Peter & Liz Crockett's Blog

I’m skipping over some major material. A week cruise down the Danube, courtesy of Liz’ Mom. This last week spent in Italy on Lake Como. The following is excerpted and edited from Liz’ travel diary (me being too lazy to write it from scratch).
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Transylvania, October 21-22, 2010
Took the train with Chris and Pat to Sinaia . Sinaia is the first town in the Carpathian Mountains after rising out of the Rumanian plains, about two hours north of Bucharest. Pat with his engineering eyes marveled at the rickety rails. Our train stopped for a long time in Ploiesti. The next stop was Campina where we waited longer, and then longer, and then longer. Every few minutes a couple more passengers resignedly straggled off, eventually leaving us the last remaining. Conductors frantically rushed up and down the train, shirtsleeves rolled up, handing off a dripping bar of soap. The conductors finally slowed down their pace, averted their eyes, and locked themselves into a their own compartment, When they spread out a huge lunch and started playing cards, we figured we better start walking. As we got off the train and walked along the tracks we saw a lone Romanian workman, with a sadly undersized hammer, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the tracks taking half-hearted swings at a stuck rail switch. Tink… tink… tink… Three young Romanian backpackers guided us to a “maxi-taxi” – a fourteen passenger van, with about 27 Romanians in it, that took us the rest of the way to Sinaia for about $1 each.

Did I mention the weather? Clean, azure blue sky, brilliant autumn hues in vertical array on the shoulders of the Carpathian mountains…the perfect fall day in the most beautiful of settings.
In Transylvania.

The bus dropped us off at a decrepit train station; a creepy lady behind cracked glass flanked by giant proud posters proclaiming the dawn of a new age when the new tracks get finished in August 2010. So much for planning. At least they had the marketing done. Her window was set so low in the wall that I had to bend at the waist to see her. “No Mauney!” she says, when I ask for a refund. When I ask her if the trains will run tomorrow, she shrugs “Maeebe” and points to the poster. Great.

We climb up the steep steps from the grimy station to a bustling tourist street, Sinaia feeling like a ski town out of season. I walk into a bookstore to try to get directions to our hotel… two ladies at the counter look at each other then sheepishly say”Otel cloz” (meaning “hotel closed” not “close” as in near). We had arranged for reservations 3 months ago. Yikes! We knew that it is located at the front gates of the Peles Castle, so we start asking for that. Answers we received ranged from “it is very far, must take taxi”, to “it right around corner”. Unfortunately, all were true – if added together – right around the corner, up a hill very far through the woods up the hill, and yes, we needed to take a taxi. Our taxi driver confirmed that the hotel was indeed closed but was willing to give it a go (since we were buying).

We emerged from a winding climb through woods into a majestic courtyard where six men were all standing around watching one guy take down the Hotel Reception Office sign. Our kind taxi driver goes in to figure what’s what. He returns. Yes, Hotel closed, but yes, they have reservari, so you four unsuspecting nooks can be the last (last?) occupants at the (cue lightning flash, ominous roll of thunder)Hotel Economat. The Hotel Economat is a 19th century Fachwerk structure, built at the same time as the Peles Castle as part of the royal estate (for servants? guests?) and converted for tourists after the end of the monarchy. How it got its name remains a mystery, but the name is what got us interested in the first place. The Hotel Economat proper (a sprawling four stories, 100 rooms) was locked up and boarded. We were shown to the Hotel Economat Villa, a separate 15-room building surrounded on three sides by a rushing stream, so loud that it could drown out just about anything, anyone, anywhat… Just up the road is the big Peles Castle, summer home of King Carol I. Outside our front door is the Pelisor Castle, the summer house of Queen Marie (who thought the palace too ostentatious). All of these buildings are huge, incredibly ornate, with enormous stone arched entrances, old stained-glass windows, soffits ornamented with gargoyles of stone and wood carvings, topped by a multiple of steeples, spires and minarets (I use all of these terms, because there are so many and such a variety.)

