Thursday: October 10
Vienna, Biking in the Rain
I finally drew the short straw. There has been some sort of cold going around the ship, and last night I got it. I had a scratchy throat at the concert, and by the time I went to bed, it was verging on a sore throat.
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I don’t know if it was the cold, the schedule changing (dinner, and then an event, then eating, and then going to bed), or just randomness, but I had a terrible bout of insomnia. Hours went by and still I didn’t sleep. I lay there, figuring that I would at least rest if not sleep. I started dozing briefly, but my dreams were of lying in bed and not being able to sleep, so it wasn’t exactly clear how much sleep I got. I was definitely dreaming, however, when the alarm went off.
I was also a bit stressed trying to figure out whether I should go on the bike ride in the morning or not. The forecast was for a significant chance of rain. I was wondering if I should try the biking and take my chances, or if I should have Amy go without me, and try to get more sleep.
I didn’t bother with a shower when the alarm went off. I figured I would need one later. But the alarm was set for Amy to take one of her pills (a half hour before eating). I reset the alarm and lay in bed until it went off, then we got up and went to breakfast. Because of my cold, I didn’t have much appetite.
After eating a little, I went back to the room and crawled into bed. It was very tempting to skip biking and try to sleep. But the sky didn’t seem threatening, and there were periods of sun, so I decided to risk it.
The e-bikes were odd in two particular ways. They didn’t have derailleurs. They had some sort of gear mechanism in the hub. The net effect is that it is better to shift when you are not pedaling, which is the opposite from what I’m used to. Secondly, the bikes had hand brakes (hydraulic disc brakes) *and* coaster brakes. So I couldn’t reverse pedal.
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I went out with my heavy shirt, down vest, and raincoat, but then it felt a bit warm, so I took the vest and raincoat off, and put them in my pack. We walked to the bikes, got the “how the bike works” lecture, and tried them out. I decided that with the wind, I was under-dressed, so I put on the raincoat, and left the vest in the pack.
There were people from several boats all together, so we had I think 15 people (from at least two boats).
We biked along a bike path along the Danube, and then through some town streets. I was amazed at how easy it was. Back home, on my “non-e” bike, I have to pedal really hard with a slight downhill to hit 20. On these bikes, we were cruising between 20 and 24 most of the time, with occasional spurts of faster.
Then I realized that at home, it was 20 MPH, and here it was 20-24 KPH (which is only 14-15 MPH).
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The last stretch was a “grind” up the hill to an abbey. With the e-assist, it was almost effortless. I was thinking that “this is cheating”. When we got to the abbey, the guide took the words literally out of my mouth and said that going up a big hill with the e-bike felt like cheating.
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We visited the entrance hall of the abbey, which was also a winery. We had some refreshments of fruit juice (which I thought was better than the wine that the program director mentioned). I went outside to take some pictures of the abbey, and I felt some “liquid sunshine”. By the time we were getting ready to leave, it was raining steadily. Amy and I had raincoats, but a number of people ended up buying cheap disposable trash bag-like ponchos. We biked down a somewhat steep hill, paved with very wet cobblestones.
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I tried to get in line directly behind the lead guide, as I hate being stuck behind a slow person and having to go slower than necessary. After telling us to go down slowly and carefully, he went flying down the hill. I did my best to keep up with him, but I went slightly slower. However, the two of us went significantly faster than anyone else, so we had to wait at the bottom of the hill for the rest of the bikers to catch up.
As people straggled in, I heard some garbled comments about two people getting the wrong bikes and having to readjust the seat heights. It turns out that one of these was Amy. She grabbed the wrong bike, and the seat was much too high, so she had to stop and readjust the height.
This is the first time I’ve ridden a bike in the rain, and I can’t say that I recommend it. I was thinking that if it had just been me or perhaps Amy and me, I would have put it on turbo and 8th gear, and blasted straight back as fast as I could.
Halfway back, we stopped under a bridge for a council of war. We were supposed to take a ferry across the Danube, bike through a park, and then cross back across a bridge. This would add about a half hour to the trip. The guide asked if anyone minded if we skipped the river crossing and just went straight back. No one objected.
Ironically, just as we got back to the start, the sun came out and the rain ended. So we got the worst of both worlds. We got very wet, and we missed biking through the park.
At that point in time, there were six Viking boats moored in Vienna, It was also interesting to see these tugboats, presumably with humongous engines, with an exhaust pipe that was probably 10-12 inches in diameter.
After dropping off the bike, Amy and I went to the boat. There was some time before lunch, so we walked back to see some crows Amy had seen from her bike. The sun seemed to laugh at us by being warm as it shined in our faces.
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When we got back to the boat, I took a shower and we went to lunch. Again, I had no appetite. At this point, I felt completely drained. We had debated going in to town to visit a coffee shop, or cross the river and visit the park we didn’t bike through. I wasn’t up to walking to the park, and after lunch, I wasn’t even up to going in to a coffee house.
So I just crawled into bed and crashed. I ended up sleeping about 2+ hours. I hope this doesn’t screw up my sleep tonight. Amy’s plan was to go to Stephensplatz to a coffee house that the program director had recommended that was right off the square.
During lunch, the sun ended, and the clouds/rain returned. Amy made copious use of her umbrella.
In hindsight, we should have looked up the address before Amy left the ship, but we had passed that coffee house on our walking tour, and we thought it should be obvious. Apparently, it wasn’t. Amy wandered around and asked a lot of people. For some reason, she couldn’t get google maps to work on her phone. Eventually, she found someone who googled it, and then directed her to it. She ended up getting a coffee and s strudel.
I was just getting up when Amy returned. Unfortunately, as I had feared, my cold is moving up from my throat to my nose, and I am very very close to getting the sharp hacking cough that I always dread. Sleeping tonight should be interesting, and quite possibly not in a good way.