I knew someone once who was said to be “all over the map” and I know that wasn’t a compliment, but maybe when applied to one’s physical body as opposed to one’s mental state it’s okay????? I hope so, because my physical body as definitely been all over the map recently. Oh wait! --- my mind has also been severely “boggled.” Darn.
Anyway I’ve just gotten my land legs back again after spending 3 weeks on the road sightseeing with my dad, and brother and Mike and an aunt and uncle (Lynette and Loren, my dad’s youngest sister and husband).
Nancy, Mike, Nancy's Dad, Aunt Lynette
Loren and Lynette have an adult offspring who has recently expressed his concern about all the “material (bleep-bleep-bleep)stuff” that they own that will have to be disposed of when it comes time for them to move to assisted living. If nothing else, the past 3 weeks have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that L and L are no where near ready for assisted living.
A couple of the places we visited Mike and I had been before – Gimmelwald, Hallstatt, Melk Abbey,
One little story I must tell about Hallstatt before I go on to the “new”stuff. We were in Hallstatt on a Saturday night and, as luck would have it, our favorite restaurant which we discovered on our first visit there was full. We were really hungry so we were forced to look elsewhere. We ended up at a restaurant with a live band – a jazz big band.
The Hallstat Big Band
Loren is a retired Air Force Band Director and still does lots of gigs with his trumpet on weekends, so he was particularly blown away by the unexpected bonus – a picturesque town, a delightful pension, a great meal and live music to boot. I have it from a pro – these guys (and the female singer) were no slouchy, small town, thrown-together, amateurish group. They were REALLY good. And if Loren hadn’t left his trumpet back in
So here are the new places to be wowwed over:
Our three mountaintop experiences were all similar in that they involved fairly expensive gondola rides, awesome views and absolutely PERFECT weather (a major stroke of good luck), but each was also quite different from the others.
Our Mont Blanc trip involved a large 50-people-stuffed-in-a-phone-booth style gondola ride to Plan De Aiguille, another similar ride to Aiguille du Midi and then a smaller 4 person gondola ride to Helbronner.
View from the 4-person gondola to Helbronner
The first 2 rides were pretty much vertical; the third was horizontal, taking us just over the border into Italy. There were spectacular views of Mont Blanc as well as other “dents” and “horns” (though not the Matterhorn) at hand throughout the trip. There were lots of crazy people with crampons and ice picks and ropes doing various crazy things at Aiguille du Midi.
View from Mt. Blanc Gondola
On the ride to Helbronner we looked down on tents pitched in the snow and groups of specks roped together making tracks in the snow fields and skirting the crevasses as they made their way to some destination unknown to us. All the novels I read as a teenager about mountaineers suddenly had a context.
View from the gondola to Helbronner
Getting to the Schilthorn involves a cable train to Grutschalp and a narrow gauge train to Murren and another large 50 person gondola to the Piz Gloria at the top. There is no snow on the Schilthorn this time of year – just rocks and more rocks and distant meadows and incredible views of mountains peaks and glaciers. There were several viewing platforms and a revolving restaurant from which to see it all. The James Bond movie “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” was filmed on the Schilthorn shortly after the tourist facilities there were completed. If I weren’t so adverse to “scary movies” I would rent it tomorrow just for the views.
Nancy and her three friends
The Eiger, The Monch, and the Jungfrau
Our trip to the Jungfraujoch (the saddle of the Jungfrau – -Jungfrau means young lady/virgin/maiden) involved a cable train to Wengen, another cable train to Kleine Scheidegg and another train that went through (i.e. inside) the mountains, to the Jungfraujoch (2 hours total travel time).
View from Kleine Scheidigg
When we got there just before noon the skies were fairly clear and we were able to get good pictures although it was really cold and really windy and we were glad for the indoor viewing areas.
By the time we left a couple of hours later it was completely socked in. There was one place where you could walk out (or ski out in the winter) onto the snow. I have pictures of a flagpole in the midst of a huge snowfield, silhouetted against the blue sky that could easily pass for a picture of Antarctica.
View from the Jungfraujoch
One side of the viewing facility looked down on a huge glacier “flowing” down the mountain away from the visitor’s center. “River of ice” is truly an apt description for a glacier. I’ve seen plenty of “toes” of glaciers in Canada and Alaska, but never looked down on a whole giant river of ice.
