Jamie Thingelstad

I’ve flown many times. In fact, at one point I was flying about 50% of the time for work. Week in the office, week on the road. I’ve never thought that much about flying, it’s just something that you need to do. No big deal.

When Tammy told me that she didn’t like to fly I didn’t really think that much about it. That is, until we flew together the first time. As she stomped her feet and told me to stop the plane from shaking in the turbulence I realized that she wasn’t joking, she really is scared of flying. After hearing her go on about going down in burning flames and how nobody survives I find myself sitting on the plane watching the wing and wondering, is it really supposed to bend that much?

Flights I’ve been on since being exposed to her phobia have me on pins and needles. I watch the wing. I watch the cabin. Have you ever noticed how the cabin and fuselage of the plane move independently? On a recent international flight there was a good three inches of movement between the two structures. How much can it move? As I descended on a recent flight into Chicago through the clouds I couldn’t help but wonder if there were other planes out there. Is it really safe to be going 250 mph when you can’t see anything?

Cleary I need to regain my innocence and ignorance about flying and stop listening to her.

I’ve really not cared for Outlook Express for quite a while now so I’m giving Mozilla Thunderbird a shot. So far, it’s pretty good. Have to change some of my habits around keyboard shortcuts and the like. The news reader is much better than the Outlook one, but that isn’t saying much. We’ll see how this goes.

Many of you know that I’m a gear junkie. I record my heart rate on all my rides and runs. Why? Because I can, not because I need to.

Polar just put up a webpage with heart rate data from a few riders in this years Tour de France. It’s really interesting. It’s also amazing to me how low their heart rates are even on the hard climbs!

I just finished putting the journal entries that I kept while we were on the hiking portion of our trip up here in the blog. I linked in a number of photos from the trip as well. Took a little bit more work than I thought it would to get it all on there, but wanted to get it done soon. Tammy and I are still suffering from jet lag so making it past 9:00 pm is a little hard.

We spent most of Saturday on buses and trains working our way from Soglio to Zurich. We took a round-about way to make a trip back to Zuoz, one of the towns we had visited on our hike, to get this cool goat sculpture that Tammy had really liked. We made our way fairly easily.

When we arrived in Zurich we were greeted with absolute chaos. Unknown to us Saturday was Zurich’s Street Parade. This is from what I can see on the Internet the largest techno gathering in all of Europe. The train station had a stage setup with pounding techno. The streets were filled with people in various forms of crazy dress. Large man in fishnets and white leather shorts? Group of interesting folks? More fishnets? It was a little bit much coming from the trail to this. More pictures of Street Parade are on their site…

We wandered around after dinner a little to take some of the Street Parade in, but then retreated to our hotel to get some rest and relaxation.

We got up on Sunday and had “the longest day in the world”. We flew from Zurich to Amsterdam. Then from Amsterdam to Minneapolis. My mother came and picked us up at the airport and instead of going home we went straight to the Uptown Art Fair. We go every year, and didn’t want this year to be an exception. We finally got home and crashed very quickly.

This trip was simply awesome. The hiking section was particularly great. I’d love to go back to Switzerland soon.

I’ll probably take a little time off from the site here. I’ll be back in a bit though… see you soon!

Today’s Stats:
Moving Time 3h 54m
Distance: 9.2 miles
Ascent: 1,656’
Max Elevation: 4,822’

We had the dessert course of our hiking trip today. Today’s hike was an easier hike with some great views and a wonderful trek through history. We started our trip by grabbing a bus from Sils Maria to the small village of Casaccia. This bus descended down the Molaja Pass which is perhaps the most winding, twisty road I’ve ever seen. The bus has a special horn that it blows from time to time as it goes down to let traffic know it’s there, as the bus requires the entire road to make it around the hairpin switchbacks.

We got off in Casaccia and started our hike to Soglio. The hike was fairly easy. We slowly ascended a little then descended a bit too. All in all I think we descended more than we ascended today. Yesterday was a tiring day and Tammy and I were both feeling some tenderness in our knees so Tammy and I didn’t feel like burning up the trail. It was a nice final day of hiking.