The sweet girl (there’s always a sweet girl in this genre of film) from the reception office shows Peter and myself to room 12, Chris and Pat to room 13 (du-du-dun). The heat is so intense that we immediately open our windows, only to discover that any agile determined vampire or werewolf could hop from stone balustrade to stone balustrade and waltz right in, in the night, while we fitfully sleep in our lumpy, creaky beds to slice us to bits, or worse. We decide to lock the windows and put up with the heat. Did I mention the toilet in our room? When you lean to one side`, the toilet leans with you….as far as you feel like leaning, it’s right there with you. Does the Basilisk in Harry Potter come to mind?

I’m a little creeped out about spending the night in this place. I go over to the newly planned reception building where sweet girl is moving the office. She sooo reads me, laughs a bit, and says “Oh, the guard in front of the Pelisor Castle, which is front of your door, there all night”. Phew! I feel better. She acts like I’m nuts to ask for the heat to be turned down – it’s a happy miracle that they got it running at all. They are proud of hotness in our honor as final guests. As I trudge back up to our villa, I look over my shoulder, watching me is a dog with white eyes and rising behind him (du-du-dun) the Full Moon!

Have I mentioned the bears?
Down the road a bit is a little settlement of small houses, most are daytime stands to sell souvenirs; the first one is a ranger station- did I mention that we are surrounded by a thick forest. Posted not once, not twice, but three times on the front of his hut, the same poster of a bear and Rumanian text. I knock on his door; he speaks no English so we resort to sign language. As I point to the posters and wave around the area; he nods. I count on my fingers, indicating more than one…up to ten; he nods. I look petrified and look imploringly “What to do??” he raises both hands and brings them down slowly in front of him and then shakes his head. Bad idea to be out after dark.

Since it was only 6pm, we still needed to eat dinner, which meant we needed to walk through the forest up the hill in the dark to look for a restaurant. We walked arm and arm, all 4 of us, like Dorothy, scarecrow, tin man and lion. Pat walked in the middle, as he has a “bear phobia”. As we are eating our dinner, a pack of dogs began howling nearby in the forest. Pat confessed then that he also has a “pack of dogs phobia”. I asked the waiter if we needed to fear the dogs. “No, no, the dogs won’t hurt you but the bears that they are barking at will”. We drank a lot of wine to try to blur the clarity of the situation. Feets don’t fail me now. We make it back to the Economat in one piece. We hugged and kisses before turning in, in case our bloodless corpses, or sliced throats, or clawed limbs couldn’t find each other in the morning..

And they were never heard from again.

Just kidding, we all woke up whole, but as we tried to exit the front door at 8 am to go for breakfast (included in price) to the creepy Hunter’s Cabana, we found ourselves hopelessly locked into the villa. I mean, no one could get us out……the guard outside, the sweet girl, a couple of maintenance workers. We were ready to jump out of the stained glass window, but the rushing stream 20 feet below convinced us otherwise. No other exit besides the now-jammed one we came in through (the trap door just leads to the torture chamber…). Peter, after many failed attempts by those the outside, managed to pry the lock open with our trusty Swiss Army knife.

Enough Transylvania. We hastily depart. By train? Hell no. We hire a taxi to take us all the way back to Bucharest.
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This is the final entry of our travel blog. We’re home Nov. 4. Thanks for checking in.

