The Scenery and Food of Austria!

From September 5th through October 2nd, Agnes and I traveled to Europe to visit friends and relatives and see some of the beautiful sights of Southern Germany (mostly in the state of Baden-Württemberg) and Upper Austria (Oberösterreich). As you might expect, I took many hundreds of pictures, and thought I'd share a few of them with you. This first collection deals with the scenery and our culinary adventures in Austria ... first, the scenery ...

We traveled to the summit of the Dachstein, which offered incredible vistas of the Austrian Alps stretching away into the distance around the five lakes of the region ...

Of course, Agnes and I needed a happy snap at the summit, reached by two heart-stopping cable car rides ...

Our friends Alois and Steffi also took us to see the incredible Gosausee, in which the towering mountains are perfectly mirrored in the utterly still water of the lake ...

We didn't just go into the mountains. We also visited the Wachau valley along the Danube River. Composer Johann Strauss celebrated the river in his beautiful waltz "An der schönen blauen Donau" (translated as "On the Beautiful Blue Danube" and better known in English as "The Blue Danube Waltz") ... as it happened, the Danube was greenish-brown rather than blue, at least while we were there ... 

We also stopped at the picturesque town of Dürnstein, which is notable for its beautiful church tower ... as far as I can remember, the only one I've ever seen that was painted blue ...

The town of Dürnstein sits up above the Danube, and is reached from the riverside promenade and parking areas by a picturesque (some might say, "eerie") stairway ...

In the town of St Wolfgang, we enjoyed lunch with Alois and Steffi at a restaurant on the shore of the Wolfgangsee ...

... and after lunch, it was recumbent ... uh ... incumbent upon Alois and I to enjoy a nap in the sunshine ...

We also visited the scenic town of Gmunden on the Traunsee ...

We didn't just gawk at the scenery and pose for pictures. We also did quite a bit of eating, and encountered some interesting new dishes, such as Stecherlfisch ... seasoned fish baked on a stick or - as I like to call it - a troutsicle ...

It looks a bit hideous, like something Count Dracula might serve at his Halloween buffet, but was absolutely delicious.

We also went (twice!) to Huemer's Mostschank, a wonderful little restaurant in Bad Wimsbach ...

Most is the German word for a delicious hard cider, and I imbibed quite a bit of it while munching through some of the marvelous home-made cold meat and sausage platters offered up on the menu ...

Agnes and I enjoying the dinner and company at Huemer's with Steffi and Alois, and Alois's cousin Konrad and his wife Anneliese ...

And, lest I forget, I also had the chance to enjoy a "halbe Haxe" - half pig's knuckle with Knödel (dumplings) and sauce, washed down with a good Weizenbier ...

Here's one last image to round out this quick summary of our visit to Austria - my attempt at a panoramic photo from the summit of the Dachstein ...

I took more than a thousand pictures while were were on our vacation. I'll share a few more of them over the next week or so.

Have a good day. More thoughts coming.

Bilbo

Pirates Retirees of the Caribbean, Part 2 - The Eastern Caribbean

Yesterday we viewed the travelogue for the first half of our cruise vacation last month, featuring on our visit to various locations in the Western Caribbean. Today we look at our visits to several locations in the Eastern Caribbean ...

Since we were doing two one-week cruises back-to-back, we had a day to spend in Ft Lauderdale while the Regal Princess disembarked some passengers, boarded others, and restocked all its onboard bars and restaurants. We decided to spend the day on an excursion that combined visits to the Everglades and to a beautiful botanical garden (we love gardens).

We started with an airboat ride through a small corner of the Everglades, Florida's "River of Grass." Our tour guide was a fellow named Tom, who was an amazing fountain of interesting and entertaining knowledge about Florida in general and the Everglades in particular; at the end of the day, we knew all about the geography, geology, hydrology, and twisted history of the Everglades - his descriptions of the political and economic decisions that have caused grave damage to the ecology, and the expensive attempts to recreate the original natural flow of water and control invasive plants were a cautionary tale about what happens when greed and business interests overpower the natural order of things.

If you've never experienced an airboat ride, imagine this: you are sitting in an open-sided, flat bottomed boat, propelled by two giant fans driven by two huge (and very loud) engines ...

For the most part, we cruised sedately (if noisily) across the surface of the water, over patches of grasses and other water plants, watching for the lurking denizens of the Everglades, such as this alligator, who laid there and totally ignored us as we went by. A grouchy woman on the boat was convinced that it was a plastic alligator, placed there so that we'd be able to say we'd seen one. I noticed, though, that she wasn't convinced enough of that to try to reach out and pet him.

