Biking down the Loire

It's been two months since I last complained in this my blog about being afflicted by the one-two punch of  tendinitis in my left Achilles tendon and arthritis in my right knee.  Don't assume that my silence means that these afflictions have gone away like magic.  Or that I'm no longer suffering from all the disruption to my favorite activities that they cause.

Actually, the tendinitis is considerably improved, and I have hopes that the tendon and related muscles are gradually healing.  The arthritis, however, .... well, arthritis doesn't really "get better," so far as I know.  Most sources say that the best you can do is to slow down the degeneration until you either pass on to a better and less painful world, or pay for an artificial knee.  I'm nowhere ready for the latter, and hopefully am not looking at a near approach of the former.

These problems, taken together, kept me from taking part in a pre-paid  hike with friends in Scotland last August.  But, as reported to you, I nevertheless joined the group and traveled by baggage van each day, joining the hikers when they arrived at each day's target town.  

Except for two days, when I stayed with the group on a bicycle.  A bicycle.

I found that bike riding bothered neither my tendinitis nor my arthritis.  Unfortunately, the remaining days of the hike were over terrain too rough -- at least in my estimation -- to make for comfortable biking.

But now we come to 2024.  Same fellow hikers.  But this year we are planning to be fellow bikers.  My university friend Jim is an untiring biker, and has taken part in weeks-long group rides throughout the U.S.A. -- including one ride from the east coast to the west coast.  

So Jim has organized a bike ride through the chateau-infested Loire Valley in France, two and a half months from now in May.   As with our past hikes in Britain, he is working through an organization that arranges each night's accommodations, as well as provides maps and tour descriptions.  They also arrange for bike rentals.

We will be a group of seven.  Two of us -- Jim and his brother John -- are purists who will ride conventional road bikes.  The rest of us will ride e-bikes.  The entire group will ride from Orléans to Tours.  After a day's rest in Tours, the two hardy brothers will continue on to Nantes near the coast, and then south to La Rochelle.  The rest of us will return to Paris from Tours, and then home.

The ride as far as Tours is rated as "Easy."  We will be biking six days on mainly level terrain, with daily miles ranging from eight to 29 miles, averaging out to about 21 miles per day.

We plan to spend four days before the ride in Paris, training for the ride by consuming ample provisions of truffles, cassoulet, bouillabaisse, and coq au vin -- washed down with hearty French wines. 

 Getting to bed by 1 a.m.

Should be great. Wish me luck!

Chicago adventure

The whistle blew twice.  Exactly on time, at 4:55 p.m., Amtrak's Empire Builder moved slowly out of King Street station, plunged immediately into the tunnel beneath the streets of downtown Seattle, and emerged minutes later into early twilight along the shore of Elliot Bay.  I settled back in my roomette, smiling contentedly.  In forty-six hours I'd arrive in Chicago.

Hey, knock it off.  You're just giving the readers a quick summary of last week's trip.  You're not writing a lousy novel!

OK, OK.  I'll summarize.  It was dark by the time we reached Everett where the train turned right, heading east.  I had dinner (Atlantic Salmon) in the diner at 7:15 p.m.,  and was sound asleep in my bed long before we reached Spokane.  The section of the train arriving from Portland was hooked onto our train in Spokane, but -- as in my last trip on the Empire Builder in 2009 -- I slept soundly through the process.

I awoke at a predawn stop and several inches of snow in Whitefish, Montana.  I pulled on some clothes and enjoyed a few minutes outside the train in the crisp mountain air before proceeding to the diner for a French toast breakfast.  Altogether, Amtrak served me two breakfasts, two lunches, and two dinners -- all included in the ticket price.  The train proved unusually uncrowded --- maybe only half the roomettes and bedrooms were occupied.  

We crossed the Rockies just south of Glacier National Park, and then glided across the vast, flat, snowy expanse of eastern Montana and North Dakota.  The second morning, we pulled into St. Paul, Minnesota, by which time we were beyond the snows of the prairies, and headed southward uneventfully to Union Station in Chicago, arriving fifteen minutes early at 4:30 p.m.

The final trip of my three-year Chicago-by-Amtrak trifecta had been completed -- California Zephyr in 2022, Southwest Chief in 2023, and now the Empire Builder.  

I have a strange attraction for long distance railway travel, obviously -- at least when I can do it in sleeper accommodations -- but I was excited to arrive in Chicago.  My friends Jim and Dorothy had taken a Greyhound up from West Lafayette, Indiana, and had arrived at their (and my) hotel on Wacker Drive about two hours before my arrival.  Rather than hunt around for the station's inconvenient Uber stop, I decided to take an available cab to the hotel.  Bad Decision.  The cab was unmetered, and the fare for a ten-minute ride was a shocking $56.  (It would have been $12 by Uber.)  Be warned.

We had arrived Tuesday evening.  On Wednesday, we took an interurban Metra train from Union Station to suburban Aurora.  Aurora may be a suburb of Chicago, but it is also the second largest city in Illinois, and is full of theaters and other activities devoted to the arts.

We attended an excellent performance of the Billy Elliot musical -- unexpectedly good dancing by the thirteen-year-old star, good singing and acting by all, and very good production values in general.  

On Thursday, we visited the Chicago Museum of American Writing.  It's a little difficult to imagine how you could make a museum of writing, but it was done well, and I walked away feeling like I'd had a quick refresher course in American Literature.

