Donau # 2: and Motion

                               Church boat Vikinger - Katherine is in 2 seat, starboard side                               

 Sun. Sept. 21 (Day 2) - Vohburg-Bad Abbach

      Today we get in the boats, and on the water.  We have 4 Finnish kirkkovene (churchboats),  used to transport people - to church, among other places.  Sometimes different families owned each set of oars, and all had to contribute to maintenance. In addition to 14 rowers (7 rows, 2 abreast), there is a cox who steers with a real rudder, and room for a kielschwein.  We never did get a good explanation of this word which has something to do with pigs, but basically it means an extra person at the back of the boat.
 
      One of our churchboats is 6 weeks old - the Dorsch - and one is very old and Finnish-built - the Bergknappe.  The others are the Salier, named after one of the tribes which inhabited Bavaria, and the Vikinger, old and bright yellow.  There are only a few in Germany and these come from all over; one is on loan from a club in Berlin.  In addition, there are two touring quads, so named because the back is square, they are broader in the beam than racing quads, and have a tiller; easier to set and far more stable.  The FISA organizers have wisely mixed us up - in theory, we each get a day in each boat.  Over daily distances up to 40 k and up, you spend a lot of time with your seat partner, and have an ample chance to get acquainted.
 

Nothing but the best for these rowers!

 
        We launch upriver, at Vohberg, where we are heralded into the water by a brass band! - and row back down to the Abbey, where we have an enormous lunch, then row downriver to Bad Abbach - almost 41 k, a typical day.  These boats are wide and roomy - we each have at least one dry bag, and water, with us, to carry rain gear, extra clothes, chocolate...

Leaving beautiful Weltenburg Abbey

     Rowing a church boat isn't sweep rowing as we know it:  the rate is 16-20, we cannot feather the oars because they are wooden and very heavy, and do not need to because the boats are broad of beam and set is not an issue.  It's really endurance rowing, especially in some boats.  As I found out on that first day, the Salier is the worst - after about 3 hours I was seriously wondering if I had made a mistake coming on this trip.  In contrast, the Bergknappe, that good old boat in which the oars are hooked into the oarlocks, some with plastic fittings and some with bits of string, and in which the foot stretchers are late add-ons and look jerry-rigged, is so well-designed and engineered that you can practically row with one finger, and the hours go by almost effortlessly.

              Thomas Haarhoff             

     Our boats' "captains" are the German organizers of this trip - Thomas, Detlef, Gisela, Werner and Jens, head of FISA tour rowing. How do you explain Jens?  Picture a tiny, chuckling Norwegian gnome, who never gets in a boat without his Oktoberfest hat, has a big heart and a bigger voice.  You have to, he explains, when you are the admiral.  Thomas, a civil engineer who works on water issues, is a red-bearded Germanic sage, wears a straw hat and blazer on land and never gives you a short answer; ask him a question and you get a lecture.  Gisela, a retired maths teacher who is also in charge of transportaion, runs the bus, and her ship, exactly the way she must have run her classroom;

       Jens Kohlberg               

you do not speak when she is speaking and if you are late for the bus you will be left behind!  Detlef, the youngest, loves his crew, lets us take turns coxing and constantly compliments us.

 
     And Werner, dear Werner.  He is our maestro, the organizer, planner and leader of this trip, and feels responsible for every person in every boat every step  of the way.  His tireless and long-suffering wife, Renate, cannot row with us because she broke ribs a few weeks ago when she fell off a ladder while she was washing windows (there's a moral here...).  I spend the entire trip hoping he wouldn't have a heart attack before we finished.

             Werner Rudolph             

 
 
      We arrive back from Bad Abbach very tired and facing a typical rowing evening - off the water about 5, a guided tour of the Abbey Church - plain on the outside, high Baroque on the inside - at 6:30, drinks at 7:30, dinner at 8, bed - if we're lucky or skip dessert - 10 ish, and up at 6:30 the next morning for a 7:45 departure.  I hope you understand now why this blog is a week behind, but at least now we are in motion.  For each kilometer we travel we row about 75 strokes:  3000 today, almost 20,000 by the end of the week.  Today, and for the rest of the week we are now, definitely, on the Donau, and in motion.

