The Wallbergbahn

On the first weekend Mom came, I took her and the boys to Tegernsee, where we rode the Wallbergbahn up that mountain to a restaurant. It was Sunday morning, and there is a beautiful little chapel up there:



There was a church service going on! Somber horns were playing, and the priest and all the listeners were standing outside. We went up close to listen a while. Both boys were very quiet. It was a neat place. We sat and looked out at the Tegernsee and the neat plains of green stretching away to the north. Here are some more pictures:







All of the pictures from Mom's trip can also be seen easily here.

Bad Hindelang

Mom, Kris, the boys and I stayed in Bad Hindelang for 5 days. This is in the Allgäu Mountains of Germany/Austria. We were just on the German side. They are not very high, and in our area were mostly forested peaks with outcroppings of limestone. But nearby they get pretty exciting. It's a beautiful area where, especially in winter, you can find real solitude (despite what everyone says, yes it's true, even in Germany!). I've been there a few times for climbing or snowshoeing. Here is my account of a snowshoeing trip there alone last January. And here is my trip report describing a couple of days of rock climbing a year ago. Here is a nice page on Summitpost about the range along with a map.

We rented a "Ferienwohnung" or "vacation apartment." This is very popular in Europe. This way you have a kitchen and can cook your own dinners, because eating out is expensive. You get to become a regular resident of the town for a while.

We stayed right in the center of Bad Hindelang. There was an excellent grocery store in walking distance, along with a bakery and some gift shops. Not much else! Though Mom and I had a really interesting walk through the cemetary behind the church. The gravestones were very beautiful. There seemed to be plenty of tragedies, especially one set of linked graves where three teenage boys died, probably in a car accident.

There was also an amazing greek restaurant. We had our favorite meal there, and Mom used the leftovers for days! Once we got pizza from next door, otherwise, we just let dinners come together in an ad hoc way at the last minute, with varying, but mostly good results.

Almost every night around 6 pm the cows would be driven through town from pastures on the valley floor into barns scattered around. That was very interesting! Here is Mom remarking on that:



Here was the view on our balcony:




And here was the general look of the countryside:



Mom took this picture of me and the boys playing in a cow pasture. They were very good and running but dodging cow manure:


One day we headed south to a mountain with a ski lift and a kind of sled you can ride down on tracks:






Afterwards we had an expensive but delicious lunch on the mountain. Mom got something with pfefferlingen mushrooms, and I got a steak. I don't remember what Kris got, but darn it, the poor girl doesn't usually find something she likes :-(. Elijah loves his train called "Diesel," and made me take pictures of it!





On the last day we went to another mountain summer-sled, which promised to be the longest in Germany. It was so much fun we did it twice. It was really, really, really fun! We tried to get Mom to try, but she told us how much she enjoys observing.

This was also the first time the boys rode a real ski lift, the kind they could jump out of if they went crazy. Happily they didn't go crazy :-).

The Breittachklamm

During our 5 day stay in Bad Hindelang, one day was pretty cloudy. Nearby, the Breittachklamm advertised itself as being perfect for a rainy day. In the car, family!

After 30 minutes we were there. Deep river canyon formations seem to happen a lot in the Northern Limestone Alps (a chain roughly from Salzburg in the east to the Swiss border in the west). They are called "klamms" in German, and for 100 years or so many of them have been developed for tourism. Tunnels and walkways lead through the canyon, bringing you very close to rushing white water or ducking under rock overhangs. In the winter, dramatic ice cliffs form in there. The mountain town of Garmisch, for example, has two famous "klamms."

So we thought this would be fun, but we'd have to make sure the kids held our hands for the areas where there are big drop offs. There is a guard rail, but it's just kind of an advisory rail.

We enjoyed it a lot. We had a little problem when Elijah put his foot down and didn't want to hold hands. But he came to see reason, and we could continue. We didn't go all the way through, but I think we saw all the spectacularly steep and dramatic parts of the canyon. Mom has been doing more walking here than in a month of Sundays, and this day was no exception!

Here are some pictures:










The rest are here.

Mom and I visit the Dolomites (briefly!)

On the way home from Florence, the weather was too good to miss a driving trip to the Dolomites. Just north of Bolzano we turned east and rapidly climbed up into the mountains. We were hungry for quite a while, but also in a hurry to make it to the Pordoi Pass in order to take a lift up to the Pordoi Spitze. This peak has an amazing 360 degree view of surrounding mountains. Finally we found a little fast food stand (there are surprisingly few of these, in fact the area seemed kind of deserted), and got a hamburger and a Panini sandwich.

After a drive through a pretty valley we started the first of 35 180 degree switchbacks that would get us up to the pass. Mom did really well...I've made people sick with my driving on these things! But I'm a very mild driver compared to the Italians, and especially to the motorcycles, trust me!

