Venice

Awed by the speed of a passing Venetian

Excerpt from Voluntary Nomads, Part Seven: Austria Adventures, Chapter 30:

Venice

A week after I ran the Vienna Marathon, Fred and I caught the early morning train for a mini-vacation in Venice. We chose the same quaint hotel where Fred had stayed with his friends a couple months earlier. Ochre plaster walls and antique furnishings provided a mellow old-world backdrop. Fred and I exchanged looks of wonderment as we followed the dwarf concierge up the narrow staircase to our floor. The stage was set for romance, mystery, and intrigue.

We strolled to a small neighborhood trattoria where we relaxed in candlelight and enjoyed the best meal of our lives -- baby clams bathed in an unbelievably delicious wine sauce that sent our taste buds to paradise.

After lingering over a second glass of wine, we meandered back to our room, anticipating sweet dreams. But during the night, our hotel lost most of its romanticism. The windows, open in a vain attempt to catch a cooling breeze, overlooked a waterbus stop. Traffic was heavy and midnight conversations were loud and boisterous.

Well before dawn the next morning, the rest of the romantic air leaked out of our hotel when the fish stall beneath our window opened for business. The musical tones of the fishmonger's patter could have been tolerable, but can anyone luxuriate in bed and relish the smell of dead fish? Ah well, we had plenty of sightseeing to do, so we got up and got going.

At breakfast we learned that sitting down to eat in Italy doubled the bill. A helpful British bystander explained that almost all coffee houses and sandwich shops had a counter where patrons could stand while they ate. He advised us to avoid sitting at a table if we wanted to save money.

We walked what seemed like a hundred miles, seeing all manner of wonderful art and architecture. The pace surprised me. Venetian women in elegant suits and spike heels speed walked everywhere and they gave us lollygagging tourists the evil eye. Window-shopping was definitely unacceptable in Venice. Fred and I reacted to the censure and focused on museums and churches instead of shop windows.

To get another perspective of the city, we rode the entire route of the main waterbus that circled the city and offered a picturesque view from the water. At lunchtime, we got off at a random stop and wandered the labyrinth of alleyways until we found a café. Sophisticated Venice-wise tourists now, we savored our spinach/mozzarella sandwiches while standing at the narrow street-side counter.

At the end of our dream weekend, we boarded the night train and found our sleeper coach for the return trip to Vienna. I recall having some anxiety about what our teenage children might have done for entertainment during our absence. ###

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Congratulations

 

Graduate and Proud Sister

Vienna, Austria, 1991. In the middle of our sixth Foreign Service posting, sixteen years after signing on, we realized just how close we were to empty-nest-time. From Voluntary Nomads, Part Seven: Austria Adventures, Chapter 29:

Congratulations

Dakota went to Turkey on his senior class trip in May and returned mere days before graduation.  High school graduation. Where had the time gone? I recalled our photo of not-quite-two-year-old Dakota in Washington, DC, all dressed up in his new Winnie-the-Pooh outfit, ready to fly to Tehran in 1975. Now in 1991 our handsome eighteen-year-old son stood at the beginning of a new path to his own future.

More interested in music than in academics, Dakota decided to stay with us in Vienna for a year of study at the American Institute of Music (AIM). To fill the time between graduation and the start of classes at AIM, he signed up for the summer work program at the embassy. The personnel office did their best to create jobs for teens, gave them a courtesy security clearance based on their parent's background investigation, and paid them to help the gardeners and caretakers or function as security escorts for workmen in unclassified areas of the embassy. Before Dakota got a job through that program, I had a brainstorm: he could do my job while I went on home leave. My boss and the Brookhaven Lab accountants approved the plan.

I wrote glossaries to automate the correspondence that Dakota would have to generate and streamlined the daily routine as much as possible. The story had a perfect ending. Dakota did great work, and I still had a job when I got back. And Dakota survived his two-month bachelor experience as well.

Meanwhile, Tina flew to Washington, DC to spend time with her girlfriend Alex Asselin from Dominican Republic days. Fred and I rode the train to Frankfurt where we could catch a direct flight to Dallas. This was our first time on a night train and our first experience in a sleeping compartment. Novels always describe the wheel clicking rhythm and rocking motion as soothing and dream promoting. But it reminded me of my father pushing on my shoulder to get me up for school, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up.

In the middle of the night, Fred got up to pee. Being a considerate guy he didn't turn on the light. He groped in the dark to find the floor-level cupboard that held the urinal, a quart-sized vessel with a handle at one end and a spout at the other. After using the urinal, the traveler was supposed to return it to the cupboard where the angle of the shelf would automatically tip the contents (onto the tracks below, I'm guessing).