Soglio is very close to the border of Italy and it seems Italian is as common here, if not more, than German. I noticed that the trail signs switched from German to Italian. Another difference that denoted the Italian influence was the near universal use of rock roofs on the houses.

As we were hiking along the trail and passed through a small village we saw this table on the side of the road with preserves for sale on it. We we’re confused at first. It looked like this stuff was for sale but there wasn’t anyone there and there were no prices on things. Annica translated the sign for us and it simply said the preserves were for sale and leave whatever you felt they were worth. How cool is that? We grabbed two jars and left some francs in the money jar. It’s nice to see such trust in your fellow people.

The trail was very nice and we passed several water flows. We even passed one relatively good sized waterfall that I took a moment to climb up a little bit on and get some better pictures.

Another really cool thing about today’s hike was a section of the trail that is an ancient Roman road. It was constructed forever ago by the Romans to help them get around their land. It was really amazing to walk on these stones that were laid literally thousands of years ago. How many people have tread on them.

We got our first glimpse of Soglio and it was so picturesque. Soglio isn’t in the valley and the first glimpse from the trail didn’t give the details of the ancient city inside. I’ve never seen a town with such narrow alleyways and corridors between buildings. It feels like you are walking in another century as you walk through the village.

Tomorrow we start our journey back home. We head to Zurich and then the following day fly back home to Minneapolis. It’s been a great time. Memorable in so many ways. The hiking trip was just great. Six days of hiking and 63 miles later I can’t believe that I wish it wasn’t ending.

This is a map that shows our six days of hiking all together. You can see the gaps in the first half of the trip that were taken by train. The last half of the trip is all on foot.

Part of Europe 2004 collection. Also see Hike to Soglio from Switzerland & Italy 2023 collection.

Today’s Stats:
Moving Time: 5h 4m
Distance: 9.5 miles
Ascent: 3,589’
Max Elevation: 9,124’

Shirley left us this morning. Shirley is one of the happy members of our hiking group and she’s a pretty incredible lady. She has no problem talking but luckily she’s got a wealth of stories that are interesting to back it up with. Shirley has done something like 20 Ryder Walker hiking trips and just keeps on coming back. She sets a pace on the trail that is hard to keep up with. I can only wish that I’m as healthy and fun when I’m retired and kicking back (if you can call what she does kicking back!)

Anyway, onto our hike. Today was awesome! Simply great. Best day of hiking I’ve ever had.

We started the day at 8:30am and stopped at a bakery in Sils Maria to get some lunch for the trail. No huts on todays hike. I didn’t even see any water springs now that I think of it. We hiked out of town and up into the trees. We took a route that was relatively gradual for a few kilometers to get some altitude. It was a very nice way to get up. Not too tiring and gave us time to get our legs warmed up for the day and let breakfast get down. We only had 7 people in our group (including Annica and Julie, our guides). There was another hike that wouldn’t go as high as we were that had a few people in it and several people decided to take today off and go to St. Moritz for the day. We are only a few minutes by bus from the famous resort town and people wanted to check it out. I think the note in the itinerary that today would be the hardest day of the trip also helped tip the scales for some.

We ascended fine out of the tree line running into a few groups of cows out eating grass. The cows in the Engadine region seem so happy. They just hang out on the mountain sides munching on grass in small groups. We hiked straight through several groups of them today.

The clouds were very low today and as soon as we got a couple thousand meters up we were looking down on them. They were also moving at a good clip. Looked like some bad weather was heading our way, but nothing too severe. There was no sign of thunder or lightning, just some precipitation. We stayed on the trail and got pretty darn cold. Everyone put on every layer they had, and even with that the wind was whipping us all into a pretty frigid state. Visibility was at times less than 50 feet. In my opinion, it was awesome! I know some may think that sounds awful, but I was loving it.

We headed along the trail to our destination which was a lake up the mountain. We spent about 30 minutes on some fairly exposed trail, but it wasn’t too bad since the visibility was so terrible we didn’t really see how big the drops were. That’s looking on the bright side eh?

