The Yankee asked me to shoot a video of her on our bike ride this evening. So that took precedence of my other video plans. She was making a video and needed some B-roll, but she gave me carte blanche. So I settled on a clip of her going by me. Which means I had to be in front of her. And I decided, for some poorly oxygenated reason, to do this in a place where I’ve never taken any footage of her before.
Which means I had to stay ahead. And then I had to wait for her to come by.
But this is the sound I hear when she goes by.
I did set a PR on one Strava segment, though, and spent the entire rest of the ride, from that moment, trying to catch back up to her. Finally I did, but only on our street.
My lovely bride told me I shouldn’t put this into the world, but the forecast was for 107 degrees, and we didn’t hit that mark. So I taunted the weather. She said the weather would make me regret it. She’s really thinking of everyone else. Like I want it to be 107 degrees.
This was plenty. I’m not as young as I used to be.
More music from last Friday’s show! Here are a few clips from Barenaked Ladies, who were the headliners.
“It’s All Been Done” hit number one in Canada and landed in the top 10 in the US.
BNL’s live show comes with a lot of comedy and a bit of ad libbing and the occasional freestyle moment.
The song about pinching is a big hit.
There are also singalongs in a BNL show.
Here’s a newer tune. “Man Made Lake” was on last year’s Detour
There are classics, of course, and covers, too. We’ll get to some of those tomorrow.
No one is going to talk about this enough, but Wout van Aert had the most amazing ride in the Tour de France today. It was on the cobbles. He’d captured the yellow leader’s jersey, and was a favorite for stage five. And then it all went wrong. And then it went sideways and bananas. And then Wout van Aert showed his mettle.
He crashed once and narrowly avoided crashing into a team car. After he recovered from all of that, his team had the worst day imaginable and he had to drop back to save them. It seemed a sacrifice of the yellow jersey. But Wout is the strongest rider in the best field in the world. Here are the highlights.
So after his crash, and a near-crash, and animating the race, and giving that up to save his team’s two overall contenders, Wout van Aert still managed to narrowly hang on to the maillot jaune. He’ll give it up in the next day or two, and people won’t really appreciate his ride today as they should, but it was epic.
Friday night we’re going to a rock ‘n’ roll show, a good ol’ fashioned concert. Lights. Music. Happy people. Crowds.
(I can still count on one hand the number of frivolous things we’ve done around people since March of 2020. This weekend will involve numbers four and five. Maybe this sort of thing will soon stop feeling novel. Maybe it won’t feel like I’m breaking curfew.)
This will be our first concert since Covid came along. This is a show we should have seen in July of 2020. We bought these tickets in 2019. So, in two more days, we will see the Gin Blossoms, Toad the Wet Sprocket and Barenaked Ladies. I haven’t seen the Gin Blossoms since 1996. I’ve, sadly, never seen Toad the Wet Sprocket. We saw Barenaked Ladies in 2018. It was my third or fourth time I’d caught their act, but my lovely bride had never seen them. They were celebrating 30 years then, had just been inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. They put on a great show.
Anyway, we’ll have pretty nice seats for a great show and we’ll wear masks and, I’m sure, have a great time.
So to get ready, here are a few BNL clips from the show we saw in 2018.
And how was your summer solstice? The day was 14 hours, 55 minutes and 28 seconds here. And there’s always that guy who just can’t wait to point out that the days are doing nothing but getting shorter until December.
Around here? We hate that guy.
But we love the long days. If you stepped outside last night at 10:19 and looked west, moments before nautical twilight, it looked like this.
No camera tricks, no Photoshop treatments. That’s just the view after 10 p.m. in June.
If I ever say anything here is better than that, I am, in fact, making a secret, coded cry for help.
Since we talked about books last, I have recently finished you might be interested in. First was The Last of the Doughboys by Wall Street Journal reporter Richard Rubin.
In the earliest days of the 21st century Rubin started interviewing the surviving military veterans from World War I, all of them centenarians. He wraps his interviews around rich context about the Tin Pan Alley music of the era, and his own tours of France and a general historical overview.
Those stories are as uniques as the men and women’s experiences. Some of them colorful and sharp as they were in 1918. Some of the details had become foggy over the course of their long lives, as you might expect.
Some parts of the book are about some of the other parts of their lives. None of the people Rubin interviewed were a part of this experience, but that was up to chance and good fortune as much as anything.