We arrived by train to a fairly creepy station in Budapest. Tourist Info pointed us to currency exchange (that would later completely rip us off) and handed Liz a city map which marked no museums, no palaces, no concert halls, no civic structures of any kind, but it did label – in blazing red and gold logos – all seventeen Burger Kings within the central city. (We have found an astonishing propensity for modern Europeans to employ navigation-by-fast-food. Earlier in the month in Feldkirch, Austria, when we asked for directions to the town market square, a local pointed two blocks down the street toward a tenth-century, sixty-foot wide, two-hundred-foot tall, medieval stone tower – which dwarfed the town around it – and said, “Turn left at the McDonalds”.)
After a disappointing night in a tawdry hostel, Liz and I walked through the Jewish quarter in search of coffee and a decent breakfast. <> Anyway, we did find a tiny but very nice coffee/pastry shop with tasty traditional Jewish cakes and an extremely kind owner (who should have opened at ten, but arrived at ten after, carrying boxes of fresh pastry, sorry I’m a little late this morning, please come in, sit down, OK, come back in ten minutes and the espresso machine will be warmed up…) who fed us well, gave impromptu tourist advice – complete with photocopied flyers fetched from a random heap atop the radiator – taught us some essential Hungarian, played decent music on the stereo (don’t get me started on all the awful pop music we’ve had to endure on this trip), and made pretty darn good café Americanos.
Budapest at first appears a little tattered (we were told that the national sport is road construction), but we did discover an amazing and beautiful new cultural center (concert hall, contemporary art museum, new national theater) south of the main city. And the city boasts a phantasmagorical collection of architectural landmarks.
Liz’ Mom, sister and brother-in-law met us in Budapest to begin a Danube cruise, and on our free afternoon before, the girls went to the thermal baths while Pat and I went to visit Professor Boris and the amazing Elektrotechnikai Muzeum. (You won’t find this place an any map.) I gotta say “wow”. After a search through narrow streets, we stepped through rusty gates into a junkyard/courtyard full of scrap metal, busted neon, blowing paper and not one living soul. We pulled open an unmarked door, startling a little man with a leather case who hurried out past us yelling “First door! First door!” before vanishing like the Alice’s rabbit. Strewn inside the lobby was a collection of apparati fugitive from a Frankenstein movie. The first “First Door” proved to be a long tunnel-like room lined with twenty desks, empty but for one. That being occupied by a lone woman who, upon my sudden appearance, looked up and let out a little “Eep!” before I quickly closed the door. We stepped through the second “First Door” which appeared to be a conference room appointed with every static electricity demonstration machine imaginable. In the back corner, behind the profusion of black belts, silver orbs and counter-rotating disks, at a PC dating from the original IBM days, sat a woman indeterminate of age (as indeterminate of age as any woman with frizzed white hair, hooked nose and warts can be said to be). She rose and without a word vanished through a back door. It was becoming apparent that these people had never had a visitor to their “museum”. The place seemed to be a Soviet era project created to occupy under-employed physicists which the current government forget to shut down after the 1989 revolution. The door opened and the woman reentered followed by a lanky gentleman in a somewhat-too-large gray suit. He extended his hand and introduced himself in heavily Hungarian-accented English. Still uncertain as to why we were there, he explained that the museum was a converted power substation dedicated to demonstrating the basic principles of high-voltage electricity and educating students and the public at large of the great contributions made by the Hungarian people to the field of elektrotechnik. During this exposition, the white-haired woman behind him was frantically searching through the chaos of her desk, files and shelves for anything pertaining to the museum, its history or its entrance fees. She quickly passed an A4 sheet to Professor Boris (our nickname for the Direktor – since we had instantly forgotten the name he had given us) who read out the entrance fee, fee for guided tour, fee for taking photos, fee for asking questions, fee for laying hands on the hands-on exhibits and fee for using the washroom (numbers one and two). We told him we had only forty minutes and would not need a guide nor be taking photos (I’m still kicking myself for not paying the photo fee). He seemed crestfallen that we had waived the offer of a guide, but notwithstanding informed us that, sadly, it would be impossible for us to visit unaccompanied since all the explanatory plaques were in Hungarian, all of the exhibition rooms were in any case locked and powered down and many displays were in sad need of repair and could be quite dangerous without supervision. He lead us from the room to begin our guided-tour-which-was-not-a-guided-tour-since-we-hadn’t-paid-the-guide-tour-fee. The corridors were lined with a fantastic collection of electric company ads and posters from the 1930s-1950s. At each new locked iron door (all the interior doors were made of iron as a fire suppression measure of the old substation – so we were told) Professor Boris called out for keys to whomever was within earshot (there seemed to be dozens of employees bustling about, seemingly without purpose – or perhaps with mysterious and sinister purposes unbeknownst to us). The enlisted employee would promptly vanish and another would suddenly appear carrying another dusty jangling keyring from which Professor Boris would seek out the requisite key. We entered each successive darkened chamber, the heavy iron doors clanking shut behind us. Professor Boris powered up the lights and exhibits, each new room revealing a different array of motors, transformers, generators, switches, devices, antique appliances and demonstration devices of all sorts. When, all too soon, Professor Boris shook our hands and opened the final door, Pat and I found ourselves suddenly back in the same junkyard/courtyard we had entered an hour before. I turned, half expecting the doorway to have vanished.
Time to catch the bus back to our ship, bid farewell to Budapest and begin our Danube cruise.

