Halfway: we're in vienna

We usually try to start riding early - especially with the current heat wave.

So, the sunrise over the river is pretty.

 Lots of dams with power generation, and with locks for the boats to get through.  Jean seems to have a fascination with watching those big long things slide in and out of the tight little channels.

Europe is more compact than North America:  houses are smaller, closer together (and that has the secondary effect that everything is closer together, so bike commuting is easier).  Closer together applies to the tent campgrounds.

 Lots of the bridges have spiral bikeways to get from the river level bike paths to the bikeways on the bridges.

Always seems to be at least one castle, or at least a humungous church, in view either on a hilltop or along the river.

 My image of Viennna is lots of large, ornate, old buildings - and there are plenty of those in the central area.  But, it's also a large, modern city with lots of skyscrapers and a space needle.

Rather neat reflections of the old buildings in the glass facade of a new building.

Wrong way on a bike path is apparently thought to be dangerous.

(BTW, as we use texting shortcuts, my favorite here is:  "8tung".

For you non-German speakers:  8=acht.  And achtung = attention, watch out.

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Did some riding alone the last few days:  gives some opportunities to meet locals that don't come up while riding with the group.

Met the "Academic Rowing Club" from Kiel in Germany:  bunch of retired professors who every summer spend a couple weeks rowing down a big river.  Some of them were doctors and lawyers, so after the obligatory switch from German to English so that we could actually understand each other, somehow degenerated into telling "lawyer jokes" - all except one (What do you have when a lawyer is buried in sand up to his neck?  Not enough sand.) were common to both sides of the Atlantic.

Met a guy and his 13 year old son who had driven from Cracow in Poland to Vienna (6 hour drive through 3 countries - try that in North America), took a boat to Passau, then were bicycling 3 days back to Vienna.  The boy's first 100 km day.  The man had spent 15 years working in Chicago, so had American English and the boy had been born in US - dual citizenship.

Yesterday, connected with a local bike rider going pretty fast.  Rather unusually, my German was better than his English - I think we agreed to take turns pulling, to go as fast as we could without vomiting or dying of heat stroke, and agreed that it was lots of fun.  But, with the conversation being in German, at high speed, with my heart rate meter off scale, I'm not really sure what we said to each other - but, we laughed a lot when it was all done.  I really was surprised at, when forced, how much German came back to me and how much we could talk.

Vienna appears to believe that there are only 2 musicians in the world:  Mozart and Strauss (Joe, not Rick).  They do make a deal of it and there is an amazing amount of kitsch available for sale.  Of course, we can't resist so will go to a concert tomorrow night at the opera house - the same hall as the New Years' eve concert with many of the same pieces.  Undoubtedly played by the 17th string players.