Donau, # 1: Time

Sat. Sept 20 (Day 1):  Munich to Kloster Weltenberg

Weltenburg Abbey

...is not on your side.  Neither is there time to spare.  When we have no time we want it; when we have time we use it up.  Either way there is never enough.  I've been particularly conscious of this truism on this rowing tour; we're literally busy from morning to night, with never a minute to spare.  And this is supposed to be a vacation!  But perhaps I should start at the beginning.

     True to form, it took me as long to get from London to Munich as it took my four fellow rowers to get there from Seattle.  The flight from London to Brussels was an hour late and as a result I spent a very long day in Brussels airport while my friends spent theirs drinking good German beer and watching the Oktoberfest activities in Marienplatz.  About 10 p.m. I emerged from the S-bahn at Truderingstrasse in the pitch dark, gamely hoping I was dragging my suitcase in the right direction.  What a relief to get to the hotel, tea and bed.

Oktoberfest in Munich

     The next morning we enjoyed a long, gargantuan breakfast (I can see already that I am going to run out of adjectives to describe the vast quantities of food we've encountered here), and made our way back to the Munich hauptbahnhof, where we found our bus, dropped off our suitcases and had time to take a quick look at the festivities (lederhosen and dirndls everywhere!) and enjoy our first German cafe.  (I really regret not being able to drink coffee here - such a waste!)

Stone Carving at Abusina

    On the way to Weltenberg we stopped at Abusina, a UNESCO World Heritage site where the ruins of a Roman fort have been excavated.  The ruins are significant because the Danube was the northernmost point of the Roman incursion into southern Germany; the fort prevented the Germanic tribes invading from the North.  The Romans decamped from this area in the 5th century A.D. after Rome burned, and were replaced by the tribes whose names eventually led the region to be known as Bavaria.

The Danube from our window

     Kloster Weltenburg (Weltenburg Abbey); founded in 620, is the oldest abbey in Bavaria; now it is proud home to 7 Benedictine monks. A biergarten fills the monastery courtyard; founded in 1050, the abbey's brewery is the world's oldest and its Dunkel beer has won the World Beer Cup several times.  The monastery also has a Gasthof (guesthouse), which was remodeled last year after the disastrous floods of 2013, and which operates almost like a hotel.  The walls are 3 feet thick and the rooms are beautiful and spare; all the building's huge timbers are exposed, and our room looks right out over the river.  The Abbey is situated on a peninsula called the Danube Gorge where enormous crags tower over this narrow area of the river, also a nature reserve.

The Bainbridge 5, ready for action   

      The evening was filled with introductions, information and - being Bavaria - enormous quantities of creamy food; after two days I learned to eat sparely to preserve my digestive system!  After the meal, there was a memorial ceremony on the beach in memory of an Austrian rower, known to many on this tour, who drowned in the Danube a few weeks ago.  A circle of candles next to the water glowed as one of the monks intoned a prayer and all of us threw a flower into the flowing river.

     There is little time, all week, to reflect, take a walk, write a blog post, email or catch up on the news.  Particularly on this first day, though, surrounded by almost 70 strangers, bombarded with instructions and never having seen a churchboat, an hour to reflect would have felt even more luxurious than our surroundings.  Hence my writing this a week later.  Nonetheless, we are happy to be here and look forward, with not enough time even for trepidation, to tomorrow's adventures. 

Devon

North Devon - looking West along the Southwest Coast Path from Westward Ho!

London.  Wed. Sept. 18

Southwest Coast Path through Devon and Cornwall

     Ifracombe, Barnstaple, Clovelly, Bideford; these seaside towns in Devon (the foot of England) were where my family went on summer holidays when I was a child.   I remember holiday camps (think England, 1950's), riding ponies on the moors, picnics, sailing.  So it was with considerable interest that I ventured back to this territory, 50 years on, for a weekend away to celebrate Bridget's 30th birthday.