Dorothy then went off exploring on her own, and Jim and I took a rail transit -- after some absurd walking around in circles attempting to find the station -- to the south shore and the Museum of Science and Industry.  After caffeinating ourselves in the museum cafeteria, we spent all our museum time exploring the exhibit of the German U-505, captured by the U.S. Navy during World War II.  The first capture of an enemy ship in battle since 1813. 

It wasn't easy to capture a German sub.  It would have been far easier to simply blow it out of the water.  But extensive planning had gone into the capture of this submarine, forcing the crew to abandon the ship before they had time to successfully set the explosive charges that would have scuttled it.  The capture gave us valuable information about German technology -- not only the ship itself but a large number of documents and cryptology information, including an Enigma decoder.

I enjoyed most the museum's documentary exhibits in the corridors leading to the ship itself -- which seemed huge from the outside -- but we also toured the interior of the sub itself, giving me a gut appreciation of what it would have been like to find myself cooped up with a large number of fellow crew in what was actually a very small tube, while depth charges were going off all around us.  Not fun.

We all got back together for dinner, and then walked to a nearby theater where we saw a stage production of Highway Patrol -- a three person cast in a play about the heartbreak of fake identities on the internet.

Then, the next morning, we bid each other farewell -- Jim and Dorothy returning to Union Station for their Greyhound ride south, and I taking the CTA to O'Hare airport for my Alaska Airline flight to Seattle.

A lot of fun, and enjoyable adventures with two enjoyable friends.  I'm ready for more travel.  But then -- when am I not?

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Photo -- Train stop at Whitefish, Montana.

Travel to Chicago. Blog visits from Singapore

Just a brief notice that I leave Seattle tomorrow, on Amtrak's Empire Builder, and will arrive in Chicago Tuesday afternoon.  I'm meeting my friends Jim and Dorothy, who are coming all the way up from West Lafayette, Indiana, to hang out with me.  We plan to see a couple of theater performances during my visit -- Chicago being in the midst of its annual theater festival.

I'll return to Seattle by plane Friday afternoon.

While I'm away from Seattle and from my blog, I'd like to ask the person or persons or organization -- or whoever you are -- in Singapore who has been visiting this blog repeatedly during the past three weeks to explain what on earth he, she, they, it is doing.

The last two hours have been typical -- about sixty visits.

I love being visited, but it's a  little disturbing when the visits are spaced evenly throughout all 24 hours of each day, every day for three weeks.  The total so far is something like 9,160 visits -- compared with a typical 545 from the USA during the same period.

  

Cuppa Java?

When I was a kid, my home town had a doughnut shop that I frequented on occasion.  I could get a large, tasty doughnut for just five cents.  I remember noting in passing that a cup of coffee to wash it down would have been another five cents.  Not that I ever bought coffee.

I tasted my mother's coffee once or twice, and was nauseated by the taste.  I was 23 before I began sipping an occasional cup of coffee -- to stay awake, in lieu of  my usual No-Doz tablets.  Finally I walked up to a fast food counter and ordered a cup.  I don't remember what I paid for it.  More than five cents, I'm sure, but not much more.

What I do know is that I now pay $4.91, including sales tax, for a cup of Starbucks coffee.  An article in this week's The Economist persuades me that I'll be paying much more in the years to come.

As is so often the case, nowadays, the villain is Global Warming.  Coffee -- especially Coffea arabica, by far the most popular species today -- is fussy about the temperature zones in which it grows.  Studies quoted by the article indicate that by the end of this century, depending on how much warmer it gets, between 35 and 77 percent of today's coffee-growing cropland will be unsuitable for growing Arabica coffee.  Even by 2050, the unsuitable cropland will be between 43 and 58 percent.

Of course, certain cooler lands now unsuitable for coffee will then become suitable because of Global Warming, but maps included in the article show that those newly suitable lands will be far fewer than those lost.

Several remedies are suggested, all of which present problems.  Another species, Coffea rubica, is sturdier and less dependent on a narrow range of temperatures.  But Rubica coffee doesn't have as appealing a taste, and is used at present mainly for instant coffee.  For consumers like me, who drink coffee primarily as a hot drink, and secondarily for caffeine, this probably won't be a problem.  But many or most coffee drinkers are more discriminating when it comes to taste.  By analogy, some of us may also drink jug wine, but many others gladly pay large premiums for high quality wine.

Coffee agriculturalists are examining other lesser known species.  Coffea affinis and Coffea stenophylla, both rare and both found primarily in Sierra Leone, have pleasant flavors, and are less dependent on cooler temperatures than either Arabica or Rubica.  Another possible candidate is Coffea dewevrei, commonly known as Excelsa, a species with a good flavor, that was once grown extensively in the Congo region, but in 1931 fell prey to disease, wiping out many growers.

All of these alternatives show promise, but each presents its own difficulties which would have to be dealt with by coffee growers.  The article seemed cautiously optimistic that one or more solutions would be found, and that coffee would continue to be drunk by future generations.

I, myself, of course, will drink almost any liquid that is hot and black.  Coffee drinkers like me, however, aren't the consumers that concern growers and roasters of coffee in today's world.  It's that fellow ahead of you in line at Starbucks, the one who demands to know in which part of Sumatra his coffee was grown, who offers both the challenge and the rewards to tomorrow's coffee industry.