We got to the pass and it was freezing cold. We grabbed what jackets we could find and bought our tickets. The lift took us up several thousand feet in just 5 minutes. I was really happy to be able to show Mom the area. The Dolomites are really my favorite place in the Alps. The relief between summit and valley is very great, and very steep too. There is only one glacier in the whole range, but the many sheer cliffs make up for that. And the meadows are so peaceful and friendly, making a great contrast with the spiky peaks.

Later we sat in a meadow below the Sella Pass. We had the massive Langkofel peaks on our left, and Piz Boe with it's dozen or so subsidiary peaks on the right. Here are some pictures:













The rest of the pictures are here.

Florence with Mom

Updated to include pictures too. To see all the pictures from the trip just visit here.



Wow, there is a lot to write about, including the week in the Allgaeu Mountains with Kris, Mom and the boys. And as for Florence I'm just getting started. I'm at an Internet cafe a few doors down from our pension, Mom is upstairs reading. I won't be able to upload photos until I get home.

But we took two tours today, a walking tour first then a tour of the Uffizi gallery. They were both great, and Mom and I learned so much. I'm going to just write down a stream o' consciousness here for now, then edit later with picture, etc.




Our guide's name was Heather, she was really personable and started by giving an overview of the transition to the renaissance, preceded by a quick history of the city.

It was founded by J. Caeser when he traveled north on some occasion. It was spring, and the flowers were blooming. The city was named after Flora, goddess of flowers. So we call it Florence in English. It's Firenze in Italian.

We visited the square with an original column left by the old Romans. The roads exit the square north, east, south and west. This square was the Florence market for hundreds of years. Eventually, in the 18th or 19th century, the new emporer of Italy revamped the square and disbanded the old market. He cleared it away, leaving only the old column, and a new building on the north side with words to the effect of "where once was squalor, now is truth/light/etc."

During the Middle Ages, Florence became very wealthy because of wool. The Arno River was shallow near the city, and good for carting and dyeing wool. Then bankers appeared, like the Medici family. They charged ~25% interest to use their banks, and this was the sin of usury at the time. So they had to plow many profits into the church. A patron economy for the arts sprang up from that, and a very competitive, very productive period began that would last for hundreds of years. Florence was THE place for art, and money too. It was bigger than Paris and London in those days.




We next moved to an old building, maybe it was the Medici family home in the 12th century. It was a great tall building, oriented for defense. You could shoot arrows out of slit windows or drop boiling oil. There was no attention paid to symmetry, or clean facades or design at all. But it's indicative of the way Florence was in those days. You were fighting with far away nations like Spain or France, who would send armies. You fought with the other city-states in the area like Pisa and Venice. Finally you had intense rivalries with other families in the city.

On this building we saw the curious Medici family crest, with 6 balls glommed onto a shield. No one knows what the balls mean, even the Medicis forgot. We saw curious missing stones in the wall, this was for masonry scaffolding. They left the holes in case they needed to do maintenance later. On another tower we saw embedded stones sticking out of the wall at intervals. These stones have slots on the top so you could sort of "attach" a balcony. You would do that so you could have a garden. In fact, it would be foolish to have a garden on the ground: remember all those city states and families trying to kill you? So you'd attach your garden balcony one or two floors up.

Anyway, back to the old Medici family house. Eventually they moved out and the building was sold to the Wool guild. They embedded a picture of a sheep in the wall. But the Medici family wanted to "keep an eye on them," because any large concerns needed to be watched. So they built two flanking buildings with Medici bank offices on each side.

We saw another house, built by a wealthy competitor to the Medicis for absolute power. By this time the ideas of the renaissance were coming into vogue. These were notions like symmetry, perfection of form, Roman columns. Many of these ideas were being unearthed in Roman ruins and old Roman texts at the time. So this building is not oriented for defense. Instead it has corinthian columns, incredible stone masonry on the (completely without function) roof cornice. It has symmetrical, rigorously placed windows. Still, he saved some money by skimping on the side that faced no street!

Here is a "hole in the wall" bar where great families would sell extra wine to people on the street. You pass in some money, and get back a bottle. You could also get a cup of wine too. People would stand around and drink:



Apparently there are a few of these still in existence, though not in Firenze. What a great idea! Anyway, it's nice to know where the term "hole in the wall" came from.

Here are Mom and I at our well-deserved lunch break:



Argh, I've gotta go now. Future topics:

* Family chapels within churches
* Crypts, the "stinking rich"
* Buried alive, and first legal divorce
* Flood of 1968, "Mud angels," the Gothic church built from the Roman bathhouse.
* The Duomo dome, dramatic story.
* The conspiracy against two Medici brothers, one killed.
* The meat market on the bridge over the Arno. The private walkway for the family head.
* The hated statue of Hercules, the "sack of potatoes."
* The influential statue of St. George, done for the armor guild.

And more, I know I'm missing a lot, and I haven't even touched on the Uffizi gallery tour!