I photo my thumb accidentally took while idly fiddling with my phone and watching the news and waiting for The Next Thing of the Day.
Two points if you can figure that out. I know what it is, but I’ll be impressed if anyone here can take two points off of my hands.
The Next Thing of the Day proved easy and uneventful. Started on time, ended on time, everything in the middle was assuredly a smash hit. A Tuesday to be remembered! If you could make the normal Tuesday stand out somehow or another.
Two points if you can figure that out, too.
In my idle chatter I mentioned I had a tube going on my bike. I took it off and found just the tiniest little hole seeping air. I was tempted to slap some super glue on it and experiment, but, in another sign of my own maturity and wisdom, decided this was not a profitable experiment.
You can wrap a tube in a dollar bill to finish a ride in a pinch. (Two points if you get it right on the first try!) But I was already at the house, and not in that pinch. If you’re lucky, though, the currency can hold up for weeks. I can also buy another inner tube and just be done with it. We have a small stack for just such an occasion. I went to the room where we keep stacks of things and found that we have one spare inner tube.
This does not a stack make.
Opened the little box, pulled out the tube, prepared it for installation and …
So I had to put my spare on my back wheel. The spare is the one you carry with you, not the one from the room where we keep stacks of things. That means I don’t have a spare to carry on the bike. So tomorrow’s ride will feature a new back tire, and one with a tiny pinhole on the wall. I should throw a dollar bill in there, too. Juuuust in case.
I always carry a few bucks on the bike. (Two points to me for being prepared.) You never know when a ride goes farther, or takes longer, and you want to stop at a store for water or extra fuel. And, also, for emergency tire patching.
The setup is this … and this is similar to something that I explained here last week, but also different.
We ride bikes through a nearby neighborhood and the other end of that neighborhood ends with a T-intersection. We turn right, which is immediately into a little hill. It’d be fine if you just rode over it, but it’s just stiff enough to be unpleasant from a complete stop — as in an intersection. So when we go that way, which is often, I jump on up ahead so I can be the Stop or Go signal for my lovely bride. If the timing works out, she can just take the right turn and keep up a little momentum. And somewhere just after that hill I can catch back up to her because I have no momentum. But just after that hill we take another turn and work through another neighborhood, and there’s a particular road there where I had one good day and now I try to hit it with zeal every time. I am three seconds off the Strava segment leader. It’s a short sprint and I’m sure I’m only on the leaderboard because no one really rides that road, or rides it hard, anyway.
But now I do, because of that one good day, and so I attacked it again yesterday. I have come to realize that my average time is only three or four seconds off my best time on that segment. It’s short, and that, of course, means that even my fastest time wasn’t that fast there, but nevertheless. We get to that right hand turn and I do what I can for about 35 seconds.
I do both of those things each time we go out this way, now. And yesterday, just like last week, The Yankee passed me about a mile later. Last time I was taking a sip of water and she rode away from me. This time, she just put in one little turn of speed … and it took 10 miles for me to catch her again.
So here’s a photo from our Monday morning bike ride.
Did you know the Gin Blossoms had a Grammy nomination in 1997? Did you know they lost to the Beatles?
Had you forgotten that the Beatles were somehow still releasing music three decades after the band broke up? There’s been good money in nostalgia since the invention of surviving media, I think.
Anyway, this was that song for the Gin Blossoms. They were the feature act in a show with Toad the Wet Sprocket and Barenaked Ladies, a concert we caught last Friday night.
That record sold five million copies and stayed on the charts for three years. And all the old fans — we weren’t the youngest people there, but we might have been close? — still sing along.
Jesse Valenzuela remains the band’s true weapon. Here’s his standard solo on the Doug Hopkins hit.
Robin Wilson makes a joke
This one was an initial release on the Empire Records soundtrack in 1995.
Anyway, “Til I Hear It from You” was re-released as a single the next year. Billboard hailed it as “the closest thing to a perfect pop song to hit radio in recent memory.”
The soundtrack, by the way, is holding up better than the movie.
It’s a coming-of-age movie and most of those don’t age well after the desired audience ages. No one was interested in Gen X at the time anyway, so that film was destined to flop, which it did. (It doesn’t hurt that it isn’t any good.) It does have a minor following for two lines of dialog but is otherwise not as good as the soundtrack, which was fronted by that Gin Blossoms tune. At Variety, Ken Eisner famously wrote Empire Records was “a soundtrack in search of a movie,”
Anyway, that song was number one in Canada, and in the top 10 on virtually every American chart. It is frozen in amber.
adventures / cycling / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on I was breathless, she was tranquilo — a bike story 28 Jun 22
I like riding from behind. First, the pace is your own. Second, you don’t have to worry about bumping anyone directly in front of you. So it is never a bad thing when there’s a little space created between my front wheel and my lovely bride. But I also like riding out front, because that gives her something to chase.