     We left central London on Friday at 6 p.m.; from Paddington it takes less than three hours by train to Exeter, and from there a local train took us to Barnstaple, and a bus to Upper Yelland Farm, where we stayed for two nights.  We considered renting a car, but short of going out to one of the airports (an hour on the tube) it's hard to return a car in central London on a Sunday night.  Not horribly expensive - 85 GBP for the weekend, but that much again in petrol; it worked out about the same price as the train in the end.

Upper Yelland Farm - our B&B

     Our B&B was everything a B&B should be - 300 years old with tons of character and a lovely garden, comfortable beds, and a breakfast that knocks your socks off and lasts all day.  It was divine - homemade bread, jams and marmalade, eggs from local chickens, lashings of streaky bacon, good hearty English sausages and fried tomatoes (I skipped the baked beans).  The farm is dog-friendly and everyone staying there, except us, had dogs; always a good sign.  All in all, we couldn't have been happier with our choice of accommodation.

   
     On Saturday, gasping for air after downing an entire day's worth of food at breakfast, we set off by bus to walk a section of the Southwest Coast Path (SCP), Britain's longest long-distance walk; 650 miles, from Minehead in the north, around Land's End to Poole, in the South.  The bus took us to Westward Ho! (yes, it actually has an exclamation point in the name) on the coast south of the River Taw estuary, where, in addition to sailors, kayakers, swimmers and surfers also recreate; there's a surf school nearby -I kid you not.  The path was just yards from the bus stop.

Start of SCP in Westward Ho!

     I got the cliffs and dramatic scenery I'd wanted, plus a lot of up and down, mostly on stairs cut into the hills; our calf muscles were screaming.  Besides the sea vistas there were steep pebbly beaches, fields and woodlands.  We passed lots of hikers going from Clovelly to Westward Ho! - both lifeboat stations -in support of the Lifeboats; a 16-mile journey.  We hadn't planned how far we intended to go; we had to work around the bus schedule and got off the path at Buck's Mill, about 7 1/2 miles from our starting point, plenty tired.  From there it turned out to be another mile to the main road and the bus stop and we had to dash to catch the only bus for 4 hours.  We stopped in Bideford for a well-earned Devonshire Cream Tea (tea, plus scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam - yum!), and loaded up with fish and chips to take home for dinner.


     On Sunday morning we shared a table at breakfast with a couple in their mid-70's.  They moved to Cornwall from outside London 5 years ago, and over a two-year period had walked the entire 350 miles of the Cornwall section of the Southwest Coast Path.  Now they, and their yellow lab Tessa, were doing some of the Devon bits.  They also proudly recounted how, on their 50th wedding anniversary the previous year, they had gone our body-boarding on the Cornwall coast near their home (in wetsuits) with 12 of their 13 children and grandchildren, in the pouring rain!

Crow Point, Braunton Barrows

     Peter, our host,  had bicycles for rent, so after breakfast we started our ride on the 30-mile long Tarka Trail, one of Britain's longest continuous traffic-free walking and cycling paths, which happens to run right next to the farm.  We rode back towards Barnstaple along the River Taw, crossed the river, and headed west to Crow Point on the Braunton Barrows, part of a UNESCO Biosphere preserve.  Here it was flat, grassy and sandy, with many grazing cows and sheep, in stark contrast to the previous day's landscape, and it was lovely not to worry about cars and traffic.  We stopped for a pub lunch and made it back to Upper Yelland Farm, our B&B, after a very decent 24 miles in the saddle, in good time to catch a bus back  to Barnstaple and from there trains back to Exeter and London. 

