Mile 799 - Getting Close

Move out day is on Friday, which is just 5 days away.  Almost everything that needs to be stored is vacationing in Poulsbo for the next 3 months.  Here's what my hilariously grim apartment looks like right now:

The items that I'm bring with me to Europe are the 4 panniers, the small amount of debris strewn in front of them, the bike (duh), and the bike box on the left of the photo.  The Xbox, the TV, the luxurious chaise lounge and the wooden table (built by my dad!) go into storage.  Not pictured are 500 Q-tips which I'm not sure what to do with.

I'm almost embarrassed to put "Mile 799" in the title of this post.  Non-biking events have dominated my life for the last 3 weeks, causing me to slack on the training.  Tomorrow, I'm going 50 miles, fully loaded come hell or high water.  Also, since it's the last Sunday before I leave this island, it'll be a fitting farewell.

Had a fun going-away get-together at my favorite local bar, the Treehouse, with various characters (you know who you are).  A few fun trinkets were given to me to take along on the trip.  Here's a jaundiced, beserk koala, given to me by J.  The marble was given to me by my nephew Sam a couple of weeks ago.

That koala looks a little crazed, but apparently he needs a vacation too.  He's come into my protection, and I've got to respect that.

Here's a likeness of Ganesha, given to me by S. and N., under whose protection I was put:

Sure, when he's a little metal trinket, he doesn't look like much, but this is a recent photo of Ganesha:

Make no mistake, Ganesha will fuck your shit up if he wants to.  He is the Remover of Obstacles, the Steamroller of Chumps and he has all of a sudden made an appearance as part of my trip.  Let's give a big hearty welcome to Ganesha as well as the as-yet-unnamed disturbed koala and Sam's marble.

Trip Plan - Leg 4 - Vienna to Prague

This part of the trip takes me through a region about which I know very little.  Compared to the amount of reading I've done on Germany and Poland, Austria and the Czech Republic have been left behind a bit.  Here's a view of the Vienna skyline (thanks, Wikipedia)

Regardless of my ignorance regarding the culture and history of this region, the bike riding is supposed to be world-class.  My route will be based on some variation of the Czech Greenways routes, available here.  The most direct route is 250 kilometers, which is a comfortable three to four day trip.  However, if I'm ahead of the game, then there's a number of side trips that beckon (Moravian wine country anyone?).  This ridiculously vague map gives you an idea of the route.

This is also the first part of the trip which I don't have maps ahead of time.  My "plan" is find some bike shops in Vienna and pester the local bikeshop nerds for maps and routes.  At this point, I'll probably need to adopt a Blanche DuBois attitude and rely on the kindness of strangers.  Things get a little unknown from this point on.

I should be arriving in Vienna right around June 5th. If I spend 3 days in Vienna and take a leisurely 6 days to get from Vienna to Prague, I'll get into Prague around the 14th.  I'll spend another 3 days in Prague and then hit the road.

Next stop: Wroclaw, Poland!

Inventory - The Tool Kit

My friends and family know me as a fairly hopeless handyman.  Home repair in my household didn't go much beyond using soap and water to remove dog pee from the carpet, so things like fixing cars or putting up drywall are simply not in my repertoire.

However, embarking on a three month tour of Europe is not something a person should do without know a few basics about bike maintenance and repair.  So, after watching a few YouTubes about changing a tire, having a few flat tires of my own (and fixing them no problem) and taking a 2 hours class on bike repair at Classic Cycle on Bainbridge Island from an awesome guy named Paul, I'm pretty sure I can take care of most things that the bike may throw my way.  And to help me fix the bike, I've assembled a fancy little tool kit with all of the stuff needed to make it happen.  Behold!

So, here's what I'm bringing (from Left to Right):

• Pedal Wrench (for taking the pedals off to get it into the bike box on the airplane)
• Topeak Mountain Morph Frame Pump (unbelievably great.  Get one, seriously)
• Tire patches (bought from Free Range Cycles in Fremont)
• A Park Y-shaped Allen wrench (for reaching those awkward spots on the bike)
• Chain and Gear Brush (for keeping things clean)
• Tri-flow Chain lube
• 2 spare inner tubes (700x32 sized)
• Tire levers
• Park multi-tool
• Spoke wrench (for tightening, loosening or replacing spokes)
• 2 spare sets of brake pads (I wear through these quickly, because I ride my brakes like an old lady)
• 1 extra set of shoe cleats
• 2 tire boots (a temporary tire patch in case the tire blows and the tube starts sticking out)

There you go!  Most of this was bought at Classic Cycle on Bainbridge Island.  And most surprisingly, I know how use all of it!  I got some good advice from the Bike Touring Demigods on the the bikelist.org mailing list.  One guy wrote "Never carry a tool you don't know how to use".  So self-evident, yet I carried around tire levers and a spare tube for half a year before I taught myself how to use them.

UPDATED 4/19 - Got some great feedback from various folks and decided to get some extra shifter and brake cables, a new multi-tool (the Park 1B-3), and bring along a little sack of extra bolts and zip ties.