So it was the best of both worlds today, which almost makes it the worst.
Let me explain. I’d attacked her twice, springing ahead early, twice. First, because I can play traffic cop at a key intersection. I get to a downhill T-intersection and can tell her to go through or stop. It’s a little helpful because when we take that turn at the stop sign you go immediately uphill. No momentum. But she’s finally learning to accept that I have a healthy respect for empty roads and she will go into the intersection when I wave her on. Advantage: momentum!
I have to start at a dead start, but better one of us than both. And, besides, I’ll catch her near the top of that little hill.
We take another turn, and go over some rollers and then turn right into another neighborhood. I am tied for third on that segment on Strava, just three seconds off the leader. There are two datapoints in that sentence which make no sense in the way I ride, but I had a good turn one day a month or two back and now I’m interested in attacking this particular road when we take that route. (Recently I equaled my best. This also doesn’t make a lot of sense.) So I attacked that again, today, and found myself four seconds off my best time.
But about a mile later, The Yankee went by me. It wasn’t an attack, she just outpaced me. I reached down to grab a sip of water, put the bottle back in the bidon cage, looked up and she was down the road.
This photo is merely a recreation. I did not have time to take pictures today.
She did this on the big galloping rollers. All of those comes down to legs. Some days I’m stronger there. Often, she’s powering away from me. Today, I could tell that I wasn’t making a lot of cuts into her advantage. And then she perhaps got a break in the traffic that I didn’t at an intersection, and she was gone.
All of this time, I was riding hard. With abandon. I did not have to worry about the pace of anyone in front of me, because the road was empty. Hands on hoods, hands in the drops. Legs alive and burning. Lungs dead and burning.
It was one of the faster rides of the year, I think. It was one of the better, harder, rides I’ve had in a while. I don’t know if I could get more out of my bike, but for two hills where I lagged a bit.
I got to the house and she was sitting on the back porch, all casual like. She asked me if I was OK. I was fine. My bike felt like it was floating over bumps. One of the tracking apps said I hit 49.9 miles per hour.
She had already put her bike inside.
So she’s recovered from her crash 10 days ago. The rest of us are just chasing.
You thought we were done with that amazing vacation, didn’t you? The first rule around here is my site, my rules. And the second rule is use all the photos you can.
The third rule is rub it in if you can (because you’re back at the house and in the office anyway).
So a few more pictures to get through today, all of these from the return portion of the vacation. And then, after that, it’ll get normal here again far too quickly. (Because the fourth rule is indulge in normalcy, and pad your content with routine matters.)
There are, it turns out, a lot of rules.
We saw this at the bakery just outside of our hotel, where we had a nice little quiche breakfast before heading to the trolley to get to the train station to ride to the airport to take a tram to get on a plane to fly to the U.S.
You need a quiche to fortify you for such logistics. Anyway, we saw this, and I have no comment.
I just read that the EU (Switzerland isn’t a part of the EU, but does participate in the Union’s single market) produces about a million metric tonnes of strawberries a year. About half of them are from Spain, Poland, Germany and Italy.
I imagine they all look as gorgeous as these.
At the airport, we saw perhaps the most useful, tasty chocolate that’s ever tempted you.
Useful, that is, until you eat some key part of the map.
Nearby, this stack of fudge. I wonder how long that’s been there, if it’s still edible or if it was made in some special way just for longevity in a display box.
This guy was flying the planes.
You better not be my pilot, Herr Lego.
He was not. Just your regular human people sitting in chairs up front while the plane flew itself. Zurich to New York and, after a reasonable layover, on to Indy. We saw our first sunset in the U.S. in two weeks. Call it Pennsylvania.
Looks like Pennsylvania, right? And that looks like the end of that trip to Paris, Normandy and all over Switzerland. Now, back in Indiana, we wonder where we’ll go next.