We finally reached the lake and everyone was very cold. We found some windbreak and planned to have a very quick bite of food and head down. It seemed that the option of summiting the peak was out of the question. Then all of a sudden the sun peaked out just a little bit. We extended our lunch stay to warm up some, still thinking that the peak was out of the question. However, the weather just got better and better.

Annica decided that if we wanted to give the peak a try we could, but if the weather got bad we would have to turn back. Three of the others decided not to try it and just went down with Julie. Annica, Tammy and I headed up to the Piz.

It was a great ascent. We got to play in the snow as we went up to the Piz. I was a little concerned at times mostly as I considered how we would get down this route. The route that we took was a scramble on boulders with many big steps up. There were several times where I was grabbing anything that felt scure and pulling myself up the rise. Tammy on the other hand did simply amazing. She bounded up the side of the peak like a mountain goat! We made it to the top and there was a small gathering there with 3 Belgians that had just made it to the top as well from the other side.

It was just great to stand on the peak and look around at all the mountains. What a sense of accomplishment and a fun time. We took a different route down that turned out to be pretty great for the descent. Part of the descent was this really mushy gravel, dirt mixture that was sort of like bug muddy sand. It was great for the descent since we could just slide in a controlled way down. We also ran into good snow banks still on the mountain and we were able to “ski” down them on our hiking boots. The descent was a blast. Lots of laughs from all.

After completing the summit we did the long and steep descent down to Maloja where we caught a bus back to Sils Maria.

What a day! Such fun, such a great time.

We have a fancy dinner tonight. The Hotel Edelweiss is having a “konzert diner”. There will be a small orchestra playing music in between the courses. Pretty neat! Tomorrow looks like it is a pretty mild hike with some really great scenery and things to check out on our way to our final city of Soglio. Soglio is supposed to be great. Can’t wait.

Part of Europe 2004 collection. Also see Sils Maria - Maloja Loop from Switzerland & Italy 2023 collection.

Today’s Stats:
Moving Time: 4h 58m
Distance: 11.9 miles
Ascent: 2,506’
Max Elevation: 7,437’

There is something really fun about waking up in one village and walking out of your hotel with your pack on and walking right into your next hotel in another village having used nothing other than your own two feet to get there. The tiredness in your muscles, the dull ache in your feet and the layer of sweat mark a good days work.

The hike today was a very pleasant hike. I didn’t think it was as hard as some of our other hikes but our guides keep saying that we are just getting used to the effort and the body adapts quickly. I know the body adapts quickly, my legs feel strong and it just seems normal that one would wake up, have a big meal and then walk ten miles in the mountains.

We hiked up to the restaurant by Lake Hahnensee. We hiked up through the forest and above the tree line for the lunch stop. This wasn’t a trail hut, but instead a real honest-to-goodness restaurant. Again I was amazed by the number of locals that had hiked up for lunch. If you put a restaurant in the states on top of a 700 foot steep ascent do you think you would need a reservation for lunch? You do here!

It seemed like we ascended more than we descended but I think it was just that the descent was much more gradual than the ascent. I was grateful for that as my right knee has been feeling a bit sore and the decreased pounding on it from the gradual descent was appreciated. The hike was very different from the others since a lot of it was in the trees. We had great views however of St. Moritz as we hiked it’s perimeter at a couple thousand meters. The last 2 miles or so was a trail hike around the city lake to get to Sils Maria.

Tammy got a picture of an Edelweiss flower today. The edelweiss flower grows in the mountains and used to be the way that a man would prove his worthiness to his to-be wife by going up into the mountains and bringing an edelweiss flower back. Perhaps as a sign of the propensity to marry in Switzerland it is now illegal to pick an edelweiss flower and you can be fined if caught.

Tomorrow is the hardest day of hiking on the trip. I’ll let you know how that goes!

Part of Europe 2004 collection. Also see Hike Pontresina to Sils Maria from Switzerland & Italy 2023 collection.

Today’s Stats:
Moving Time: 4h 19m
Distance: 8.5 miles
Ascent: 2,526’
Max Elevation: 9,061’

Last night at dinner our guides presented two different hike options for today. One would be a relatively flat hike for those looking for any easier day. The other would be a day similar to the day we just had with good distance and good up and down. Tammy and I opted for the harder day, along with a guy named Matt who is the son of a family that is on the trip with us. The hike and day were great.