I'm also going to get some spare chain links, bring a few small rags, get a Leatherman and bring some electrical tape.  Almost neglible weight addition, but a bunch of very useful items.  Thanks everyone for the advice!

Even More on Lublin and the Partitions

Holy smokes, this Polish history stuff gets real complicated, real quick.  In the hopes of establishing a timeline of who was ruling Lublin and Krakow when over the last 200 years, I think I've finally got it figured out.  With some help from the book I'm reading and this handy Wikipedia article on West Galicia, here's what I've got so far:

1) Lublin and Krakow are annexed by Austria and the bizarre Habsburgs in 1795 as part of the Third Partition of Poland.  They are tacked onto the land that Austria stole in the First Partition, which is now called "Galicia".  The area containing Lublin and Krakow are called "West Galicia" (despite the fact that they are in fact north of Galicia).  Here's a picture of Galicia directly after the 1795 Partition

2) Napoleon sweeps through Eastern Europe in the early 1800's and takes over much of Poland.  He carves out a huge chunk of it and creates an entity called the "Duchy of Warsaw", which includes Lublin and Krakow.  The latter is right on the border of Austria and the new Duchy.  The Duchy of Warsaw is run by Saxony, a German state that became independent briefly duing the Napoleonic Wars and sided with the French.  Here's a map during this brief period lasting from 1809 till 1815:

3) So Napoleon gets beat by the Russians and they come storming West.  They take over Duchy of Warsaw in 1813 and try to reaffirm their control during the Congress of Vienna in 1815.  The Congress of Vienna was essentially an enormous diplomatic summit that occurred in the wake of the Napoleonic wars where all of the winners got together and decided how they were going to divvy up Europe.  Russia wasn't allowed to keep the entirety of the Duchy of Warsaw, but much of it (including Lublin) was included in yet a new entity named "Congress Poland", which was a semi-autonomous state essentially run by Russia.  However, Krakow and it's environs got a measure of independence and was called the "Free City of Krakow".  Here's a map of Poland after the Congress of Vienna (same one I posted yesterday):

4) These borders remain essentially static except that Russia and Austria eventually remove whatever semi-autonomy their respective areas of influence had.  In 1830, Russia removed any independence from Congress Poland following an attempted uprising.  In 1846 Austria did the same to Krakow after their own uprising.

Things remained this way right up until the end of World War I.  I think I've finally got a handle on the shifting borders from 1795 through 1918.  While this may seem a little in-the-weeds, it's nice to know which of the empires were ruling over my family during which periods.  Was it the corrupt, oppressive, decadent and declining Austrian empire?  Was it the brief but overwhelming French Empire, screaming across Poland, anxious to meet their doom in Russia?  Or was it the corrupt, oppressive, totalitarian and ascending Russian empire?  Now I (and you) know.

More on Lublin and the Partitions

I'm making my way through Norman Davies "God's Playground: A History of Poland" Volume Two and came across something that contradicts the previous map I posted yesterday.  Apparently, Lublin fell within the Russian Partition of Poland, not the Austrian portion.  Take a look at this map:

The gray area in the middle is the Congress of Poland (Kongresspolen in German, apparently).  According to the book and Wikipedia, this was an autonomous region until the 1830's, when Russia made it essentially a vassal state. It includes Lublin and you can also see that Krakow is right on the border, but clearly within the Austrian Partition (but for some reason is yellow.  That needs some investigation).  After taking over the Congress of Poland, Russia renamed it Vistulaland, after the river which starts at Gdansk (then called Danzig) and cuts all the way through the Poland.

As with most things involving Polish history, this is all very complicated and requires a bit of unraveling to see what is really going on.

Also, my favorite quote of the day, from page 56 of God's Playground:

"The proliferating profusion of possible political permutations among the pullulating people and parties of the Polish provinces in this period palpably prevented the propagation of permanent pacts between potential partners". 

Mr. Davies, you are the premiere protector of Polish posterity and your prose performs it's planned purpose perfectly.

Trip Plan – Leg 3 – The Danube

In my mind, this is where my trip really starts. The first two weeks are about getting my head on straight and learning the ropes about what it takes to bike tour in Europe. I’ll have any gear and equipment problems sorted out and will have gotten a bit fitter as well.

Leg 3 starts in Donaueschingen the (disputed) source of the Danube and the ancestral home of the Furstenberg family. I chose this town as a start to this leg primarily because it’s the western most point on the bike maps that I purchased through Esterbauer. These maps are a work of art, with each 10-15 km having insane details on all the various trails, amenities and sites along the way. Here’s a shot of the area around Regensburg, for example.