[caption id="attachment_79" align="aligncenter" width="640" caption="Elektrotechnikai Muzeum"][/caption]

The fractal nature of experience dictates that to fully communicate even a single moment, given time and disc space, would require an infinity of description. Most will remain unrecounted, let alone remembered, by even the most conscientious witness. And so I leave vast swaths of landscape and events touched neither by my camera’s lens nor my clicking fingertips… In other words, don’t expect much, I’m on vacation for cripe’s sake.
The first week of October we spent following Horse Feathers through German-speaking Europe. Every day: get up, shower, eat, check out, bus, eat, train, tourist info, map, change money, bus, check-in, sight-see (if time allows) eat, go to the concert, visit with the band (I wish I could say “party” with the band, but I’m just too old for that sh*t), midnight cab back to hotel, brush teeth, collapse into bed, sleep, get up and start all over.We bid them farewell in Frankfurt as they headed to France to end their tour and fly home to get ready for their October-November US tour. Sad to see them go, but, damn, chasing them around almost killed me.
Liz and I were then treated to a sunny and relaxed weekend in Salzburg by her cousins. We attended a concert by Bavarian politico-folk singer, Konstantin Wecker. After the performance, we stalked him to a smoky little bar near the theater. (Liz’ cousin got a kiss on the cheek, I only got a handshake.) The next morning Liz led an expedition to Mozart’s childhood home. I stayed behind to do some laundry (note to self: pack more socks). Mozart’s home was #20 on the tourist map, so Liz took her cousins on a trek through dingy modern suburbs to Number 20. This Number 20, however, was the end of the line for the Number 20 bus – Mozart’s house (the other number 20) was way back in the middle of town. But now, at least, they knew where to catch a bus.

Entry 28.09.10
Getting a head cold on a trip like this is a whole new window into foreign cutoffs. I’ve had to drink a bucket of hot concentrated Elderberry juice and been forced to stuff wads of butter up my nose (you just can’t say no to a German matriarch). Liz has the cold now, but we’re on our own for a few days, so she gets to recover without the benefit of central-European folk wisdom. Though having butter running out of your nose saves step eating your morning toast…
Sorry, I’ve fallen a little behind on the blog. After a fast ride across Germany with a quick stop at Liz’ Uncle Stefan’s, we met up with the Horse Feathers tour in the Netherlands on the 17th and it’s been a crazy schedule ever since. Dirty socks know no language barrier, so we did find a “wascherei” in Tilburg and got the laundry done and were back in clean underwear for the first concert. The Netherlands seemed “normal”; a lot more relaxed, a little less organized than the fastidious propriety of Switzerland. We stayed the first night in the home of a family with three little kids. During dinner, the youngest, Sophie, leaned to her mother and asked, “What’s the grandmother’s name?” Really brightened up Liz’ day.
Two days and two shows in the Netherlands were followed by two days/two shows in Belgium. We got to spend some time with the band and had a super time. On a walking tour of Bruges, Liz ended up alone in a fancy chocolate shop with only one Euro. Luckily, this shop had a special treat for foreign visitors with only one Euro: a lollipop of dark Belgian chocolate coated in dried onions. Really brightened up Liz’ day.
The band invited us to sit in on a tune at a house concert in Brugges. A little embarrassing, but not too. Going to all the Horse Feathers’ shows, I feel a little like a traveling dinosaur exhibit. Liz and I are the oldest listeners in the audience by about a factor of three. Even though the clubs don’t have seats, Liz always manages to get a chair from someone. I think all the bouncers are a little afraid of her; “What do you mean, ‘No Admittance’? I’m the MOM.” Works every time.
This last week of September, Liz and I took some time off from following the band to renew ties with the Bavarian branch of Liz’ extended family, as well as to frolic with some old acquaintances from our own geologic period. Seeing people after thirty years… I am speechless.