In cycling they often talk about riders who get stronger over multi-day events and those that are worn down. I feel like I am getting stronger on these hikes. My legs feel better today after the hike than they did yesterday. My knees are holding out strong as well. I am eagerly looking forward to my massage that I’ve scheduled for tonight though. A good rubdown on my calves and thighs will feel exceptionally good.

Our hike today started with a short train ride to a very small village that houses a funicular. Never heard of one of those? Me either. Essentially it is a rail system used to get up the side of a mountain. A couple of things are relatively unique about it. First, the rail car itself is built at about a 25% or more angle. Think of a rhombus. The other unique thing is that there are two cars that counterweight each other. There is only one rail however, and right in the middle of the track it splits in two and the rail cars quickly jump on different tracks to pass each other and then resume it’s way up the hill. I enjoyed the ride. Much better for me than any gondola ride.

After taking the fernicular up to the mountain we started our hike for the day. The day started right off ascending a descent grade that we didn’t punctuate in any way, we simply went over the top and then started descending down into the valley. Tammy had some blister problems on the way up that required some attention. Midway down the valley we took a moment to appreciate a small lake that is fed by the annual melt and then continued down our way into the bottom of the gorge.

Once we reached the bottom we started the big ascent of the day. We had the great luck of being able to stare at the real work of our hike the entire time we were hiking. The trail took a steep switchback laden path right up to the top of the rise where we had lunch at the hut there.

This hut was rockin! There were more people here than we’ve seen at any other hut, yet it was probably the most rustic hut that we have visited. In fact, we got to see the hut getting it’s supplies via helicopter as we were hiking along the ridge. Some huts are so inaccessible that they are only supplied by helicopter, and the helicopter will then fly out their garbage as well. Pretty neat. Anyway, there were a lot of people there including a huge crowd of what I believe were Italians hiking for the day. They were picnicking, drinking and singing songs on the side of the hut. It was so cool!

The other great thing at the hut was the special of the day, fruchtkugen! What’s that? Well, when I was a kid – I think in 3rd or 4th grade – we lived in a very small town in North Dakota called Napoleon. Napoleon was essentially 100% German. The local cafe served knefle soup every day. The school had sauerkraut every day. I’m talking German. One of the things I really liked was “kugen” and I’ve never had it since we lived there. Kugen is this baked custer desert with fruit in it. Not very sweet, but very good. And here it was in the hut on the top of this mountain. You bet I ordered a piece to go with my barley soup!

After our lunch we started a very long descent down to the village of Pontresina. It was a long decent, lasting about 2 hours. I got a bit exhausted on the decent after seemingly going down forever. See, going down is in many ways harder than going up. Your knees and legs absorb the shock of each step and it can really wear on you. Some parts of the descent were exposed meaning that there was nothing between you and a fair amount of a fall if you happened to slip and fall. It wasn’t as scary as it all sounded though.

Pontresina is a very nice town. I got myself a haircut which was a little interesting not knowing any German. Tammy got a huge “brezel” as well!

Part of Europe 2004 collection. Also see Hike to Segantini Hütte and Pontresina from Switzerland & Italy 2023 collection.

Today’s Stats:
Moving Time: 4h 13m
Distance: 9.6 miles
Ascent: 2,956’
Max Elevation: 8,520’

When we were in France we spent at least €100 on water in one form or another. The water out of the tap tasted hideous and restaurants treated it like gold. Here in the Engadine region of Switzerland, Evian flows into your morning bath! All of these villages have these great public fountains flowing with cold, wonderful water that you can fill up your bottles to your hearts content with. These are all over the place and are a key enabler to the long distance hiking that is so common in this area.

We changed our hike from the schedule today and instead of hiking from Guarda to Zuoz, we took a train to Zuoz and then did a loop hike out of Zuoz. The hike was spectacular with the only complaint being a rather long “road hike” to get to where the real hiking starts. We left right from the front door of the Posthotel Engiadena and hiked out of town. The road pitched up immediately to at least a 20% grade as we were hiking out. We ascended around 300 meters and I was dripping wet with sweat before we even lost site of the village.

