Went for a bit of a fun practice with my drone (have I mentioned I have a drone? Probably not, I’m a bit sporadic with the blog these days – it’s a DJI Mini 3 Pro, lovely little drone) since it’s been a few weeks, and I was wandering all over this park, trying out the active track on a steep and closed in trail (where it did excellently, by the way). I was walking along and i got the RTH (Return To Home) warning. I was miles away from the Home Point, so I cancelled that, but now I didn’t have a Land icon on the screen – or at least I can’t see it, but it’s on the screen recording so I don’t know . I was on a paved path, so it would have been a perfect place to land if I’d had the opportunity. I decided to do a hand catch. I’ve done a bunch of them before, but like I said it’s been a few weeks since I last flew. Somehow I got my thumb sticking up too much and I got two nice little slices in it, and now I’ve got blood stains all over my drone.
Later on I was flying in this grove of trees, weaving in and out and I lightly tapped a tree and crashed. I examined the drone, and nothing seemed wrong with it, but every time I tried to start it, the props would run for a second and shut down, and give me a warning about a motor being jammed. One of the motors was definitely harder to turn so I gave it a good shaking out and blew it out. It started up and took off, but it was really slow to move. I landed it and took off again, and it was fine.
This week I remember two recent dreams. I usually only seem to remember one, and that’s good so I can have something to talk about with my therapist.
In the first one, I’m on a bike ride when I meet up with a Global Cycling Network (GCN) group ride. (GCN is a cycling focused YouTube channel based out of the UK, and most of the presenters are former pros, although usually not World Tour pros) We get to a stop, probably a cafe and I take off my rear wheel for some reason. I’m having trouble getting it back on, so Sy Richardson, one of the GCN presenters, offers to help. Immediately he’s doing one strange adjustments to my rear wheel that I’ve never seen before. But he can’t get it to go back on either. And then he starts working on the entire drive train. By the time he’s finished, the entire drive train is on the wrong side of the bike, and the chain is really rusty and far too long for my bike. I realize that what he’s done is take the entire drive train off the XtraCycle long frame cargo bike I’m parked in front of and transferred it to my bike, which is why the chain is too long.
XtraCycle
I don’t think I figured out how it got transposed to the wrong side of the bike.
The second dream was a few days later. In this one, a few people I don’t know in real life but were friends in the dream were in one of the royal palaces. For some reason my car and most of my possessions where spread out on a steep slope, or possibly a stair way. One of my friends was an artist, and she was making these weird little sculptures that tucked into one corner of every door frame. I was going around behind her putting ridiculously high price tags on all of them. At some point the Queen (yes, just like it’s hard to remember to write 2023 after a year of writing 2022, it’s hard to dream about the King after a lifetime of living under a Queen) comes out and scolds me about the high price tags, and tells me to take them down because she’s already negotiated a price with my friend. I recall putting something in or taking something out of the mess that was my car and assorted possessions, but I don’t recall which.
I hope somebody has better luck interpreting these dreams than I do, because I’m at a loss. I am pretty sure both of these dreams were longer, but I don’t recall any more. One thing I’ve noticed lately is that all my dreams seem to have one famous person who has been in my consciousness that day. One recent dream it was Wout Van Aert after I’d watched a cyclocross race the day before. Another one had Vladimir Putin in it but of course the Russia/Ukraine War is in the news (and my Quora feed) every day. And there is a GCN video on YouTube every day. Not sure where the Queen came from, though.
We went on another Viking River Cruise this year, the one advertised as the “Danube Waltz”. We loved the first one we did on the Rhine 5 years ago, and so we’ve been really looking forward to this one. Obviously COVID put a bit of a damper on this, but Viking’s COVID protocols looked very strong – daily testing, modified ventilation system on the ships, hand sanitizer stations everywhere, mask rules, etc. As well as the standard Danube Waltz, we signed up for the 4 day “Pre Extension” in Munich and Salzburg.
I should start with a disclaimer: after the last cruise turned into a complete muddle in my mind and being unable to remember which day we saw which city, I vowed to keep proper notes and remember things. Spoiler alert: I didn’t. One of the couples we hung around with on the trip worked as a team with her taking many photos with an SLR, and him making notes just about every time she took photos. We weren’t that couple. I was doing most of my photography/video with a GoPro and unlike the phone it doesn’t tell you where the photo was taken and it’s not even 100% consistent about having the right date stamp on the file. So expect some vagueness about what happened when.
