europeblog

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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Now here is something special. After emerging from the internet cafe, I thought I would go out and finish off sight-seeing Vienna. I was just taking some really bad pictures of a historic and artistic looking dome when I heard a really loud noise and trucks going past about 300m away. I had to investigate.

Coming closer, I saw it was a procession of punks and others and about a dozen floats with various types of music and noise coming out at a f/loud volume. So of course I found a beer and joined in.

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Last day in Vienna, at a rather expensive net cafe, because I forget where the cheaper one was, and was sick of the underage WoW addicts in the other cheap one.

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