Bideford, on the River Taw

    Having had a little taste of the SCP, I definitely want to come back for more.  The SCP Association has an itinerary which invites walkers to cover the entire 650 miles over 8 6-day weeks of walking.  I'm thinking I could walk a week or two a year...  It's something I could plan as part of each trip back here.  There are sections in Cornwall, from Penzance to St. Ives, which are more bouldering than walking, apparently; the trail guide describes them as "extreme."  But our breakfast companion, who had done many British long-distance walks, including several in the Scottish highlands, was of the opinion that the SCP was the most beautiful walk in the world.  A good reason to return to Devon, again.  And I won't wait 50 years this time.

Green

The Serpentine in Hyde Park, with a view of the London Mosque

London, Fri. Sept. 12

     I think I am genetically programmed to require green in my landscape.  The day I arrived in California from England the temperature was 106 degrees F; I thought I'd arrived in hell.  In all the years I lived there, I dreaded spring's rising temperatures and the fading of green from the hillsides; Maggie was bitten by a rattlesnake on April 1st when the temperature was 90 degrees.  Having grown up in England, I still feel most comfortable in a green, temperate climate.

Primrose Hill

     Moving to the Pacific Northwest from California felt like breathing a sigh of relief; I even hate it when my grass gets brown in the summertime.  Green is also a relief to a country mouse like me in the city, and considering its size - 8.3 M people, 607 sq. miles - Central London has a wealth of green space.

    The 8 Royal Parks, former chases (Royal hunting grounds, enclosed in the 15th century) together occupy almost 5K acres; Hampstead Heath an additional 800.  In addition, they boast 68 miles of trails and paths, 21 miles of lakes and ponds, 100K roses and 37 million visitors/yr.  Bridget lives between Primrose Hill (also a Royal Chase which became public land in the 19th century) and the Heath in Northwest London, and often walks home to her flat in Belsize Park from her office (next to the Bond St. tube station). So today I decided to follow this path south, by bicycle, and continue on through Hyde Park, Green Park and St. James's Park (all 3 Royal parks) to the Thames. 

     I started south through Primrose Hill, which offers one of the best views over central London, and proceeded through adjacent Regent's Park.  Among other accoutrements (like the London Zoo), it boasts Queen Mary's Gardens; with its elaborately gilded 4 gates it houses the national delphinium collection and 9K begonias, as well as of roses still blooming in this sunny September weather.  London's parks are well-used; everywhere people were picnicking, playing with dogs and children, biking, skating and running, and lounging in  London's iconic rentable deck chairs.


     From Hyde Park, with the help of the London A to Z (indispensable, google maps notwithstanding) I meandered my way through the city streets to Hyde Park, where the tourist hubbub really began; fortunately there's a bike path around the perimeter.  Hyde Park boasts the Sepentine, a lake with its own 150-year-old swimming club.  Members swim there every day of the year, breaking the ice if necessary in the winter!  Right across the street from Hyde Park, literally, is small St. James's Park.  470 years ago this area housed a hospital for women lepers; today you can watch Trooping the Colour in Horseguards' Parade.

Jubilee Gate, Queen Mary's Gardens, Regent's Park

  
     Green Park, next to Buckingham Palace, is the end of a chain of parks which stretches from Kensington to the Thames.  When Mary 1 married Phillip of Spain in 1554, Sir Thomas Wyatt led a rebellion here, and it was famous (or infamous) as a dueling spot until 1667.  Even in mid-September it's mobbed with people (8M visitors/yr!) but still manages to feel serene and lovely. 

  
     And voila!  On the other side of Green Park is the Victoria Embankment, right across the river from the London Eye (no, I am not going to waste 25 GBP to ride it!).  I've made it from Northwest London through 4 London parks to the Thames, the city's fluid center.  Heading back, I work my way northeast through the Temple (home of London's lawyers), then take a straight shot to Belsize Park up Kingsway, Southhampton Road, Woburn Place and Eversholt Rd. (so you can follow my route on google maps) to Camden town, then up Havistock Hill Road to my reward - a nice strong cuppa in Bridget's sunny flat.