Fred fumbled the cupboard door open, removed and used the urinal. Bumping and clunking noises followed.

"What the hell?" He flicked on the light. "Damn."

The overhead light glared upon perplexed Fred holding one of his shoes. I watched him pour the contents of his shoe into the urinal. And I giggled. Giggles escalated into belly laughs that disintegrated into hiccupy guffaws. Fred laughed then too, although he didn't seem quite as amused as I was; maybe he wasn't quite as loopy from sleep deprivation, or he envisioned putting his foot into a damp shoe in the morning.

In Dallas we launched our visit to Fred's sisters who lived within the Texas Triangle, as we called La Porte (Laura), Conroe (Pat), and Austin (Beth). Party, party, party. The Austin segment included a side trip to Port Aransas where I got the second worst sunburn of my life, blistering my calves, during a long walk with Fred up and down the beach.

After our whirlwind tour of the Texas Triangle, we flew to Albuquerque and met up with Tina for our visits to my dad and his wife Bea in Los Lunas and to Fred's parents in Roswell. Tina toured the UNM campus, one of her options for college. She also got her driver's license and practiced driving in my dad's Goldie, a venerable Pontiac sedan. Fred spent the whole vacation feeling sick. We wondered if it might be a recurrence of dengue fever that had first infected him in Somalia and then again in the Dominican Republic. He felt better by the time we topped off the home leave experience with five days in DC getting physicals and taking care of other business.

When we arrived back in Vienna on that August day, home never looked so good. It would have been perfect if our suitcases had arrived with us, but international travel is not all wine and roses after all. Our bags showed up two days later. ###

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Half Century

Bicycle Reststop

Today's excerpt from Voluntary Nomads takes us to Austria in the spring of 1990.



Spring weather turned our attention to bicycling. Fred bought a set of detailed maps of the many bike routes throughout Austria. Once he and I had explored the area in and around Vienna, we put our bikes on the car-rack and ventured into the countryside. We rode much of the time on designated bicycle paths and some of the time on country roads. Outside the city, Austrian drivers seemed less hurried or harried and they gave the utmost consideration to bicyclists; I felt safe. Often we cruised those byways on Sundays and found the quaint little towns virtually deserted. I imagined all the families gathered at Oma's (granny's) house for dinner after Mass. I pictured us as colorful figures on a scenic postcard.

Out in the country, we rode among the hills and valleys, and once we pedaled the perimeter of a potato field. There, in the middle of nowhere, we came upon a small wooden shed with rustic picnic tables outside. Inside the shed, refreshments were sold, including beer and wine. More than just cyclist-friendly, this was cyclist-heavenly.

Half Century

Our lovely bicycling excursions over the summer gave me the idea for a birthday trip to celebrate my fiftieth. One of our map packets featured a trail that ran along the Danube and I chose the portion from Passau, Germany to Melk, Austria, a trip that would take three days.

To catch the train to Passau we had to get up at 4:45 AM. We packed our saddlebags the night before and, after some fiddling around, discovered that Fred's bags fit on my bike and vice versa.

We rode our bikes in the early morning darkness with perfect visibility thanks to the bright streetlights. I shivered a little in the wind that made sixty degrees seem chilly.

Traffic on the Gurtel was a little scary. Where could all those people be going at 5:30 in the morning?

Although we purchased our passenger tickets in August, we had to get tickets for the bikes on the day of travel, September 12, my birthday. The man at the ticket window spoke perfect English and handed Fred our tickets as he directed us to take our bicycles up to the platform. Fred assumed that the ticket man meant we should take the escalator along with the regular passengers.

The world switched to slow motion as Fred performed a wild acrobatic routine with his bicycle caught in the escalator's claws. Before the comedy had a chance to turn into a tragedy, a Turkish newspaper vendor stepped in to pull the red emergency ring. The escalator stopped immediately, but the alarm system set off a clamor of bells that centered everyone's attention on Fred's drama. While Fred pulled himself and his bicycle and his baggage together, I stood paralyzed, my view of the world still in shocked slow-mo. An important lesson: bicycles and escalators are best ridden separately.

After that, boarding the train was a snap. This was a special bicycle train with half the cars designed to transport bikes. In typical Austrian fashion, the train got underway right on schedule. As the wheels clickety-clicked along, I watched blue sky replace clouds and improve the outlook for today's forty-four-mile leg of my birthday bike trip. ###

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