[caption id="attachment_61" align="aligncenter" width="640" caption="Sound Check in Utrecht"][/caption]

When I got a load of Swiss prices I just about had a cow. (Probably why there are so many cows in Switzerland. Every visitor sees the prices and has a cow.) Four dollars for a cup of coffee. Good coffee, sure, but that good? Public restrooms in Switzerland are now private restrooms – all run under the brand name “McClean”. Two bucks to take a leak. The Swiss have you coming AND going. So, the next time some lunkhead U.S. politician says we should privatize something, force him to drink a quart of coffee and drop the bastard in the middle Bern’s main train station with no pocket change. After finally getting out to our friend Rosemarie’s house in the Bernese countryside, where people are free to pee in the forest – just like home – we asked her where people go if they don’t have cash or can’t afford it. All she said was “Don’t ride the elevators”.
We took bicycles the next morning and headed for Schüpfen, our old home village. I had forgotten how beautiful
Switzerland is. Along one-lane roads that connect the little villages, far from highways and railroad lines, not much has changed since we lived here thirty years ago. But the dwindling number of village cheesemakers and a dramatic increase in the cultivation of corn (a much more “efficient” and high-energy form of animal feed than the more poetic – and cow-healthy – grass pasture) both point to increasing agricultural industrialization and the reduction of one of the last remaining family-farming economies in the developed world.
We met many old friends in the villages along the way. We were treated to coffee and the use of a bicycle pump by Liz’s old boss at Restaurant Neuhaus. We were sad to learn the farmer that taught Liz how to milk cows had passed away the week before our arrival. We visited the Butcher’s wife in Schüpfen who had tutored us in Swiss German. We saw our old apartment, walked up into the hills behind Schüpfen, and drank from the old public fountain. That night Rosemarie and Jakob cooked up a traditional cheese fondue.
The next day we embarked on the typical American “thirty-six cities in thirty-six hours” trip through the Berner Oberland. First stop: Kandersteg and the 2000-foot climb to Oeschinensee – a beautiful bright blue alpine lake surrounded by snow-capped peaks. (OK… we took the ski lift up the 2000 feet, took a nap at the lake’s edge, and walked back down for ice cream and coffee.) I hate to admit it, but the walk down nearly killed us. I’m in bad shape. I just don’t get enough aerobic exercise. I made a resolution then and there to make some serious life style changes in the future. Like taking the ski lift both ways.
After our ice cream, we hopped the train through the Rhone valley of Canton Wallais all the way to Montreux on Lake Geneva or Genfersee or Lac Leman (The Swiss have four or five names for everything, being obsessed with equal treatment for all language groups – but every place and town also has a secret practically unpronounceable local nickname so the natives can easily identify out-of-towners). Tuesday morning, we took the train to Lausanne, Bern, Jegenstorf and the rural bus back to Rosemarie’s in Brunnenthal.
Next day, we headed to meet Uli in Canton Aarau. The climb down from Oeschinensee had taken it’s toll, so we had to force Uli to abandon the punishing series of mountaineering exploits he had planned for us. Thank God. Instead, Uli took us on a day-long train loop through Canton Lucerne and the Emmenthal.
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We need to find a laundromat. Uli informed us that there is no such thing in Switzerland. The dirty clothes we stuffed in the pack last week are starting to seem attractively like clean clothes. I may need a putty knife to get undressed.

