there are no homeless people in Austria, or very few anyway, and there is universal heath care for all. You can ride the public transportation system for about $200 per year(!) and that includes subways, trams, and buses, all of which are very clean and punctual. But the tax burden is correspondingly high. Needless to say, we don't have that level of service in America. Who needs old people or those that can't earn enough money to pay for housing or medical help anyway?

I spotted this odd looking structure from the Justizcafe and asked Helga about it. There are several of these old towers around the city. They're gun emplacements, remnants of the Nazi era and World War II, she said. I later learned it's one of six flak towers in Vienna that held anti-aircraft guns for use against Allied bombers. The city was bombed 52 times during the war and 20% of its houses destroyed but these reinforced concrete towers survived.

World War II anti-aircraft battery

And one last image from, well, somewhere. I forget...

Procession

As I prepare to leave Vienna, my thanks go once again to Helga. She was an outstanding host that I hope to see again someday. Next it's on to Buffalo, North Carolina, Oregon, and finally Alaska. In writing this last post about the bike trip I got to thinking again about biking along the Danube on those magical spring days. It was really a swell way to travel and now that my butt is back to normal, I can say I thoroughly enjoyed it. Maybe I should go again, I'm thinking. Why not?

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A death in the family

For various reasons, I've put off writing the final chapter of my bike trip. I'm back in Thailand now but I had a wonderful visit in Vienna and Helga, my hostess, besides being a super good cook and tour guide, was a wealth of information about Vienna and its history. But that post will have to wait yet a little while longer. This post is mostly for family and friends who knew my mother when she was still alive.

I've written here about my mother, her good energy, her excellent health and her strong drive to continue living despite the fact that her body was wearing out. Although we all thought she'd live to be a hundred, her time finally came this June. Our beloved Mother passed from this life with grace and courage on June 14th with her dear daughter Sandy beside her. She had lived a long and productive life and almost made it to her 98th birthday this November. She had experienced several medical setbacks during the preceding year that left her weak and barely able to walk. Most of our immediate family came to Buffalo for a visit in May and she enjoyed those gatherings, especially because my daughter Carin and her family were there from North Carolina, and also her grandson Tuli, whom she hadn't seen for years, and his son Harper, from Oregon. I had encouraged this meeting in Buffalo because I believed she was failing and that this might be their last chance to see her — and so it was.

Family photo, four generations — May 27, 2014

Mom with grandchildren Tuli & Carin and their children, Harper & Kaiyah

Not long after these photographs were taken, mom fell and fractured her wrist. She was in considerable pain afterward and couldn't endure using her walker — she was forced into a wheelchair until her bones could heal. Her knees were already worn out by arthritis and old age. Even before her fall she could barely walk without assistance, which is something she always did with a passion. And her eyes were bad. She loved reading but macular degeneration had long been eating away at her vision. She used a TV camera, the Video Eye, connected to a huge TV to help her read for years. She never complained about any of this. She merely accepted the hand she was dealt and soldiered on with a smile on her face. But now, even the faithful Video Eye was failing her. She could no longer see well enough to read.

Cutting out coupons using the Video Eye (1995)

After our week together, we went our separate ways. I returned to Alaska, Tuli and Harper to Eugene, Carin and her crew to Kernersville, leaving my sister Sandy, brother Dale and nephew Jason in Buffalo to care for mom although truthfully the bulk of the care, and the constant worry, fell squarely on Sandy's shoulders.

Sandy and I talked frequently by phone over the next couple of weeks until one day when she told me I might want to start looking around for a flight back to Buffalo. Mom, she said, had told her she didn't care if she ever got out of bed again. The pain in her knees was too great. And she wasn't interested in food or eating. I tried talking with her on the phone. I asked how she was doing, but she couldn't hear me well. Her last words to me were, Nothing's any good anymore, David.

Just as I began making arrangements to return to Buffalo, Sandy called back to tell me our mother was gone.

Mom never wanted to be a burden on anyone. Even now, in perhaps her last conscious act, she had somehow managed to leave this life without inconveniencing any of us further. Especially me, the one who left home at age 19 and never looked back. I was glad to be out of Buffalo and made no bones about it. I signed myself "Your wayward son" in my letters home during my early years in Alaska. By most standards I reckon I wasn't a very good son to her because I haven't been around much since college but if she ever had any thoughts along those lines she never mentioned them to anybody. That's just the way she was.

Mom at home in 2008

The death of my mother has put new thoughts about my own demise into everyday consciousness. I suppose it's inevitable that the older one becomes, the more one thinks about death —  about when and how it will begin, how it will play out, how one will deal with it when it becomes unavoidable. My mother's death has left me in a blue funk — I'm feeling rootless and plagued with many questions. I've had my kids and passed my genes along to future generations. Of what value is my selfish pursuit of a better tennis game and more traveling in the overall scheme of things, of life? Why wasn't I a better father to my older children? Why wasn't I there to help my mother when she was failing? I sincerely hope that when my time comes I will face up to it and be able to accept my end the way she did.