      Bicycling is a great way to see any city; in London it's surprisingly quick and painless: I wore a helmet; cars, buses and taxis were tolerant, and I felt quite safe.  All told, I probably rode only 10 miles today, but in that small distance covered the heart of London and managed to wend my way through most of the major London green spaces.  The moral of this story?  Even a country mouse can thrive in a city, as long as it's sufficiently green.

The Green Park was first recorded in 1554 as the place where a rebellion took place against the marriage of Mary I to Philip II of Spain. It was a famous duelling site until 1667 when Charles II bought an extra 40 acres and it became known as upper St James's Park. - See more at: http://www.royalparks.org.uk/parks/green-park/about-green-park#sthash.yYmuMV9G.dpuf

The Green Park was first recorded in 1554 as the place where a rebellion took place against the marriage of Mary I to Philip II of Spain. It was a famous duelling site until 1667 when Charles II bought an extra 40 acres and it became known as upper St James's Park. - See more at: http://www.royalparks.org.uk/parks/green-park/about-green-park#sthash.yYmuMV9G.dpuf

,

Shelling Peas

London, Wed. Sept. 10   

From Bridget's living room

     I offered to make dinner tonight, so I'm sitting here shelling peas.  Pop, zip, slide; the motion is as familiar to me as brushing my teeth.  How many times in my life, I wonder, have I done this?  In the U.S., fresh peas are a once-a-year treat. We ate them with every Sunday roast when I was growing up; cheap, prolific, easy to grow.  And despite all the vegetables I've been introduced to, and enjoyed, in the decades since, fresh peas, lightly steamed, tarnished with butter and just a hint of salt, are still my favorite vegetable.

     Which led me to meditate on the edibles I return to when I revisit England.  McVitie's Chocolate Digestives - not those fancy-ancy dark chocolate johnny-come-latelies; milk chocolate - the real deal.  A biscuit and a nice cup of tea - thick, dark, laced with whole milk.  Robertson's Thick Cut Seville Orange Marmalade; spread thickly atop lashings of creamy English butter on a hearty slice of whole wheat bread.  Jam.  When we arrived home from school, we'd dash upstairs to watch our tiny black and white telly, and Mum would call: "Bread and jam, bread and butter, bread and sugar or bread and dripping?" - our choices for tea.

     Growing up in a County Council estate outside London, we walked to the shops to buy food:  bread at the baker's (split tin, 11 1/2 d.); fish (and herring roe) at the fishmonger's; turnips, potatoes, carrots, peas at the greengrocer's.  There was also a fish and chip shop, a salon where my mum had her hair "done" every two weeks, and a Coop where my sister and I purchased, with our meager savings, four rather useless tiny glasses in different colors for one of Mum's birthdays.  Across the street, and past the entrance to the Tube, a quonset hut housed the Brownies' weekly meeting.  And up the road was the stationer's (newspapers, magazines, cigarettes, sweets) where I spent my weekly sixpences on Cadbury's milk chocolate.

     I still love Cornish pasties, pork pies (about as healthy as Spam), and scones, with or without clotted cream.  But it's impossible not to acknowledge some of the harsher historical realities that color my childhood.  Until I was at least 10, orange juice only came powdered; the Seville orange you got in your Christmas stocking was a once-a-year treat.  Bread was rationed from 1946-1948, sugar until 1953 and meat until 1958.  And austerity wasn't the worst of it.  As a child, I'm ashamed to recall, we collected the paper figures inside the lids of the Robertson's jars (jam as well as marmalade): "Golliwogs," thick-lipped, large-eyed caricatures of Africans.  You got a prize if you collected enough; no one in England in the 1950's thought twice about racial stereotyping.

From Anna Jones's A Modern Way to Eat

     Cadbury's Flake bars, Bassett's Licorice Allsorts, Maltezers, Ribena (blackcurrent cordial) - these are still part and parcel of every English child's life.  But they also have the benefit, in London as in most other urban areas of Britain, of living in a multi-cultural, multi-lingual society.  Prejudice not only still exists but is a tangible undercurrent here in London, but Pamela and Christopher live, and learn, alongside Raul and Ahmed, and that has to be better for everyone than the lily-white, homogeneous England I grew up in; I was 13 when I remember seeing my first person of color, an American serviceman who purchased some musical instruments from my dad before we emigrated to the U.S.