Our base camp for Mont Blanc was a town called Chamonix (pronounced shah-moh-nee). When we arrived in Chamonix at about 7:30 in the evening we faced our first and only real crises of the entire 3 weeks of travel. First we couldn’t find the pension at which we had reserved rooms. When we finally did, it had a sign on it that said “Closed for the season” – not in English or course, so we had to stop and translate to figure out why no one answered our knock. We weren’t sure what to do so we decided to eat dinner. The first restaurant we tried was a dud – high prices, menu only in French, an unappealing selection of entrees and really slow service. Finally we got up and went elsewhere – but not before Mike had managed to find rooms for us via his cell phone. The next restaurant was a winner and by 10:30 we all had full tummies and were tucked into a fairly nice pension with a view of Mont Blanc from the patio and a place to park the car about 10 feet from our room. (This is rare in Europe!) The next morning we discovered that we were also about 3 blocks from the gondola that went up Mont Blanc. All is well that ends well. When we got back home a few days later we discovered a message on our answering machine from a pension where we did, in fact, have reservations. It was not, however, the one with the “closed for the season” sign on the door. Apparently when Mike was making the reservation his finger momentarily shifted down one entry in the tour book from the pension he intended to call. Fortunately we hadn’t given them any money for the reservation – though we probably did give them added cause to wonder about Americans.
Chamonix was a neat little town. Among other things, there was a visiting German “town band” performing in the town square the second night we were there.
Loren actually got to conduct this band. He requested a particular German march that he was familiar with. One thing led to another and he ended up conducting a number. The “real” director, Andreas, was more of a liability than an asset. A lot of the players had a mug of beer close by to sip in between numbers, but the director was more than a little drunk. When he introduced numbers, he talked on and on. During one of his harangues, the band got tired of listening to him and started the next selection without him! One of the members just stood up and counted off and away they went.
Loren and Andreas, German band leader
Later that evening (after the “old people” went to bed!), Mike and I went back “downtown” exploring and came upon a string trio performing in the street. They were from Cracow and they were really good – the relatives really missed out this time – you snooze you loose. (Lynette is also a musician - plays the flute - she and Loren live, eat and breathe music.) I’ve decided that the 3 things that I like most about Europe are (1) the tidy and picturesque countryside, (2) the interesting architecture, and (3) the street performers – L and L call them “buskers”. More about this under Vienna.
Our base camp for ascending the Schilthorn and the Jungfraujoch was a town on the valley floor between the 2 peaks called Lauterbrunnen. (Mike had to miss this part of the trip – he took the train back to Heidelberg – boohoo!.)
We stayed in a bungalow at a campground in Lauterbrunnen. It was located right at the base of a spectacular waterfall. Our bungalow was a little small (Dad, Curt, and I had a room that was wall-to-wall bunks and we had to climb into bed from the foot) but it had a kitchenette and a reasonable-priced restaurant on the grounds which are important features in Switzerland where prices are sky high!
Staubbach Falls, LauternbrunnenAfter a day and a half at home in Heidelberg we set out again for Vienna (Hallstatt on the way – also a little town named Hohenkirchen where we Risch’s think our great grandmother Sophia Hoffman lived before her family immigrated to the US). We did Melk Abbey our first day in Vienna and then kind of an overview of Vienna via public transportation on the second. (Dad and L and L had been to Vienna before -- Mike and I have plenty of time to go back – so we skipped some of the “big” sights like the Schonburg Palace.) After our “overview” we toured the Imperial Apartments at the Hofburg Palace where we learned a lot of interesting history about the Hapsburgs and Franz Josef’s Hungarian wife “Sissy.”
Our second night in Vienna we happened onto a trio of musicians from Russia – again performing in the street – two balalaikas and a button accordion. A balalaika is a 3 stringed instrument – the one used (I think) to play Lara’s Theme from Dr. Zhivago. The sound cavity is sort of triangular shaped and the strings are plucked, not bowed. One of the balalaikas was small and high pitched, the other was very large and low. The larger one stood on a peg, sort of like a string bass, and was played standing up. The button accordion was like a normal accordion but had buttons instead of piano-ish looking keys. All that to set the stage for this --- they were incredible musicians!!!! They were playing classical music – Eine Kleine Nacht Musik and the like. Their technique and ensemble were impeccable and they were soooo much fun to watch. Have you every seen anyone do a vibrato on an accordion? Dad says Myron Floren used to do it on Lawrence Welk, but I was too young to remember that. Anyway, vibrato on an accordion is a function of the whole upper body. The whole performance was a real treat. I bought a CD and it’s good, but watching them was even better.