And there's a good-sized iguana sunning himself in this tree ... click the picture to embiggen it and see him ...

Twice, when there were long, open stretches of water, the driver of the boat put the pedal to the metal and we roared along at high speed ... an exhilarating, if extraordinarily loud, experience.  

After the airboat ride, we watched a presentation at an alligator rescue facility, where the American equivalent of Steve Irwin delivered an informative and often funny lecture on alligators, assisted by two of his rescued gators, "Godzilla" and "Target," who moved lazily around just enough to possibly convince the grouchy lady from the boat that they were real ...

From there, it was back onto the bus and off to the Flamingo Gardens wildlife preserve and botanical gardens ...

Flamingo Gardens got its name - oddly enough - from the presence of large numbers of flamingos, which are far more interesting in person than as tacky lawn ornaments. Here, Agnes makes the acquaintance of one of the bubblegum-pink birds, whose garish pink color (we were informed) comes from the chemicals in the shrimp and other marsh things they eat ...

We took a tram ride through the park, which offered us a chance to see the efforts being made to recover from last summer's hurricanes. A great many trees had been blown down, and whenever possible they had been straightened up, replanted, and propped up to try to save them ...

As it happened, our visit coincided with the annual Flamingo Festival, which featured a contest for ladies wearing garish homemade flamingo-themed hats, as well as all sorts of flamingo-inspired art ...

Flamingo'd out, we headed back to the ship to settle in for the second week of the cruise. Our first stop was, once again, Princess Cays, about which I will say no more ... if you're interested, go back and read yesterday's description of that visit, because it was pretty much the same.

After departing Princess Cays and enjoying another relaxing day at sea, we arrived at St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. We'd visited there before, loved it, and had been looking forward to our return visit with great anticipation. Sadly, though, much of what we'd hoped to do was no longer possible because of the lingering damage from last year's hurricane. From the balcony of our room on the ship, everything looked relatively normal, if not downright beautiful ...

But when we walked into town, the unrepaired damaged became more obvious, as in this fence at the edge of the port area that was mangled, twisted, and propped up with two-by-fours ...

We caught a bus tour up to the summit of the highest point on the island, and along the way we saw many ugly scenes of unrepaired damage. The driver told us that red roofs were an old island tradition, but that the "new" island tradition was blue roofs - the blue coming not from colorful shingles and tiles but from the plastic sheeting still covering missing or damaged roofs ... in this picture, you can see the ratio of blue roofs to any other color ...

As far as recovery from the hurricane goes, here are two data points from our bus driver: hurricane Irma struck in early September, and he regained power in his apartment on November 4th; and the three major resort hotels on the island are not expected to be able to reopen until sometime in 2020. The economy, which is driven almost 100% by tourism, is taking a huge hit.

On reaching the highest point on the island, we were able to see beautiful vistas once again - this picture looks out over Magens Bay, rated as being one of the world's most beautiful beaches ...

At the summit, we enjoyed banana daiquiris advertised as being "world famous." World famous or not, they were very potent ...

We returned to the ship soon after that, and relaxed in the hopes that the island's recovery will continue speedily and that our next visit will be to the beautiful place we remember. And then we sailed off into the sunset, headed for our final stop at St Maarten ...

We arrived in the harbor at St Maarten early on the morning of Thursday, January 25th. From our balcony, I had the first view of some of the residual damage from hurricane Irma ... I'm not sure how well you can see it in this picture, but there's a huge area behind the building that's piled high with crushed and battered cargo containers and other wreckage awaiting salvage ...

We'd planned to visit the island's famous zoo, but tours there were cancelled because of damage, escaped animals, and looting sustained during Irma's pounding of the island. Instead, Agnes, Bernadette, and I decided to just walk off the ship and take the water taxi ($7 for an all-day ticket, not a bad deal!) into Philipsburg to wander around for the day. Of course, the touristy happy-snaps had to come first ...

We saw the first of the storm damage from the water taxi at a distance as we cruised across the harbor, and found ourselves up close and personal almost as soon as we got off the taxi at its second stop ...

We wandered around the city on foot, trying to get away from the tourist areas near the harbor. As you might expect, the areas closer to the harbor and the major tourist spots (shops and restaurants) were in generally better repair, while a few blocks further into town, the damage was more visible, with lots of the blue tarps we'd seen in St Thomas, as well as large chunks still carved out of buildings, streets, and sidewalks. 

