europeblog

Spent the day wandering around Salzburg. Woke up nice and early because I had picked the optimum position for my tent so that it would get the first sun in the campsite (this isn’t always successful for me). Coughed €7 and checked the castle. They don’t permit bikes on the cable car up the hill so I saved €3 by cycling/pushing/carrying my bike up. It is super awesome weather, no clouds at all, so the view from the tower of the alps, etc, was pretty good.

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Fine weather today, but cool. Ended up in the town of Mozart’s birth, but am still wondering about his connection to fairly ordinary tasting balls of chocolate.

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Went soft, succumbed to the weather, chose luxury instead of nature. Viewed the longest castle in the universe.

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Saw and heard the biggest organ in the universe, donned beanie instead of helmet, ended up in Hitler’s birthplace.

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After squandering two days of hot sunny weather in smokey Linz net cafes, the rain started as soon as I was back on the road.

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Yeah Linz is small and nice. I have been spending a lot of time holed up in smokey net cafes uploading photos and GPS tracklogs, writing uninspired blog filler, revealing all my passwords to the keyloggers that are surely installed on these trojanned windows computers.

On server side I had a big geeky time and moved the blog from the creaking old donation-supported bur.st to my shiny Linode. Upside is that it’s mine, it’s faster and I can upload every single rubbish photo that I have taken. Downside is that it took about 5 hours in a hot smokey net cafe to get everything working… and I probably could have bought a flikr pro account for how much I spent on the net.

Also I did a little programming in python and made some ugly altitude/distance graphs. More stats coming later.

After spending some time drying out my tent in the morning, I headed over the hill of Wallsee, then over the kraftwerk to the opposite bank of the Donau. Today all the Austrian air force were out. There were planes and helicopters everywhere. During the night a couple of really loud planes boomed overhead. I imagined huge multi-propellor bombers overloaded with tonnes of H-bombs were headed for Russia. I haven’t been keeping up with the news so my suspicion was that due to some political blunder Russia had cut off the gas supply to Western Europe. Europe, no longer with enough gas to cook their käsekrainers, declared war in retaliation.

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Slept in a bit until 8:30, woke in the reasonable hope that the sunny weather at this moment would continue, alas the clouds closed in again, I packed my wet tent and left. A banana on the road for breakfast. Plenty of slugs out today and a few unfortunate ones ended up splattered all over various parts of my bike, which annoyed me a bit.

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Ah weather.

Woke up and it was raining, so naturally, stayed in bed until it stopped. Hit the hypermarket for food, then munched my food and caught up the last 4 days’ entries in my Tagenbuch. By 12:03 I was ready to leave. All the other cycle tourers at camping had left. The weather was OK but cloudy.

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Woke up to the heat at 7:30 feeling pretty tired. Packed up very neatly and left. No breakfast this morning because I didn’t go shopping the night before, because of the free parade. There are 3 good ways to cycle out of Vienna: on the bank of the Alte Donau, on the bank of the Neue Donou, or along the Donau isle.

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