Here we are. Two weeks in. I’m sitting upstairs at Rosemarie Burri’s. Liz is in the bath. Rosemarie is downstairs, practicing piano for a concert she’s giving in Bern next week.
Sun shining through the window of her 300 year old timber-frame farmhouse. Brunnental is a village of 50 or so, also mostly centuries-old farmhouses. One mile through rolling hills in any direction will get you to another similar village. Every field and forest is long-settled, cared-for and green. A long way from Paris…
This post is about our little trip down the rough Provence to the Riviera. Last week, after traveling down through Avignon, we arrived in Cavaillon for our first “Couch-Surfing” experience (a social-networking group dedicated to sharing sleeping spaces around the world). We had contacted a couch-surfing Cavaillon veterinarian – Jose – and asked to surf his couch. He turned out to be a wonderful host, although a penultimate bachelor. He cooked us a fine dinner, prepared on a hot plate, served on a card table with pink toilet paper for napkins. Having moved from his native Spain to Cavaillon two years ago, his only furniture was the folding table, three odd chairs, two inflatable beds (his inflatable couch had recently fallen victim to an attack from his cat – which didn’t give me great hope for the future of the inflatable beds). We had a wonderful couple of days with Jose, sightseeing around Cavaillon and open-air cafe dining with a group of his friends.
We then headed South. After we got on the train, natural laziness took over and our ambitious plans for a grand tour of the French Riviera dwindled to a single overnight stay in Menton – the last French resort town before the Italian border. Liz had visited Menton as a child (in the pre-cambrian period I believe) and in the intervening millennia the town had metamorphosed into a mecca for the northern-European blue-haired set (who had likewise visited Menton as children – probably the same year Liz did). Disembarking from the train, we were nearly killed in a stampede of canes, walkers and the giant rolling luggage of old geezers anxious to avoid missing their train stop. Their rallying cry: “I may not remember where I’m going but, by God, I’m gonna start early and stop for nothing”. We needed to stay cheap, so we rolled our backpacks* to the tourist information office to ask for directions to the Youth Hostel. The woman at the desk looked us up and down and asked (in french n’est-ce pas?) “Are you sure you mean the ‘youth??’ hostel??” It turned out to be a long walk up hill, so we asked about a cheap hotel… “Are you sure you mean a ‘cheap’ hotel??” So, we checked in to the Hôtel Beauregard. After washing out our socks, we took an evening stroll through a forest of pink 60s-era beach hotels amid throngs of doddering sun-seekers. Needless to say, it was not a pretty scene at the beach either… It’s hard to get too excited about “topless” when most of the tops could be tucked in the bottoms.
The morning after arriving, we heard that a train strike was to begin the next day. We had to get out of France immediately or risk being stuck in WrinkleTown for weeks (notwithstanding, we blended in dishearteningly well…). We grabbed our bags from the Beauregard and hopped the next train to Italy.
We headed for Carrara and checked in to the Youth Hostel there. Great choice. Great time. (Carrara is where all the white marble comes from – like lots of marble – these people treat marble like we treat cinder blocks… Something going to blow away? Toss a 200 pound chunk of white marble on it. Doorstop? Marble. College student bookshelves? You guessed it. Piles of the stuff everywhere.) Spent four days relaxing. Visited Cinque Terre (unesco site – look it up – impressive but too many tourists – I’m not complaining – after all I was one of them). Got rained out of a trip to the marble quarry. So what? We just walked down to the beach and had another bottle of wine, big dinner, a couple more coffees and two tubs of gelato. I could get used to it. On the 10th, we headed to Switzerland…

We made it. Survived four days in France. Barely. Probably should have studied that phrasebook a little harder. Not that it would have helped. What they put in a phrasebook, or you read on a sign, a menu, or in a newspaper, bears only the vaguest resemblance to what comes out of a Frenchman’s mouth. They take a regular sentence – which I wouldn’t understand anyway – and lop off half the consonants, a good chunk of the vowels and all the spaces. Then spit it out at you about twice the speed of a TGV. Kinda like an ancient version of twitter imho, lol.
In our Paris hotel the first morning at breakfast, I would have sworn the waiter kept asking me over and over what kind of cheese I wanted. So I go through all the French cheese I know. Brie? Camembert? Roquefort? Neufchâtel? Picodon de l’Ardèche? Velveeta? Nope. The correct answer is “Fifteen” – she wanted our room number.
When a Frenchman sees that you have no idea what they’re talking about, instead of cutting it down to two or three really short words, spoken slowly and – god forbid – split into separate pieces, they figure sixteen fat paragraphs of run-together high-speed explanation will clear things right up. Then a wad of people passing by see you’re having trouble, so they all jump in, too. Pretty soon Liz and I are buried in such a punishing avalanche of undecipherable language that we forget about being hungry, or having to pee, or even why we wanted to go to the train station in the first place. But for some strange reason, I love it. The ambience. That certain je ne sais quoi. The joie de vivre. Mon Deiu! I’m starting to do it, too. Je cherche le bon mot, mais je trouve seulement le français! (Of course that’s pronounced “zchbmt, mztrvslm lfrsay!”)

more in about a week

Hi y’all. As some of you may know, Liz and I are leaving for two months in Europe on Monday. My last lengthy sojourn on the continent was 30 years ago. A lot has changed since then (I’m not talking new technology and transformed political boundaries… I’m talking irreparably damaged body parts and diminished mental capacity). A few fans of our Christmas letter suggested a travel diary/blog. They don’t realize I’m only good for two good pages a year. Stay tuned. Log entries begin next week.

Rendezvous on the deck of Dick and Diane’s Sauna in July.