     Every time Anglophilic Americans drool over England - how cute, picturesque and quaint it is - I have to measure my response.  Yes, there are wonderful things here, but intractable problems, too.  At least the cooking is a lot better than in my childhood; until I went to college the only salad I had ever eaten consisted of iceburg lettuce, tomato and cucumber with salad cream, a peculiarly English invention that tastes like mayonnaise with a dash of relish.  Tonight those shelled English peas, along with leeks, fresh asparagus and broad beans, will go into risotto, a dish I never heard of until I grew up in a different country.

A Place to Sit

London, Mon. Sept. 8, 2014.  I think.

     Spoiler alert; just arrived in London after traveling for 17 hours, and this is going to be something of a rant.

     Cheapskate.  Penny-pincher.  Tightwad.  Bring it on; I embrace those labels and wear them with pride.  Between Depression-era parents (my mother's chronic back issues may have stemmed from childhood rickets - 10 children and barely enough food) and 10 years a single mom, every month a battle to make ends meet, I've learned the value of a buck the hard way.  I consistently deny myself small pleasures, and I also hate to shop; on principle I also avoid buying almost anything new.  $5/day for coffee or lunch over the course of a school year, I'd tell my students, is $1K, a year's worth of college textbooks.  Bring a PB and J instead.

Canadian Rockies - from my window seat

     There are some things I am willing to spend vast amounts of money on, however;  airline tickets to see my children in far-flung places, for instance.  But what do you actually purchase when you shell out those those hard-won dollars on kayak.com?  1/400th of the fuselage of a 777?  No, you buy a SEAT, the opportunity to park your butt in an uncomfortable sliver of space for an unconscionable amount of time, daring to hope you won't starve until they get the next dose of food to your row in the nether regions of the flying sardine can.

     Now the airlines are charging for everything in ADDITION to the ticket price, and you have to pay for the privilege of getting a seat ahead of time, if you're not willing to take your chances with what's left 24 hours prior to your flight.  But true to character, I'm one of those people who sits at my computer, ready to push the "confirm" button exactly 24 hours and zero minutes before a flight in an effort to nab the closest window to the front, for no extra cost.

Bridget's books - arranged by color!

     But this time it didn't work, despite repeated attempts on both Air Canada and Lufthansa.  It wasn't clear whether the transatlantic flight was an Air Canada flight operated by Lufthansa, or vice versa, so  I called Air Canada, multiple times, only to get waiting periods from 39-44 minutes (I was game but my phone wasn't).  I then called Lufthansa, on Skype, at 11 p.m., because their phone number is in the UK.  I finally got through to Air Canada at 3 a.m.  Bottom line?  Neither airline could help me, except for "giving" me a seat on the puddle-jumper from Vancouver to Seattle in a month's time.  Woop-de-doo.

     I've conceived a great nostalgia for those cute little plane 
diagrams where you used to be able to choose your own seat, 
knowing when you shelled out money for a ticket it also included
somewhere to actually sit on the plane.  All told, I probably spent 8 hours trying to nab a window seat on this last flight.  Was it worth all that rigamarole?  Have YOU spent 10 hours in a middle seat on an overnight flight? - Tis a fate to be avoided at all costs.  But I still have to ask:  Why did I have to go through this hassle to secure my god-given right to a seat with my ticket price?  Bloody airlines; next they'll charge you for the privilege of going to the toilet! ?

Ah; finally a decent cup of tea!

    Dispirited and royally fed up, I got no help, and a middle seat on the long leg to London, from Air Canada at Seattle airport; this on top of the indignity of having to check my bag, which weighed more than 22 lbs. thanks to all the loot I packed for my daughter.  In Vancouver, I barely got the time of day from the gate agent.  As well as being a penny-pincher, however, I'm also stubborn, so I stood in line with the other pleading passengers; my last shot.  And wonder of wonders, the woman two ahead of me gave up her window seat in row 41 to sit next to the person she was traveling with, and the nice lady gave it to me.  Eureka!