The length of the Danube that I’ll be riding takes me 700 km all the way into Vienna. From the western part of Germany, through Bavaria. I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently about the area, but not nearly enough to have any kind of insight about it yet. It sounds like a conservative region of Germany. It only became part of Germany in the late 1800’s, and only in response to an impending war with France. Obviously, there’s the infamous Munich Beer Halls and all the Hitler associations. I’ve learned recently that Germany, as a country, is a relatively new invention which was crafted by the Prussians (coming in the from the Baltic Coast and Northeast Germany). It was a crapshoot for a while whether Germany would unite under Austria or under Prussia. Prussia won and dominated the politics of the country for a long time. Some would argue that the Prussia military temperament had something to do with World War I and II, but that’s for people who know a lot more than me. It’s all a lot more complicated than that, so I’ll just stop embarrassing myself here. There’ll be lots more fascinating history about Prussia during my trip in Poland, but that’ll have to wait.

I’ll be leaving the Danube at Regensburg for a side trip down to Munich. That town just sounds like too much fun to pass up. I’ll spend a couple of days in Munich, then return to the Danube and head into Austria until I hit Vienna.

Vienna used to be the capital of an insanely large and powerful empire, run by the bizarre Habsburg empire. A hopelessly imbred lineage with jutting, misshapen jaws, this family married their offspring into every major royal family in Europe, allowing them to slowly accumulate royal titles and hereditary claims over a huge swath of Europe. In the midst of their decline, they made the mistake of triggering World War I and paid for it by having only the current borders of Austria to show for it. Here’s the Habsburg empire at it’s height in the 1500’s

Here is where my family history and my trip start to intertwine a bit. Austria-Hungary, along with Russia and Prussia, participated in the Partitions of Poland in the late 1700’s. The Partitions was the very diplomatic manner in which these three countries dismantled and destroyed Poland, simply annexing the entire country because they could. Austria-Hungary got the part which included Krakow (where my last name comes from) and Lublin (where my grandmother’s family came from). After the First World War, the chastened Austria-Hungary was forced to give back it’s chunk of Poland, and my grandmother’s family, presumably, lived in a free Poland from 1919 until the Germans and Russians came storming in once again in 1939. Here’s a good map of the partitions:

Also of note is that the 700 km I’ll be riding on is nearly completely devoid of any kind of hill. Because of this, I’m going to attempt my first 100 mile day (called a Century, in biker parlance) along the Danube.

Next up: Vienna to Prague!

Mile 774 - Biking to Babysit

I got a call a couple of weeks ago from my sister, asking me to babysit my painfully cute nephew.  He'd never been away from his folks overnight, so it was a bit of a big deal.  Luckily, he's awesome and I'm a cool uncle so we had a blast.  I also took it as an opportunity to enjoy some more gorgeous Seattle bike riding.

On Saturday, I did the same ride that's been documented here before.  It was great, as usual, with the first half of the ride being a dedicated bike path along the Seattle waterfront, all the way up to the Ballard Locks.  Here's a slideshow of the trip:

The ride up to their place in North Seattle was directly into a 10-15 mile headwind, uphill most of the way.  I've never had to contend with that kind of head-on wind, and it was completely demoralizing.  I just routed it on Bike Route Toaster (no link, sorry.  I accidentally lost the route just as I was saving it) and it says that it's only 500 feet of climbing.  But for some reason, it felt like Everest with the wind.
The route I chose was based on the Seattle Bike Map (which you can get for free just by filling out this form).  It's a great resource and fit nicely into the clear plastic top of my handlebar bag.
And just 'cuz I can't get enough, here's another cute photo of my nephew

Trip Plan - Leg 2: Bodensee to the Source of the Danube

I should be wrapping up my revolution around the Bodensee right around May 23rd and will head Northwest into the Black Forest until I hit the source of the Danube in Donaueschingen.  My departure from the Bodensee will probably happen somewhere around Radolfzell am Bodensee, a relatively large town on the southwest shore of the lake.  My secret hope is that I'll find some like-minded goofballs that are heading in my direction and can show me the sights in the Black Forest.

There's a regional bike route that goes from Radolfzell directly to Donaueschingen.  This would be the route if I go direct.  It's only one day of riding to get there, so if I've got some extra time, there's plenty to explore in the Black Forest.  

Some notes on how I'm planning the route for this part of the trip.  I bought a couple of German cycling maps from Omnimap.com, which has a fantastic selection of bicycle maps from all over the world.  Part of the reason why I chose this area to start my trip in is because there's a wealth of infrastructure and information targeted directly as bicycle tourists.  Here, for example, is a small section of the map which shows the first few miles of the route I'm taking out of Radolfzell into the Black Forest

You can little wrenches for bike shops, tent icons for campsites, wine glasses for restaurants etc.  This should make life fairly easy during this part of the trip.

Depending on how long of a time I take to cycle around the lake, this section of the trip could take anywhere between 1-7 days, ending on May 26th in Donaueschingen.  I'm considering heading a bit farther north, into Stuttgart, to visit the old stomping grounds of my uncle and aunt, who spent 2 years there in post-war Germany as part of the US Army.  If I've got time, it'll definitely make the itinerary.

Next stop: 700 miles of the Danube!