The Crakow Trio
The other highlight of our time in Vienna was the opera. L and L had bought tickets for all of us on-line back in May ($US75 per person). I am not a big fan of opera, but seeing one in Vienna seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I was certainly not disappointed. The opera was “Manon Lescaut” by Puccini. It was in Italian – as almost all opera is - but we each had a little LCD screen attached to the seat in front of us that displayed the lines as they were spoken – either in English or in German. We had nose-bleed seats in the FIFTH balcony – no air-conditioning – I would not want to be there in July - but just seeing the opera house “in action” was a real treat – it made some of the things I learned in music history in college come alive.
Vienna Opera House
Balconies
Several things about the whole experience were interesting: (1) apparently, in the interest of making an old work of art speak more clearly to modern minds, there is a growing trend among opera houses to “modernizing” the set and the props – cars instead of carriages and modern looking storefronts, etc. The lines and the music all stay the same, but the visual effects are “updated” -- an interesting idea which, at least in this case, was done very effectively, (2) the acoustics of the opera house itself were incredible – a full orchestra in the pit (5 string basses!) producing a big full sound but somehow the solo voices stilled soared above it WITHOUT being electronically amplified and (3) the technical ability of the orchestra was phenomenal – no squawky oboes or botched horn solos at all. Period.
After Vienna, Mike and I and Dad and Curt left Loren and Lynette in Garmish for a few days and went back home to discharge various duties and enjoy a little R & R in Heidelberg. Having written about Garmish before, I will skip on to our next and last excursion simply noting that L and L got themselves back to Heidelberg via the train – proof once again that they are NOT candidates for assisted living.
Our last Risch family excursion included Koln (Cologne), Burg Eltz and Trier (the last 2 being subjects of a previous travelogue). The reason for going to Koln (there should be an umlaut over the “o” in Koln but compuserve doesn’t allow that) is the cathedral there. Dad and L and L had been there before. All that Dad and Loren could seem to remember was that there was a McDonalds across the street. Lynette just knew that she wanted to go back. I am tempted to think that all three of them must have been inebriated when they were there before – how else could they SEE the Koln Cathedral and not remember it. However one of them is a tee-totaler so that explanation will not work. Perhaps a better one would be that American minds can tend to get overstimulated in Europe and when that happens things all start to run together – plus that previous visit was almost 20 years ago. Given the right state of mind, a day in Koln is not just an ABC day – “Another Bloody Cathedral.” We all agreed at the end of our visit that being in the Koln Cathedral was a vivid reminder of the finiteness of man and his insignificance in the presence of an almighty God. By contrast after our visit to Melk Abbey (and the chapel there) we all noted that everything there seemed very pagan. And in Vienna we all agreed that St Stephen’s Cathedral was too dark on the inside and badly in need of a face lift on the outside
The Koln Cathedral is extremely tall and extremely Gothic – a true Swiss Cheese church as my dad would say.
On the inside it is more plain and light than many European cathedrals. The stain glass was particularly beautiful. Of the cathedrals we’ve seen so far it is my favorite.
The Koln Cathederal
One theological note before I leave Koln: obviously there are lots of problems with the way Catholicism has been practiced in Europe over the past 2000 years, but they did do some things right. I’ve verbalized my thoughts on church steeples before. I also like the fact that churches in European cities are very visible. They are often on the highest spot in town and they are usually visible from quite a distance – sort of symbolizing that God is above everything else and more important than everything else. In Koln, you could almost drive into town without a map and find your way to the cathedral. It dominates the skyline. The “Twin Towers” of Europe are churches not office buildings or trade centers. It’s just unfortunate that that is a reflection of the past and not of the current European mindset.
One last tourist note and then on to family news. After our afternoon in Koln, we headed toward Burg Eltz, looking for a place to spend the night along the way. The tourist season was about over so we had the luxury of seeing what we might “happen unto” instead of making lodging reservations. We “happened unto” the Hotel Traube in the little village of Lof on the Mosel River. Lof was a delightful little town and we had nice rooms with a view of the Mosel and an absolutely scrumptious meal in the hotel restaurant – a European back door that even Rick Steve’s has not yet discovered. Such are the things that one misses on a big impersonal tour of European – though in this case there was actually one tour bus in town.
Our relatives having now returned to Colorado and all three of our kids now being in Washington state, we have an empty nest. But . . . . we think we have another batch of company arrived in a couple of weeks. Do any of you need to make reservations?