     My advice?  Next time you try to sleep on a plane, there's nowhere to put your head, your legs or your elbows, and some idiot has opened their window shade to bright sunlight at 2 a.m. on your body clock, compose a rant.  Great cure for jet-lag.  

It Ain't About the Outfit

Bainbridge Island, Fri. Sept. 5

     How on earth does anyone actually make it onto an airplane?  I have spent the best part of the past two weeks - no, let's be honest; the best part of the past month - putting things in my suitcase, taking them out, changing my mind about the number of T-shirts I should take, remembering to add things in the middle of the night (swimsuit!) and generally stressing about getting ready for my month-long trip in two days.

Lisbon at Sunset

     I should know better.  15 months ago, I made a really bad decision; I checked my bag on a flight to Philadelphia, bound for Manchester and Lisbon.  The connection was three hours late, I was booted off my flight, and relegated to a faceless Manchester airport hotel room (without tea!).  No sign of my bag. It was the weekend before Christmas and not at all clear I would be able to get there (Lisbon) from here.  The next morning I had to take a flight to Paris at 6 a.m., spent the best part of 6 hours tracking down the airline's Lost Luggage area where I filed gobs of paperwork and, for my pains, received a toothbrush and an oversized white T-shirt (clothing?  sleeping?) before finally making it to Lisbon that afternoon.

Our view - Alfama

     Day after day, despite endless promises, my suitcase didn't arrive.  I was told its arrival was imminent, it was in Munich, Istanbul, Afghanistan (I kid you not).  It finally showed up the afternoon before I went home, 10 days later.  I spent those 10 days alternating between two t-shirts and pulling on the same  increasingly grimy pair of jeans every day.  Slightly distateful after the first week, but really?  Worse things could happen.  My memories of that vacation do not revolve around my lack of a wardrobe, but on the sights, sounds and experiences I enjoyed with Bridget.

    As a friend's husband so wisely noted, we're not going to Siberia.  I can buy toothpaste and even a swimsuit in London or Vienna.  So why is it so difficult to choose?  I suspect it's the well-earned fear that we'll stick out like sore thumbs in our Patagonia/REI/North Face Pacific Northwest gear, or that we all secretly have visions of ourselves dressed in our finest? favorite? most flattering? shirt/dress/pants/shoes while we eat strudel or sauerkraut or Cornish pasties in a small cafe in a foreign town, as if it's any different than going to Bainbridge Bakers for coffee. 

Finally...

     On this trip I'm visiting London, walking in Devon, rowing down the Danube, and sightseeing in Vienna and Prague; lots of different clothing needs in the space of a month.  I pride myself on traveling light; just one carryon.  (Not as light as my daughter's friend, who spent a week in Paris with only a large shoulder bag!)  And Rick Steeves notwithstanding, I really appreciate having a few changes of clothes.  Somehow in my fuzzy little brain, however, travel and clothing are linked together in ways I wish I were better at ignoring.

My Crew

     I'm leaving Bainbridge - my sweet dog, my rowing buddies, this beautiful weather - in under 48 hours, checking multiple times per day that I have my passport, credit cards, itinerary and a good book, have left good instructions for the dogsitter, a clean house and a watered garden.  I'm still stressing about how many t-shirts I should take, but really, I've been 99% ready for quite a while.  I'll keep stressing until I'm buckled into my seat, the airplane door is closed, and I can no longer change my mind.  Then I'll sit back and have a whale of a time; I'm not going to Siberia.

     So show what you're made of in Row for the Cure and at Otter Island, Bainbridge; be grateful every day that you get to row in such a beautiful place, with such wonderful weather and with such a great group of people.  I'll be back in the boatyard in a month, wearing the same grubby old rowing clothes.