For this Tuesday post we’re looking back at our trip two weeks ago today. We’re doing this to catch up, but also to make up for the brief break I took from the site. So, sit back, enjoy the many photos (and the charming little video!) that tells the tale of this recent, amazing, adventure …
We set out on a tour for The Jungfrau, one of the main summits of the Bernese Alps. It’s part of a massive wall of mountains, and a distinctive sight in the Alps. First summited in 1811, it was not until 1865 that a direct route up the northern side of the mountain was opened.
We’re going up there.
The construction of the Jungfrau Railway, in the early 20th century, made the area one of the most-visited places in the Alps. It is now part of an area designated a World Heritage Site in 2001.
Here’s a better look from the town below.
We took the hardest route of all: the bus route, which led us to a ski lift, and also that train mentioned above.
Oh, and they call this …
The proper summit is 13,642 feet. We stopped just short of that, which is probably for the best. I fell just before taking this photo, which was in a gift shop.
And here’s my lovely bride, realizing she’s stuck with a faller.
But can we go outside for a moment? Remember those lovely exterior shots at the beginning of the post? The ones with the beautiful mountain behind us? If you turned around the other direction, you saw this. Think about those views.
So we’re on the move here, let’s look at some other mountains, or hills, or Alpine speed bumps.
It wasn’t just me, struck by the novelty of the locale features, which is reassuring.
Here we are on the ski lift going up on the next step of the journey.
We’re just flying over these houses, and so you don’t know anything, but that doesn’t seem like a bad lifestyle from above, does it?
Putting aside the pastoral living, we’re really here for the mountains.
You’ll have to forgive me, but I don’t see mountains every day, so I really played up the tourist bit.
And, yes, we’re going well above the tree line, and into the snow.
Here we are, on foot, approaching the tourism summit of Jungfrau. For a few moments while we were standing there we were experiencing a white out. (Somehow those are more fun on the last day of May? Again, the novelty of tourism …)
I’m not sure if she was prepared for snow.
But pretty much the entire time we were on the mountain, we enjoyed the snow. Farther down, on that ski lift, it was just rain. In the valley where we started this post, it was sunny and a mild spring day, all day.
This other prominent point of the mountain in the background isn’t far away, but in the clouds and fog and snow, it seems only barely there. Doesn’t help that there are actual snowflakes in our eyes.
This is one of the two observation points that were available to us near the top. Lots of people. Lots of photographs. A lot of people doing video chats with people back home. No one, but us, doing this.
(They were all impressed by us.)
At the other observation point, we claim this mountain for Switzerland! (Our presence, like the flag, was a big plus.)
Let’s go inside the mountain.
They call this part the Alpine Experience, and this giant snow globe is going to grow on you.
Had it not been for other people interested in seeing the thing I would have stood there until I shot every moving part. But sometimes tourists get in the way of a full, proper, tourist experience.
We walked down an ice tunnel.
Everything here is ice, except the lights and the handrail. Very James Bond.
I don’t know about you, but I seldom get to walk around in ice tunnels, so this was fun. Also, the acoustics were great. You’ll have to take my word for it.
There are several ice carvings through the area. Here’s just one.
The romantic story is that it was the nuns of the Interlaken convent (the town we started in at the beginning) who gave the mountain its name. They owned a lot of the pasture land at the foot of the glacier and the mountains. The rock faces seemed inaccessible and the nuns thought it jungfraulich, untouched and virginal. The signs say that’s not actually the case. The real story just sounds like a more natural evolution of language.
Welcome to the highest-altitude karst cave in Europe, at 11,423 feet.
The unsorted sediments seem to have arrived here by glacial displacement, or water. Dating has been a problem for scientists, but the research suggests we’re looking at mid-Pleistocene age accumulation. So we’re talking after the earliest documented human clothes, but earlier than human mastery of fire. This cave is inactive today, because the permafrost restricts cave-forming processes.
But if you’re not here for geology, you must be here for the chocolate!
That wasn’t the point of the day, but a nice benefit. We didn’t buy this bag; we just ate it right there in front of the cash register.
we actually enjoyed a perfectly healthy cucumber sandwich in the self-serve cafeteria, looking out to the mountain.
Also, if you go up this high, you will feel it. Drink a lot of water, our guide said. You’ll thank me, he said. Altitude headaches are real, he said.
He was right about that last one, at the very least. We’re at 2.25 miles above sea level there. In Zurich our hotel is at 1,330 feet. Our house is just over half that high. We were up there. It was great!
And Jungfrau is just one part of our amazing Switzerland adventures. Come back tomorrow. There’s going to be something that’s, perhaps, even more impressive!