The first day was flying out of Rochester to Dulles to Munich. There’d been a huge muddle with our flights – the Viking website “My Viking Journey” continually showed the flight itinerary as “unavailable due to changes from the airline” for months and months at a time. Finally about 90 days before the departure I phoned Viking and they “finalized” the travel arrangements, only to change them again a week or so later. Once that happened, I started going to the United site to buy upgrades with our miles, but all they had was a thing where you could pay some dollars and some miles (I think it was over $500 each) and go on the wait list for the upgrades, and if the upgrades never arrived they’d supposedly refund the money and miles. (Spoiler alert: They haven’t). And then with a week to go before the flight they still hadn’t given us the upgrades we’d paid for and were waitlisted for, I noticed Economy Plus seats were available on the long leg. I decided flying across the Atlantic in economy is intolerable, so I spent another $250 each to get us Economy Plus. I still have no idea why they didn’t give them to us via this stupid wait list thing.
Our return trip was Budapest to Munich to Chicago to Rochester, and the first two legs were on Lufthansa. So I went to Lufthansa’s web site and bought business class upgrades on the first two legs. It was just a direct payment for upgrade, none of this “we’ll take your money and maybe refund it if you don’t get the upgrade” business. I’ve tried to purge how much that upgrade cost from my mind, because it wasn’t cheap.
I was a little worried because there was basically only an hour to change planes in Dulles. And even more worried when I got an email a day before departure saying there are forecasted thunderstorms on the eastern seaboard and to expect delays. And of course it happened exactly as I expected – our flight out of Rochester was delayed by over 90 minutes, and the departure of our second leg was not marked as delayed.
I got on the phone to United, and after explaining over and over what was happening to the rep with the almost indecipherable Indian accent, she said it was taken care of, we were booked on a Lufthansa flight leaving Dulles at 10:20 pm. So then I called Lufthansa to see if we could get any sort of upgrade on that flight, and they said they couldn’t because the United rep had double booked us on both the Lufthansa flight, and the United flight that they were code sharing with. So we were essentially double booked on the flight and it was screwing up their ability to assign us seats. I looked at the United App and as well as being double booked, we were still booked on the United flight we were going to miss. I called up United to get them to screw up, and once again got a person with an Indian accent. This one was slightly more understandable, but she acted like she’d never heard of the concept of missing a flight because your previous leg was delayed before. Surely this must be the main thing they do all day? Anyway, after slowly and with many, many, many repeats, I got her to understand that no, I did not want her to cancel our flights from Rochester to Dulles, I did want her to cancel the flight that was leaving Dulles before we got in, I did want her to cancel our United booking on the Lufthansa flight and NOT cancel the Lufthansa flight. It was still screwed up on both the United App and the Lufthansa App (which I had downloaded by this point because I wasn’t trusting anybody a rep told me).
When we got to Dulles, the flight we had been supposed to leave on was still on the departure boards showing something like “BLOCKED”, which makes me wonder if we could have made it, but when we got to the Lufthansa desk we found we were booked on the 10:20 flight, and we were way in the back in a middle section in economy. No upgrades were available because they were very full. So basically I had 8 hours of extreme discomfort to start the trip. Thank god for my special seat pillow. I actually think I napped a bit.
We arrived in Munich at our hotel about 24 hours after we’d left home. I’d probably had 2 hours sleep during that time, and I don’t think Vicki had any. I’m not sure if we ever got properly acclimatized to European time after that start, but because my normal sleep schedule is so fucked up by my pain it’s hard to tell.
The hotel was gorgeous, although it was very modern and in the two nights we had there I don’t think we completely figured out the weird light switches and weird shower. I don’t recall if we had time for a nap, but we did meet our Viking tour guide and the other couples on the “pre-extension”. We also nipped out for a bit of a walk around, and found an ATM to get out some Euros. We also had dinner in one of the hotel restaurants. It wasn’t a particularly beautiful part of Munich and it was a bit drizzly so it wasn’t a great intro, but we were here in Europe. So far, so good.
A brief note on COVID precautions at this point. We did a PCR test a few days before we left. I seem to recall the Lufthansa gate agent needed to see our vaccination certificates but not our test results, but the German customs wanted both, or maybe it was the other way around. We had to wear masks on the the flights, and in the Munich airport and in the bus ride to the hotel. I think some of the hotel staff weren’t wearing them, but we did except when we were in our own room, walking outside or sitting eating. Viking gave us a spit tube each to do a test the first morning after we arrived. I’ll talk about the protocols and precautions on subsequent days as I talk about those subsequent days.
