Cliffs of Moher

After Killarney, we took the train to Ennis to see the Cliffs of Moher.  It was a busy day.  We caught a train to Mallow then another to Limerick, then finally to Ennis.  Next, we hurried to our hostel to drop off our bags before returning to the train station to catch a 50 minute bus to the Cliffs of Moher.  We had a little under 3 hours at the Cliffs before the final bus back.

The Cliffs are pretty impressive:

  

Also, we liked this sign (to throw in a little CSI: Creative Sign Interpretation)

No walking on fire while admiring birds!

Ireland has been so dry for quite a while that this is the result (our shoes are normally black):

This was great for us because the weather was truly amazing.  How often do people get a clear blue sky at the Cliffs of Moher?  Not very often.  It was actually too hot - probably 85 or so - with no shade in sight.  We suffered through it, though.  :)

Suddenly Castle

On the only full day we spent in Bacharach, we visited Burg Eltz (located on the Mosel River), which is Rick Steves' favorite castle in all of Europe.  To get there from Bacharach, we took a boat down the most scenic stretch of the Rhine (again, according to Rick Steves) from Bacharach to St. Goar.  We saw quite a few castles, many of which were once owned by robber barons:

The robber barons would build their castles along the Rhine and put in place some sort of blockade to keep ships from passing through - until the ship paid the toll.  This was clearly a popular activity, since there are quite a few castles!

After the boat, we caught two trains and then had to walk about an hour on a rather muddy forest path to get to Burg Eltz.  We walked and walked and walked and rounded a bend and... suddenly castle!

Kate, Liz, and castle:

One of the castle courtyards where we waited for our tour to begin:

Liz clearly loved the drainspouts, since she took quite a few photos of them:

Photo by Liz

And, of course, as with all the other castles, no pictures were allowed inside.  We did take some photos of items within the treasury, however.  Liz liked this golden statue of Diana on a stag (although she bemoaned the idea of Diana riding sidesaddle):

Photo by Liz

Paul was enraptured by Drunkenness Conveying Gluttony.  And let's be honest, who wouldn't be?

And we were all puzzled by some of the very elaborate drinking vessels:

Photo by Liz

How do you drink out of that?

Afterwards, due to a bit of a mixup, we had some extra time to walk around and snap some shots of the castle from other viewpoints:

Finally, if you've been keeping track, that's one boat, four trains, and two hours of walking to get to and from Burg Eltz.  And it was worth it.  The inside of the castle was quite neat.  We saw bedrooms, a children's room, a kitchen, and much more - all very neatly designed and well-preserved.

Lovely Interlaken

We spent one night in Interlaken in an amazing hostel.  If you are ever in Interlaken, I cannot possibly recommend Backpackers Villa more highly.  It was one of the cleanest places we stayed, and it had free lockers in the rooms.  Now that is a genius idea for a hostel.  Everyone was super-friendly, and there were lots of places to sit and relax.  We would happily have stayed there many more nights if we weren't eager to be on our way to Gimmelwald.

Switzerland is, well, beautiful, as you might expect.  The train ride in was quite pretty (and included breakfast - woot!).  Paul snapped several photos:

For lunch, I enjoyed a burger that included shredded carrots, something I think our US burgers are sorely lacking:

Interlaken is sandwiched between two lakes - Lake Thun and Lake Brienz.  We had hoped to ride one of the ferries to a castle on Lake Thun, but the ferry hours just didn't work out.  Instead, we hopped on one of the Lake Brienz ferries and floated along for three hours as it made its loop around the lake.  Switzerland has some great Eurail pass benefits, among them the ability to ride the ferries in Interlaken and Lucerne for free (or, as Paul is keen to point out, more like pre-paid, since our Eurail pass was pretty pricey!).  Paul got himself a beer:

And we enjoyed the endless views:

We topped off the day with dinner at the top of the ugliest and tallest building (a hotel) in Interlaken and enjoyed watching the paragliders land:

23 Hours in Paris

On our way from Spain to Switzerland, Paul and I spent 23 hours in Paris on June 15.  This followed a night train from Barcelona to Paris, which was rickety and less than comfortable, so we weren't running on the best night of sleep.  I mention that to preface a little accident I had in Paris, which I'll get to later.

We arrived in Spain before 10am at the Gare d'Austerlitz train station and walked immediately across the river to the Gare Lyon train station where there is a Eurail ticket office.  We needed to make reservations for a train from Switzerland to Austria, and apparently all the Eurail aid offices in Spain have been closed.  I reported this to the Eurail folks, who had no idea and are still looking into it (Eurail passes are truly a mixed bag, but perhaps that's info for a future post).

Over two hours later, we had our tickets.  A large chunk of this time was spent waiting unnecessarily in the long distance train line because the folks at the information desk did not know of the existence of a Eurail ticket office in their own train station.  And it's not like we were being confusing, we held up the pass and asked specifically for that office because we knew there was supposed to be one in the Gare Lyon.  The long distance ticket lady was able to point us to it, which is good, because there is no way on earth you will find that place without help.  It was tucked downstairs away from just about everything else.  Then, we waited in line for ages while two British girls tried to get out of Paris that day.  At that time, Paris had just completed a 36 hour train strike, so I'm amazed that they managed anything at all.

After that, we caught the metro (man, do I love public transportation in Europe - it's wonderful!) to our hotel, checked in early, and then went for a food hunt.  We found a market where we bought falafel, some sort of large pita stuffed with spinach and cheese (it looked like a ginormous pierogi), and fresh strawberries.