We spent the first 2 hours of the hike just going up, and up, and up. We ascended almost all of the 900 meters of elevation in the first half of the hike. It was hard, but very rewarding. Tammy and I accompanied by Daniel, one of the guides, were the first to make the hut. I pushed harder up the last steep ascent to get to the hut. The push was more of a “horse to water” thing than any kind of machismo.

Our destination was the Chamanna Des-Cha Hut where we had a great lunch. We brought some bread and cheese in our packs, along with a some Swiss chocolate. We also ordered Roschti Natural at the hut, a potato dish which is most similar to hash browns but different, and very good. We had a big lunch with the Grand Massif in the background and after an hour continued around the rim of the valley to the other side where we descended back down.

Descending those 900 meters was in some ways harder than the ascent. It really kills your legs, knees and feet in such a different way. My toes were aching on the descents and I was pleasantly surprised when I finally got my boots off and found that I did not have any blisters. Tammy chose to wear her Keen hiking sandals and it worked great for her, although her feet felt tired I think due to the lack of support.

My legs are feeling pretty tired today. Tomorrow we are going to be in a town that will have spa facilities and I think I’ll look for a massage to rub out some of the ache.

Part of Europe 2004 collection. Also see Hiking Guarda Out-n-Back to Chamonna Tuoi from Switzerland & Italy 2023 collection.

After our amazing train ride we arrived in Zurich. Switzerland is such a different place than France. It’s much more multi-national. A lot of different languages; almost all signs were in four different languages. We spent some time at the train station getting Euros changed to Swiss Francs and checking our luggage at the rail station since we were taking a train the next morning, no need to lug it all over the place. It’s nice to be in a currency that is less than one on the dollar, however things are pretty expensive so far.

Zurich is a nice town. Seemed very orderly, similar to the train station itself. We got a pass for the city rail system to get to our hotel but I don’t know that we really needed it since nobody ever looked at it and there was no device to run it through. Guess it was the honor system at work.

The Hotel Rigihof in Zurich was fine. Tammy observed it was the dirtiest of all the hotels we had stayed at so far, but it seemed fine to me. On the plus side it had relatively fast WiFi so I was able to send all my digital photos taken so far to the server at our house for safe storage (took about 10 hours while we slept!).

Some other items of interest…

Train Update - I went on and on earlier about how great the Paris to Zurich train was. I now know that not all rail travel in Europe is so great. Our train today from Zurich to Scuol was perhaps 1/2 of a step up from a Greyhound bus! Plus, we made the mistake of getting in a smoking car and not realizing it and then having to move. Did I mention that we have too much luggage? We do. We plan on sending some back to Zurich on the train tomorrow if possible. We are new to packing for a three week trip and definitely have more than we should.

Language - Switzerland is all German. Leave your French at the border. Zurich was very good with English as well, but so far the mountains are pretty sparse on English. For some reason I’m finding this easier to deal with but Tammy is finding it much harder.

Technology - I’m having terrible luck tech-wise. I brought three compact flash cards for our cameras along. Of the cards only the 1 gig card (thankfully!) is still working. The 512 mb and 256 mb cards have both decided to stop working in different ways. The 256 mb just corrupts anything you put on it. And the 512 mb won’t format and just gives an E50 error when I put it in the camera. This sucks and we’ve left Zurich now so I doubt I’ll be able to get anymore cards. Hope the 1G holds out. I even had to get a new card reader since my PCMCIA reader seems to have gotten loopy as well and freezes the laptop whenever inserted! I think this is what killed the 256 mb card. Argh! Tammy’s theory is that it has something to do with the power differences, who knows.

As you may have figured out by now we are in Scuol, Switzerland. This is a fairly small mountain town near the border of Austria on the upper side of the Engadine Valley. We meet our hiking group in a little over an hour for dinner and orientation. We hike 13 miles tomorrow on a fairly flat route only ascending 1,000 feet of elevation. The mountains are all around us. I’m looking to my left out my window right now in this converted Engadine hotel and can see two peaks well above the tree line with a saddle in the middle. Great stuff.