We now own a “new” van --– that doesn’t fit with having an empty nest I know, but . . . . . oh well. Mike and I aren’t known for being logical. We have been stewing all summer over what exactly our second vehicle should be. We finally decided that it had to be newer than our Dodge Caravan which has 170,000 miles on it. It needed to be big enough to haul company around in and also big enough for Mike and me to sleep in when we sightsee alone. We decided that that sounded a whole lot like another van. Mike is totally averse to buying a brand new vehicle, so once we figured out what we were looking for, we took the first reasonably priced, 2-3 year old van that showed up on the post lemon lot – which turned out to be a Honda Odyssey. Mike would LOVE to buy a German Audi – instead he got a Honda Ody. Unfortunately Audi’s are expensive and in order to ship one back to the US when we leave we would have to pay a minimum of $2000 to get it to meet US specs. By the way, Germans DO produce and drive vans – some of them bigger than our minivans. American vans are not as out of place in Germany as some would like you to believe. The one thing that Germans do NOT produce or drive is pick-up trucks.
On to family news. Deanna is back in Tacoma Washington for her senior year. She is living with some friends from our church there – Steve and Amy Kliewer. They raised 4 wonderful girls of their own and have been gracious enough to take on another one. Things seem to be working out at their house and Deanna is really glad to be back at Covenant High School. There are always surprises when you return to some place that you’ve lived before, but one of the more pleasant ones for Deanna was discovering that her favorite teacher, Mr. Bond, is teaching senior English. Mr. Bond is a demanding teaching and one of the “rewards” of being a senior at Covenant used to be NOT having Mr. Bond as a teacher – those were the good ole days – or so Deanna’s friends are probably saying.
Amy should be back in Tacoma also – at least by the time I hit the send button on this message. She is enrolled at TCC for the fall quarter, hoping to transfer to WWU in Bellingham after Christmas. She is still planning to live at the Parkinson’s but I’ve heard that Jim has a job with the IRS in Idaho and they might be moving????? Hello Ana???? Are you still with me???? This is a “secret” message for you.
Amy spent several weeks between the end of her job in the Catskills and the beginning of school in Washington helping with Hurricane Katrina victims. She started out in Knoxville, Tennessee where they were preparing for the arrival of 600 hurricane victims – many of whom never arrived (read “FEMA truly was messed up”). Somehow she ended up delivering a bunch of supplies to Sliddell, LA and working there for several days shoveling muck out of houses – “it was a lot of fun”. Then on to Lawton to spend a couple of days with Laura and Josh Carlson while she had the clutch replaced in her car and visited her Grandma Strohm in the assisted living center. Then on to Grandpa Risch’s in Estes Park and finally to Tacoma Washington in time for the first day of class. Her little green Nissan Sentra (that used to be Mike’s) has now been all the way around the US twice (it started out life in Montana and then moved with its owner to Ft. Benning, GA).
Alan has survived his first “project release” at Google and still likes his job – also his church. A couple of weeks ago he joined a Precept class (that he found on-line) that is doing Hebrews. That should provide us enough theological meat to keep Deustche Telecom in business for the duration of our assignment here. Actually it’s only 1.9 cents a minute for us to call back to the States. The challenge is to find a time when we are awake and the kid we want to talk to is too.
I am back to a schedule again –- that is, I have one scheduled event in life -– teaching my Bible study at PWOC on Thursday morning. We are doing the “Prophets of the OT” this time: Samuel, Elijah, Hosea, etc, etc. Unfortunately, mine is the only Bible study offered with any serious biblical content. While I was “all over the map,” an unexpectedly large group of ladies decided they wanted to take my study. (Hummm seems like there’s a lesson here about offering content vs fluff.) They only ordered 10 books and the PWOC president decided she couldn’t allow more than 10 to sign up without my permission. All my ladies from the last study dilly-dallied around about signing up and then couldn’t get in. The fall-out from that hasn’t totally settled. Meanwhile I am enjoying teaching the OT to a totally new group of ladies.
One of my busier friends/readers has informed me that I needn’t apologize for my long travelogues. So I will refrain from doing that though it looks like I’m starting my 7th page which seems particularly egregious. Perhaps the moral is that 3 weeks of travel is way too much for one travelogue
The future: Mike and I are thinking about Amsterdam over Columbus weekend. Hopefully, I will have two friends from Tacoma (Rinnie and Jennifer) to chauffeur around for several weeks after that. I plan to be in Tacoma for the week of Thanksgiving and the week before (ETS week at the seminary – Prof Glessner are you still with me?). Mike will also be in Tacoma for Thanksgiving. After that . . . . who knows.
Nancy