Next it was back to  Gare d'Austerlitz to join up with the Blue Bike Tour folks for a 4 hour whirlwind tour of Paris.  We were turned on to this company by the Canadian folks we met in Carcassonne who couldn't speak highly enough of it.  The bikes all had fun names - Paul chose Blaise Pascal.  I forget who I had.  We saw Notre Dame:

with its nearby bridge covered in an insane amount of locks (Paul and I wondered how much weight this added to the bridge):

the Eiffel Tower:

along with the Louvre, bridges, statues, the golden flame sculpture the US gave France as a thank you for the Statue of Liberty (to which the French were apparently like "what are we supposed to do with this?"), and more.  The sights were great, as was the information provided by the guide.  The tour is intended as an intro to Paris where you can get a sense of all the sights you want to go back to later, so we only paused briefly at the sights - not enough time to walk around or anything.  But it allowed us to see most of the important things in just 4 hours, which will be helpful in deciding if we'll pass back through Paris later, or just skip it in favor of crashing in Belgium with cool peeps for a while (the latter is more likely at this point - we are travel weary).

However, I'm not sure I recommend this tour as highly as others do.  It involved an insane amount of pedestrian dodging while trying to keep up with the other 10 folks in the tour,  look at all the sights around you, AND keep an eye out for all red lights so as not to run them and be smushed by a car.  It's a level path but you go over a lot of curbs and around a lot of sharp, blind corners.  So, as you can probably guess, this is where my little accident comes in.  While rounding a corner and trying to dodge a pedestrian at perhaps too high a speed for little old me, I wiped out.  Gracefully, I'm told.  Honestly, it even felt graceful and rather slow motion to me.  As far as bike accidents go, I am very lucky.  Just a bit bruised and scraped - scraped a knee (didn't even tear the pants - woot!), scraped my chin (less than desirable for pictures, wish I had some makeup with me...), and have a few bruises on my right thigh.  More embarrassed than anything, really.

You can see the mark on my chin from my fall.  However, the 5 bruises on my legs are much more colorful.

Moral of the story?  Be careful on bike tours.  :)

After the bike tour, we went back to Notre Dame so we could get a view of the famous flying buttresses:

The cathedral was still open (it was past 7pm at this point), so we poked around inside.  Definitely neater on the outside.  At this point, we've seen so many churches that they all start to look the same (minus the Sagrada Familia, of course).

Then, we went back to the hotel to clean my pants.  And me, too, I suppose, although my scrapes weren't very dirty and barely bled.  Then, out for a view of the Eiffel Tower at dusk:

And a little people watching (this shot is taken from where we were sitting but in the opposite direction from the Eiffel Tower):

It's really cool that this huge lawn in front of the Eiffel Tower is a gathering place at dusk for locals, mostly of the 18-35 age range, I would guess.  Groups of people sat in circles with wine (I wish outdoor drinking in the US wasn't banned in so many places!), picnics with all sorts of random food from grocery stores, and even hippy singing circles.  The one near us regaled those around it with a variety of US songs.

We ended the evening with dinner at a Thai restaurant which was absolutely delicious, due in no small part to the fact that the meal included no bread or cheese.  We are thoroughly sick of bread and cheese and sandwiches at this point, so curry and spring rolls were a welcome reprieve.

The Kindness of Strangers

Greece likes to ease you in to things.  On our arrival at the Athens airport, we had the fun experience of finding another way to get to our hotel with the metro on strike.  That involved a bus and then a taxi (which overcharged us - pah!), but wasn't horrible.  Today, it was the full whammy - complete abandonment.  More on that after the pictures.

We took a bus to the Sanctuary of Asclepius to see the sites, in particular, the Theater of Epidaurus:

This amphitheater is heralded as one of the best preserved from that era.  It's even back in use today.  Some work has been done on it, but not the extensive work that we've seen on other ancient structures. Paul also liked the sophisticated drainage system.  I decided it was important for me to stick my foot in one of the two drainage tunnels so that you can see how deep it was:

There's also a stadium that a sign says is used by local schools, which I think is awesome:

So, the abandonment.  The Saturday bus schedule is limited, so there's really only one bus for the return trip - at 6:15.  After exploring the ruins for many hours, we made our way to the bus stop by about 6:00.  We waited.  And waited.  And waited.  We met an art historian from San Francisco and chatted about the unreliability of the transportation system in Greece and elsewhere.  6:30 came and went.  Then 7:00.  The already empty parking lot emptied further as we tourists, now seven in total, began to grow anxious about the lack of a bus.  There was one tour bus waiting for its group, so members of our group noticed the bus driver talking on a cell phone and inquired as to whether we could use it to call the transportation folks to see if the city bus was coming.  The nice bus driver called for us (which is probably for the best, since none of us spoke Greek) and informed us that the transportation folks claimed our bus, which was clearly scheduled for 6:15, supposedly came and left at 6:00 (it did not - some of the others were waiting long before that).

At that point it became clear that our only real option was to see if we could get that tour bus to take us back - or at least to somewhere not quite so remote!  After some stumbling through language barriers, waiting for the "boss," (i.e. the person in charge of the tour group), and a smidge of anxiety, we found ourselves on a plush bus full of Austrian academics (both profs and students in archaeology  headed toward Tolo - a city about 10 km from Nafplio.  Two Germans in our group had talked to the bus driver about dropping us off at a crossroads on the way to Tolo where it would be about a 3-4 km walk to Nafplio (totally doable) or just taking us to Tolo where we could catch a bus to Nafplio (there were two more that evening, so it seemed probable).  However, when the turn came for the bus to head toward Tolo, it continued on to Nafplio and dropped us off right in town.  Then, no one, not the tour leader nor the bus driver, would accept any compensation for the inconvenience/additional passengers.  What a wonderful turn of events.  

As five of us were walking back to our hotels together and chatting, Paul suggested that we all get dinner together.  Everyone else agreed, so we had an entertaining dinner with a couple from Moscow (the wife was actually from Spain) and the art historian.