In spite of the damage, we enjoyed our brief (second) visit to St Maarten and look forward to going back again. After all, where else can you see glorious sunsets like this one? ...

One last thing to mention about our cruise: we've grown used to fine food and excellent service on the Princess ships, but the real stars of all this are the many exceptional crew members who always seem to remain cheerful and happy no matter how busy they are. One evening at dinner, one of our waiters was a young Filipina named Alpha (at least, according to her name tag) who laughed, sang, and joked throughout the entire evening. Agnes and I were too full to want dessert after dinner, and when Alpha returned to serve the desserts everyone else at the table had ordered, she put this plate in front of us - 

In case you can't read it (the strawberry syrup had started to run a bit), she'd written, "We are sweet enough :)."

Awwwwww ...

Oh, and one really last thing to mention ... when we arrived back at Ft Lauderdale on Sunday, I got a text message from our daughter asking us to text her when we left Dulles Airport in DC, headed for home - because she planned to meet us at the house with a nice meat loaf and mashed potatoes dinner!

And if there's a better way to come home at the end of a wonderful vacation, I don't know what it is!

So, that's the story of our cruise. We had a great time, with only minor glitches for weather and modifications because of last year's hurricanes. It was wonderful to see St Thomas and St Maarten again, and we're looking forward to going back again at the earliest opportunity.

But until then, I'm done.

Have a good day. More thoughts, on a more serious topic, tomorrow.

Bilbo

Pirates Retirees of the Caribbean, Part 1 - The Western Caribbean

From January 14th through 28th, Agnes and I enjoyed a two-week cruise in the Caribbean on board the good ship Regal Princess. Actually, we enjoyed two one-week cruises back-to-back - the first one to the Western Caribbean (with stops at Princess Cays, Ocho Rios (Jamaica), Grand Cayman (almost ... more about that later), and Cozumel (Mexico); the second one to the Eastern Caribbean, with stops at Princess Cays (again), St Thomas, and St Maarten. We were accompanied by Agnes's cousin Bernadette and her husband Richard, who came from Germany to do the cruise with us.

We had some concerns about whether or not the cruise would actually come off ... we'd booked the trip in early summer of last year, before hurricanes Irma and Maria ripped through the area, causing widespread devastation and loss of life. In the end, both halves of the cruise went ahead as scheduled, with all original ports included, although several of the tours we'd planned on taking were cancelled because of lingering storm damage.

So here's how it all came down, with today's post covering the first (Western Caribbean) leg of the cruise; tomorrow, we'll talk about the second (Eastern Caribbean) leg ...

We flew from NoVa to Ft Lauderdale the day before the ship's scheduled departure (not being dumb enough to assume that an airline will get you from A to B on time) and spent the night in a hotel near the cruise port. The next morning we transferred to the ship, wandered around while we waited for the delivery of our luggage, and sat through the mandatory emergency procedures briefing. Shortly after 4:00, with the ship's horn playing the old "Love Boat" theme, we sailed off on the first leg of the journey.

Early Monday morning we arrived at Princess Cays, an island owned by the Princess cruise line. We've learned that most (if not all) of the cruise lines that operate in the Caribbean have private islands that they include as stops, which provide additional opportunities for them to squeeze out money the passengers haven't already spent on board the ship. We rented some two-person clamshell beach chairs for the day and enjoyed splashing around in the water and getting sand all over everything. Here's a view of part of Princess Cays from an observation tower on the island:

And this is what the clamshell beach chairs look like: 

We were glad for the clamshells when the daily noon rain squall came through. By the way, Bernadette shot the photo above, and the clock on her camera was still set to German time ... it was 2:23 PM, not 8:23 PM, when she took the picture! 

Here's a picture of the good ship Regal Princess anchored offshore ... the captain wasn't trying to do a Costa Concordia, I just thought this was a neat angle to shoot the picture:

After leaving Princess Cays we spent a day at sea before reaching Ocho Rios, Jamaica on Wednesday morning, January 17th. Our initial impression wasn't the greatest, as we found ourselves ashore in a vast and barely-organized scrum of buses, taxis, and great crowds of milling tourists all trying to find their way around while slowly roasting in the bright Jamaican sunshine: 