I’m sitting in the most luxurious form of transportation that I’ve ever experienced. We are taking a high-speed train from Paris to Zurich. I think we are in first class, it was required to get a reserved seat on the train and it turns out to be a fairly smart idea since we had room for our ample luggage that would have been pretty tight in the other cars.

The train is amazing! It’s silky smooth. The chairs are like miniature lazy boys. There are power connectors for your computer. We situated ourselves in one of these double units so we could face “the right way”. I was getting motion sick after only a few minutes so we needed to switch around. They served breakfast, a traditional hot chocolate and croissant kind of thing. Sorry, no WiFi on the train, I checked. 🙂

If something like this existed to get us from Minneapolis to Chicago, a distance I believe shorter than our trip today, it would just be great. Chalk one more up for Europe!

It was a little confusing getting on the train, as Tammy said because it’s just so simple. You just get on after all. Didn’t really know what to do with the luggage or where to go. Airport terminals are definitely more internationally friendly than train stations but we finally figured it out. I got a bit grumpy trying to figure out what to do but have no fears, Tammy kept me in my place. 🙂

Most people that know me know that I used to weigh quite a lot. Then I weighed a lot less. Now I weigh a little bit more, but by no means quite a lot. I went through a bit of a learning experience later in life. I’ve often thought that if I were a good enough writer (something I’ve been enjoying doing on my blog by the way) I would write a book about the experience.

I just finished reading a book that I think would be very similar to the book I would write. Heft on Wheels by Mike Magnuson recounts his transference of his obsession with drinking and smoking to riding his bicycle. Magnuson’s book is a fun, quick read and I felt a kinship to him in reading it. We shared many experiences, while still clearly being very different people. For example, he finished at the head of the pack in the Cat V race he tried while I was shot off the back very early on!

I should think it would be interesting to meet him some day. Perhaps on a ride.

In my last note I mentioned how confusing Paris was to get around. Amazingly enough I think I’m starting to get the hang of it however, of course just as we are only a ‘wake up’ away from leaving on to Switzerland. We spent much of the last two days zipping around on the Paris Metro and doing a little more exploring. Tammy did a little shopping today, although the city doesn’t really fit her shopping tastes from what she can tell.

City of Light

Last night we hopped on the metro after dinner to do some night photography. I brought my little portable tripod (thanks REI!) and did some fun ‘bulb’ exposure shots. For those that are not aware, that means taking pictures where you leave your shutter open for a very long time. These shots were taken with 20 to 30 second exposures. I dig this stuff probably because it’s really easy to create a shot that looks so cool. I’ve put three above that I liked particularly well. Paris get’s to be both the City of Light and the City of Love! Pretty lucky, both light and love!

Anniversary Art

Some of you may know that Tammy and I decided when we got married that our wedding presents were going to be art, and that after that we wouldn’t get each other anniversary presents but instead together get a piece of art. As you’ll know from reading our site this is only our 2nd anniversary, but the tradition continues. We went out today to find a piece that we really enjoyed and came out even better than expected. The beginning of the search was a bit disappointing as we got excited about €15,000 paintings that we obviously weren’t bringing home. We then returned to a gallery we had visited shortly right by the Louvre called Art Club. We found a a piece called Allez Saute! that we thought was great – and now it’s ours! It’s by a young Parisienne artist named Corniere. She had a number of pieces but this one we particularly liked and it fit our budget.

Kilometers

We’ve decided that we like kilometers. Let’s get these in the states as well. They are great for bike riding. The numbers are so much higher and they just go by so fast! Plus you can use the abbreviations k’s which is just so cool. While we are at it, let’s chuck the pounds and ounces and go for grams as well. Although, I don’t find ordering a 240g steak nearly as exciting as a half-pound steak.

My feet and legs are tired from walking around the city all day lately. That’s maybe not such a great way to begin a week-long hiking trip in the Alpes! We head out on the train to Zurich tomorrow morning. I don’t expect to be online much, if at all, so you probably won’t see anything else from us until we return. See you all soon, when we have to return to reality!