The large family in which I grew up shrinks every year. My aunt Marion, my father's only sibling, is the last one left alive of my mother's generation and she's 95 and increasingly frail. All mom's sisters and brothers, the aunts and uncles of my childhood, some older cousins, even our neighbors from Lackawanna Avenue, are gone now. As I look through our photo albums of all those picnics and parties, Christmases, birthdays and vacations, I notice this one and that one; there's my father with aunt Betty & uncle Bill, and aunt Mart, Gert & Stan and aunt Evvie from across the street, and Phyllis & Jake from "down home" in Allentown. They're all gone. It's at times like this that the weight of my 70 years press most heavily. But this year my brother and nephew, my daughter and sons, my sister, especially my sister, all of us who remain, have suffered an especially traumatic blow, a cataclysmic event. Something's missing from our lives that can never be brought back or ever repaired.

We miss our mom, our grandmother, her indomitable will, her unfailing cheer, her enduring love. She was always a fighter, always a joy to be around, and always a caring mother. We will mourn her passing and celebrate her vibrant spirit for the rest of our days.

Danube Bike Trip — Day 6 — to Vienna

Traismaur to Vienna

Today, the last of my Danube tour, was a bit anticlimactic after yesterday's high. The weather continued fine but the closer to Vienna I got the more crowded became the Donauradweg. Austrians love bicycling and it was a lovely, warm weekend so riders were out in large numbers. But the first part of the day was mellow and uncrowded. The valley of the Danube widens just beyond Tulln and the forested hills I've been meandering through and enjoying are no longer in evidence, having given way to the wide flat plain on which Vienna is situated.

Looking upriver to the Altenworth Power Project (N48.369754, E15.871360)

Trailside shrine

A rest hut alongside the path, not yet open in April

I came to the charming town of Tulln an der Donau and decided to stop for a coffee break. Tulln is a typical Austrian town of neatly painted houses, well appointed shops, with sidewalk cafes sprinkled here and there. I spotted a small Italian restaurant advertising espresso, plunked myself down at a sunny table on the wide sidewalk and ordered a dopio. Delicious! I ordered another. For the picnic lunch I planned to eat later, I bought a basket of strawberries from a fruit vendor just across the way. I was worried they'd be like the woody, bland berries I buy from the supermarket in Alaska but they were very good, sweet and red all the way through.

An hour or so after this stop I could begin to see the outskirts of Vienna and the end of my bike trip. The Park Inn was my final destination on the Eurobike planned portion of the trip.

I crossed to the north side of the river on this bicycles-only bridge
The Nordbrucke (North Bridge) for vehicular traffic is at left
(N48.253762, E16.378283)

My room at the Park Inn, Vienna

I briefly mentioned Helga, my Viennese Couchsurfing host, earlier. I had planned to spend a few days in Vienna seeing the sights. I also figured I would just wing it on hotels and was prepared to stay a few extra nights at the Park Inn or some other hotel. I had not been keeping up with my favorite Couchsurfing group once my travels became centered in Thailand, where hotels are cheap and where I have a lovely Thai companion, Nut, who speaks the language and travels with me. But a couple of months ago Jana, a Couchsurfing hostess I stayed with in Berlin in 2009 and with whom I am now in frequent contact because we became friends during my stay, knew about my plans to visit Vienna. She contacted her good Vienna friend Helga and suggested she offer to host me. Helga promptly did that and extended, via Couchsurfing.org, an invitation to stay at her place. Helga was to be my hostess and proved to be an expert guide to Vienna's historical and touristic places.

So it goes when traveling. Things happen that just cannot be planned for and sometimes those things turn out to be special in some way. My visit to Berlin was made special by Jana's expert advice, fabulous cooking, and warm friendship. My visit to Vienna was to be a similar experience, enriched almost by accident through Jana's referral to Helga. 



Stats: Arrived Park Inn Hotel at 3:05 pm after pedaling 68.8 km (42.7 miles), in 4 hours, 2 minutes, total time 5:48 door to door.

Total distance pedaled for the entire ride: 349 km (235 miles)

Elevation loss: 360 meter elevation at Passau, 157 meters at Vienna equals a 204 meter (670 feet) drop.

GPX files for the trip

Click on the file link and select Download from beneath the cleverly hidden "More" menu (those three blue dots), at the top right of the resulting page, browse to a folder or your desktop where you want to place the file and click on the Save button. You can open them with Google Earth or any other application that can display GPX files.

GPX File of Eurobike hotels on this 6-day trip
Note: In Grein there is a shuttle bus to take bikers to hotels that are not in the town. The bus stop is in town and near the river. This waypoint is also included.

GPX traces for the entire trip
These are unedited for the most part and thus contain side trips of visits to restaurants, shortcuts, etc., as described in the blog posts.

Factoids: Vienna is properly spelled Wien and pronounced veen by inhabitants. Foods cooked in the Vienna style employ the word Wiener to describe it, sort of like we use the word Tuscan or even Italian when describing the food of those regions. When we were growing up our mom used to grill "wieners" at picnics and serve them to us on buns. This is the food most of us know as hot dogs or frankfurters. My mother comes from German speaking stock but I never knew her favorite term for hot dog had been derived from the name of this large Austrian city.

The popular dish made from thin-sliced veal, which is called schnitzel, prepared Vienna-style by breading and sauteing becomes the well known Wiener Schnitzel. 

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Audio equipment: iPhone 5, PanApp music player, Mighty-H Bluetooth headphones
Today's Playlist:
George Harrison: All things must pass
Liz Phair: Whitechocolatespaceegg
The National: High Violet
Phish: Billy breathes
Beethoven: Klaviersonaten Op.2 No. 1,2,3, Alfred Brendel
wind noise
birdsong

Navigation Equipment: Garmin Montana 600 GPS, OpenStreetMap of Austria, bicycling version 

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