Little Differences

Some things are just a little bit different in Europe and sometimes those odd little differences make me chuckle.

You can have a museum about pretty much anything

All the folks running for office put their pictures on their posters, even when they shouldn't

Lots more nakey people, and lets not even talk about the saunas

Just about everything is "street legal"

Not everything translates well

Get your hair cut and colored, damn it!

Taking a dump is gonna cost you, but the crapper has a catchy name

This guy gives your chips that extra special flavor

Everyone has their own ideas about art

When you want to say "hybrid", it's OK to say "bastard" even at a botany seminar

The gall of some creatures

I do so love a good gall. Not sure why, maybe it is the way that they catch your attention as just being wrong and not how things are supposed to look. The deciduous forests in this part of Germany seem to have more than their fair share and that is just OK with me. The first one is likely fungal or viral and quite a beut'. It's the only one I've seen on Beech. The second one on rose, well I don't know what the hell that is, but I suspect it is the result of alien visitors. The rest are insect galls. Mama sticks her ovapositor into the leaf, deposits a single egg and the rest is all chemistry. Usually the larvae makes or modifies plant hormones and gets the unsuspecting plant to make it a pretty little home for the growing baby. I just love it when one organism tweaks another's biochemistry to its own advantage. As long as it isn't a parasite in me that is!

WTF was I thinking?

So I really did walk 100km, aka 62 miles, starting at 6pm on a Friday night somewhere in eastern Germany, of my own free will.

A print-out of the distances with my times between checkpoints, a certificate, and this pin were the tangible things that I got for my trouble. Well I guess you can include blisters and the fact that I will walk funny for a few days.

The hike is limited to 850 people. I'm pretty sure 849 were German and I knew none of them. Talk about alone in a crowd. As you might imagine if you thought about these orderly Germans a bit, we were all issued microchips that were scanned on departure, several places along the way, and at the finish. I know, to the second, how much time I spent on the trail. Exactly 19hrs 3min and 58seconds.

As we all fell into our pace and headed up to the hills, the crowd thinned a bit.

We had enough traveling before getting to the single track that we were very well sorted. It was a beautiful cool evening for hiking. The sun set, the full moon rose, the headlamps came on and we kept on walking.

Food and drink rests were a great place for me to get ahead of the crowd. I filled up my water, pounded a few cokes to stay awake and didn't linger. There was almost nothing I could eat anyway so I brought my own and ate on the run. The first 21km clicked by at 15min/mile, the next at 17 min/mile. That was literally a blistering pace, and at the 42km food stop I did a little surgery and changed socks but felt pretty damn invincible. The night was cold and clear and moonlit. The city lights at night were great. By morning I was getting a bit stiff. This picture was at 62km and was the only place I stayed and ate some cheese and gluten free bread at a table. That was still less than a 5 minute stop.

By 70 km any heady invincibility was crushed, but I kept walking. Between 77 and 85 km I dragged my ass along at 24 min/mile, my slowest pace, but that short stretch had included a few minutes spent doing more surgery.

By not stopping much I got ahead of the pack and spent much of the last half of the hike walking alone with my thoughts and aches.

I picked up the pace again for each of the last two sections, mostly because the finish kept getting closer and I wanted this walk to end.

Kristi and the kids were waiting to walk the last 200 meters with me and they were a great sight
to see. Kristi grabbed the camera out of my pocket, ran ahead and snapped this picture. I usually figure 20 minutes/mile as a pretty good walking pace. Overall I averaged 18.75 minutes/mile including stops and though I haven't seen the placing, I doubt that there were more than 40 people ahead of me. The cost was enduring the last 8 hours which ranks right up there as one of the most physically and emotionally challenging experiences of my life, but the intangibles somehow make it all seem worth it in this clear light of the next day. But if you ask me if I'd do it again, you will hear me say, "no f*cking way!"

Praha carriage vids

Here are a couple of vids from an evening horse drawn carriage ride around Prague. Wow what a town. There isn't anything at home like this. There is a huge palace, old medieval towers, Gothic and Baroque cathedrals, narrow twisted streets full of life, and plenty of places where the Czechs got the living daylights beaten out of them resisting communism. Masons charged with filling the bullet holes after protests refused to hide the history and intentionally mismatched the mortar so all would know what happened. A great freedom loving people and a beautiful place to inspire the selfless acts of courage that took place.

(T-mobile Germany sucks so the second video will have to wait until late, late to upload. I'm disappointed with blogger's video as well. The original isn't this dark,,, oh well you get the idea.)

And below are a few of my faves from the museum of communism whose location is described in their own advertisements as; "Above McDonald's, across from Bennetton, and next to the casino. Viva la Imperialism!" Didn't take these folks much time to revel in their freedom again.

Ahhh, finally. Here's some more of the carriage ride if you didn't get enough. Turn up the sound 'cause Ben is precious.