We eventually found the right bus and ended up, after a short and rather hair-raising drive, at the Mystic Mountain rain forest, where we boarded a chair lift for a 17-minute ride through the rain forest canopy up to the top of the eponymous Mystic Mountain. I don't do heights especially well, and I wasn't particularly thrilled when the chair lift stopped cold just after the second tower, with Agnes and I gently swaying about 150 feet above the forest floor. It eventually started again after about ten minutes, and we continued up the mountain through the gorgeous tropical greenery with the blue of the Caribbean shimmering through the breaks in the trees. I'm not sure if you can really tell from this picture, but the chair lift ran on two levels - the trip up the mountain was at a tree-top level, while the route down the mountain was at a lower elevation to allow riders whose eyes were not screwed shut in fear to see the flora and fauna about halfway down to the ground:

Speaking of fauna, we met quite a few of the local banana spiders, which seemed to be everywhere, whether there were any bananas or not. I'll take the bananas, and you can have the spiders, thank you very much ...

At the top of the mountain were various opportunities to swim (they had a nice infinity pool!) or ride a bobsled partway down the slope. The guide explained that in a two man bobsled, the person in front steers and the one in the back screams. From what we heard, it sounded like a proper division of labor.

We didn't swim or ride the bobsleds, but visited a beautiful, serene hummingbird sanctuary (hummingbirds are notoriously difficult to photograph, but trust me - they're gorgeous) and took some photos of the port of Ocho Rios (two ships in town while we were there) 

and the beautiful Jamaican rain forest and sky

While we rode the chair lift back down the mountain, I commented to Agnes about how much the calls of the monkeys in the jungle sounded like screeching people. No sooner had I made this insightful comment than a young woman roared by below us on a zip line, screaming in terror and glued tightly to her safety escort. As we rode sedately past the platform where she'd landed, the escort gave us a thumbs-up and a happy smile and shouted up that "She saw Jesus!" From the look and sound of her, I think she saw a whole lot of saints, too.

Back at the bottom of the mountain we walked a meandering route through the forest back toward where our bus was parked, and passed lots of interesting trees and plants with signs indicating what they were. I thought this one was interesting ...

A tree that produces spices for use with pork and as an embalming agent. What could possibly go wrong? 

From Ocho Rios, we were supposed to sail to Grand Cayman. Unfortunately, the weather was so bad and the winds and seas so rough that the Regal Princess could not safely lower the tenders needed to carry us into the harbor (which was not suitable for huge cruise ships), and the captain made the decision to bypass Grand Cayman and proceed directly to the next stop at Cozumel, Mexico. This was disappointing, as we'd been looking forward to snorkeling and doing the stingray swim at Grand Cayman, but what the heck ... we'll probably be back*.

We arrived at Cozumel mid-morning on Friday, January 19th, after a relaxing, if unplanned, extra day at sea. There were seven (!) huge cruise ships in the harbor, five of them anchored alongside each other at one end (Regal Princess is on the far right), and two more about a mile away ... proof positive of the importance of cruise tourism to the local economy.

As soon as the ship was berthed and ready for disembarkation, we headed off to a day of lounging on the beach at Isla Pasión - Passion Island**.

It was a 45-minute trip by boat from the harbor around to the Passion Island resort, and the trip was ... well ... damp. The seas were fairly heavy and the open-sided boat threw up sheets of spray each time we hit a swell ... thoroughly drenching Agnes, who was sitting on the open port*** side. The seas were, in fact, rough enough that swimming at the beach was "at your own risk," and no lifeguards were posted. In the picture below, the posts you can see in the surf are supports for hammocks that allow you to relax in the warm water ... which were, unfortunately, off limits:

Away from the relatively narrow strip of developed beach, the island quickly gave way to fairly dense and beautiful forest:

We had access to a beachside buffet for lunch and an open bar for countering the lingering effects of news from Washington. There was also a cash bar at which one could get the more exotic treats, such as the "Passion Island Coconut," filled with coconut milk well-spiked with island rum. I couldn't pass it up:

And, this being Mexico, you couldn't escape the aggressive roaming vendors and - of course - the "discount drugstores:"

We returned to the Regal Princess about 3:00, having sufficiently roasted in the Caribbean sun, and the ship sailed at about 10:00 PM for the end of the first leg of the cruise in Ft Lauderdale, where we arrived early on Sunday morning, January 21st ...

... and where we will pick up the rest of the adventure tomorrow with the story of our cruise to the hurricane-devastated Eastern Caribbean. Have a good day ... more thoughts then.

Bilbo

* Unless the GOP Congress succeeds in wrecking our Social Security and our savings before then.

** When you're 66 years old, lounging on the beach constitutes passion.


*** "Port" = "Left." See how well I've mastered that nautical lingo?