Yesterday was our 2nd anniversary. It seems like it’s been so much longer than two years, in a good way that is. We spent the first half of the day exploring Paris by foot. We walked around in the 8th, 9th, 10th, 2nd and 1st sections or arrondissements of Paris. You see, Paris is laid out in 20 of these arrondissements, I’m not going to try to get into a history lesson of the reasons or layout of this, you can read about that out on your own.

I find Paris to be an incredibly hard city to navigate. Nothing is at a right angle. Years ago I saw this TV show where they were studying the patterns of spider webs. They did a study where they gave some spiders a very small dose of hallucinogenic or psychedelic drugs. Sure enough, the spider webs lost their concentric patterns and turned into these jumbled up messes. If you overlayed one of these jumbled spider webs on a map, that would be Paris. Everything is named, no numbers, which adds a little bit more adventure to the challenge. At least in Manhattan you can rely generally on the street grid, no such luck in Paris.

Our hotel is great. We are staying at the Hyatt Regency Paris-Madeleine. This is definitely the nicest place we’ve stayed thus far. We intended it to be a little oasis in the middle of our two structured trips. The amenities are wonderful, however there broadband is horrible. I can only get around 12 kbps of bandwidth, no good. Tammy has decided that this is now her favorite hotel ever, dethroaning the previous holder of that position which was the Hotel Monaco in Denver.

We walked our way from our hotel through a variety of shops and got to La Sainte-Chapelle. We checked out the courtyard of the cathedral but didn’t go inside, the lines were terrible. We then went over to Notre Dame and walked through the inside of the cathedral. Amazing stuff. The effort that must have went into constructing these things. Wow.

After a lot of walking we got a pass on the Paris “yellow & green” open top buses and circled our way around much of the city.

Paris isn’t that hard to get around without knowing French. Tammy’s extremely rusty and fragmentary knowledge of French from school has been very helpful. Also, so many words are similar in English that it’s fairly straightforward to make your way through a restaurant menu or read signs. It also helps that many in Paris speak either very good English or enough to get through purchasing something.

We had dinner at the Latina Cafe on the Champs Elysees. It was wonderful food and great ambiance. It’s owned by a Latina or Salsa radia station and clearly there was some serious dancing going on at this place from time to time.

Today was a full blown tourist day. We slept in and made our morning voyage to the patisserie for some breakfast. We then headed to the Louvre.

Yes, that’s a picture where you aren’t supposed to take one. We headed straight for the Mona Lisa (which seems to be a popular place to head to right away). Going to the Louvre was like taking a bubble bath in art. It’s huge. Gargantuan. So big that it would take weeks to take it all in. We only had three hours plus or minus. We strolled through the museum as if we were soaking in a huge bathtub overflowing with bubbles. We didn’t take the time to question why the bubbles existed or what would become of the bubbles, we just enjoyed that they were there. We swam in art. And just like a bubble bath, it sticks with you after you get out. The power of art is almost hard to take at such high volumes.

After our bath in art, we perused some local shops and had our ugly American lunch in Paris. We went to what I must imagine is the American oasis for travellers in Paris. We visited the Hard Rock Cafe Paris. This place doesn’t even bother to put out French menus. The waitress came up and spoke near perfect English. The food was as normal as we would get in Bloomington. The water even came with ice! Didn’t have to ask.

Can you believe it’s taken me until now to put up a picture of the Eiffel tower!

After taking our temporary trip back to the states for some lunch we headed off to the Eiffel Tower. We took a bunch of pictures and were bothered by some of the people that you run into at the super-duper tourist spots in Paris looking to scam you for something. The Eiffel Tower has only three floors: pretty high, really high and stupid high. We walked the stairs to pretty high. Both Tammy and I are scared of heights so really and stupid high were simply out of the question. I also have an extraordinary fear of heights when combined with open air stairs. Luckily the stairs were not the metal grates you can see through or there is no way I would have made it up. I was clinging the railing making my way up stair by stair. The tower is really neat, we are going to make a trip back tonight when we do some night photography in Paris.

That’s it for now, this has gotten long and we are going to get dinner. I’ll probably put up one more thing before we head for our hiking section in Switzerland and I expect there will be no Internet anywhere on that trip. Au revoir!