I’m trying to remember when was the last time I really skied. I had pretty much quit by the end of university in 1985, because skate technique hurt my knees so much. I know I had one winter where I got out 4 or 5 times sometime between Shani and I breaking up and me moving south, so I guess 1992-3 or sometime around then? Then a few years ago where I tried to ski at Mendon Ponds with my now ancient ski equipment and my boots (bought in 1981 at great sacrifice) both completely separated from their soles within a few hundred meters of the parking lot. a
Last year I found out about Cummings Nature Center, and the fact that they rent there. I tried it out once and immediately fell back in love with skiing. Unfortunately I discovered it pretty late in the season so I didn’t get back out. So I’ve been itching for a chance to go out again this year. First we didn’t have snow, then we got fresh snow and the temps immediately plummeted to around 0F. Not good for starting out. But today the weather finally cooperated. It was 26F and lightly snowing when I set out for the nearly hour long drive down to Cummings.
Driving for an hour meant the return of the painful butt. I’m still in making rounds of doctors to try and get some relief of that, whatever it is, and that means I spent half the drive trying to sit only on one buttock or lift myself out of the seat.
By the time I got there, it was snowing quite a bit harder, although the roads were well plowed. I was hoping they’d still be plowed when I finished. I got there just on the dot of 9am and there was one other car in the lot. They were skiing but not renting (I could tell because they’d skied from the parking lot to the chalet). The rental form asked what level skier you are. They didn’t have a spot for “I used to be quite good, but that was before you were born”, so I ticked “intermediate”. I was sure that when they saw that I’d put my e-mail address at xcski.com they’d accuse me of giving a fake address, but they didn’t say anything.
The equipment was quite good quality and new this year they told me. The new bindings are so much better than they were when I was a skier. And the ski lengths aren’t multiples of 5cm for some odd reason. I got a pair of Madshus Actives at 207cm because I used to race on 215s and I was a lot lighter back then. The wax less system felt like a combination of steps and skins. It worked pretty well at first.
Felt like old times. Set off and hey, my diagonal stride isn’t too bad in the grooves, but the muscles you use to keep your skis in a straight line when you aren’t in the grooves, or to skate around corners, or snowplow turn on a downhill, are all completely atrophied. Oh well, I’ll get this back.
My heart was pounding pretty hard, but the values displayed on my watch were ridiculously low. Stupid heart rate strap had had problems last time I’d erged. I didn’t think it had been long enough to need a new battery, so I hoped it would start reading right after I’d worked up a sweat. I figured it was probably in the high 140s or more because I’d had to stop to catch my breath on a couple of climbs.
I did the yellow trail out to the blue and did the blue loop, and when I got back to the yellow I thought “I don’t need to go back to the lodge yet” and set out around the blue trail again. Even though it was only 1.5 or 2 kilometers, it felt like a victory. And when I got to the junction with the orange trail, I took that one. Half way through the orange trail I got a notice on my watch that the heart rate strap had a low battery. I stopped to take it off, hoping that the watch would revert to the built in optical heart rate. I’m not sure what it did, because it was still giving me numbers around 100 bpm when the pounding in my chest was telling me it was actually over 140. I wonder if the strap was continuing to broadcast crappy data in my backpack.
When I finished the orange and blue, this time I took the yellow trail back to the lodge. I didn’t note the actual distance, but I think it was somewhere between 4.5 and 5.5 kilometers. My goal for the day had been to make it for 5 kilometers total, so I was feeling pretty good. And after having a brief sit down in the chalet to drink some water and eat a banana I’d brought, I was feeling good enough to go out and do the blue trail loop again.
This time, I think the wax they’d put on the skis to improve the glide had worn off, because my skis stopped abruptly instead of gliding a few times, once pitching me onto my face. I had to stop a few times to do the old “scrape the ski over the edge of the other ski” trick to get my glide back. I was also definitely tired now. But my heart rate was now showing up properly on my watch, and I was seeing numbers in the very high 140s and low 150s.
I finished up back at the lodge with a total of 6.6 kilometers. Goal exceeded! But I was really done – I don’t think I could have done even the yellow loop again. So I returned my rentals, suggested they renew the glide wax, and headed off to the car. It was barely 10:30. And it was snowing quite hard.
The first part of the drive was plowed but now bare, but after taking it easy on that I soon got back to bare road and headed home. Once again, the sore butt problem “reared” it’s ugly head but it was an excuse to stop for a Coke at least.