I knew this particular story, but it is always surprising to think about it in the full context.
The crux of the book are those interviews, though, and memorializing those last veterans’ experiences. Rubin, in fact, had the chance to meet the last American survivor of the Great War. All of that is in the book. It’s a worthwhile read.
Now this one, Longitude by Dava Sobel. This book was a surprise hit, even for the author. She saw it go through 29 hardcover printings, translated into more than 20 languages and become a national and international bestseller. The 10th anniversary edition includes a pretty special foreword by Neil Armstrong.
Granted, the idea of a book about longitude seems like an important one. But it also seems like a daunting tome. How do you write an interesting book about invisible lines on a map? Sobel is about to show you. First, just enough of the technical to explain what she’s talking about, and why this is all so important.
And so now you know why this had been a problem for generations, and why the search for a solution was so important. As the book gets into that it quickly becomes obvious, even to land-lubbers, how most of the success of those pre-longitudinal sailors was about luck with skill. How anyone got to where they wanted to go before their supplies ran out is a mystery.
Then, we meet the people.
For whatever reason, when I opened the book I expected this to be a dense read, but, to Sobel’s great credit, it’s just about the most approachable text you can imagine. Give this a read, you’ll be pleased and surprised.
We took the Glacier Express, the world’s slowest express train, and enjoyed an afternoon in the Swiss Alps. Trains have been running here since 1889, the Glacier Express started in 1930, but the first panoramic trains, like the ones we enjoyed, have only been on these rails since 1993. The modern cars came in between 2006 and 2009, and they have all recently received a facelift. These are comfortable rides, and they offer three- and four-course meals. (The food was quite tasty …)
Otherwise, you sit back and enjoy the scenery. There are headphones with music and, from time to time, a narration with local points of interest and historical notes. We started in Chur, Switzerland’s oldest town. We traveled through the landscapes brought on by the last Ice Age landslides, and the “Swiss Grand Canyon,” past the oldest Benedictine abbey in the country, through valleys with towns that date back to the 11th and 12th centuries, near UNSECO World Heritage sites and, finally, to Zermatt and the cloud-shrouded Matterhorn, which, on this day, was still able to hide despite topping out at well over 14,000 feet.
But why read about all that, when you can see a bit of video from the train window.
Here’s our train …
And a few photos for you to enjoy. There are a few words down below, so scroll slowly, or you might miss a pun.
Here was dessert. Locally grown berries. Fresh and tasty!
We paralleled this rive a great deal of the trip. The closer you get to it’s source, the richer and whiter the water becomes. It’s full of nutrients and minerals and, eventually, it is very drinkable. But too close to the source, and it’ll give you an upset tummy. No matter where you are in Switzerland, though, the water looks beautiful. And chilly.
Panoramic train windows.
And speaking of panoramas, here’s one now. As with every panorama, click to see the larger version in a new tab.
This is Oberalppass and, at 6,669 feet, the highest point of the train’s trip.
I get one good joke a day. And this is where I used it.
There was a place near Oberalppass where they let us off the train for a few moments. Some of the scenic shots in this part of the post are from there. The Yankee got back on the train before I did, and so I took pictures of the train, too.
Here’s our river again. Notice how the water is getting white? We’re getting closer to the runoff source.
And here we are in Zermatt, a car-free village you can walk through in a few minutes. It’s a charming place. And at the other end of the valley, behind these clouds, you would find the Matterhorn.
We didn’t get to see it. Oh no! We’ll have to come back! Shoot!
Shutter error. Looked cool. I’ve added it here.
We had dinner at a little Italian joint, Casa Mia, next to the train station while waiting for our return train. We ordered pizza. This is the Pugliese, featuring tomatoes, mozzarella, coppa ham, burrata, dried tomatoes. So very tasty. That burrata was amazing …
And here are a few photos from our train out of Zermatt. Just a regular-old train, no panoramic windows, but amazing views. And here I’m able to share a bit more of the gorge-style landscapes.
Also, we had our own train car, which was a great way to travel.
We had to make a connection, but our second train was late in arriving, which shifted our schedule back by about an hour. It was the only train problem we had in Switzerland, an event I noted with this extra photo from our stop between here and there.
And we have two more days of Switzerland adventures to get through. As great as this one was, the one I’ll show you tomorrow might have been even better. So make sure you come back for that. Until then, “Hopp Schwiiz.”
