Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

It’s a little bit cooler than yesterday, as there was a good hard rain last night, but it’s still damned hot.  Other places have it a lot worse.   California with the wild fires everywhere, of course.
Now, some might say that wildfires, like mudslides, earthquakes, and riots, are a regular occurrence of nature in California and so this is nothing unusual.  But large numbers of people dying from the heat in Canada is not usual.  This summer, with it’s scary sounding temperatures all around the globe, seems sort of apocalyptic.

Some might point out that there is a difference between weather and climate, and between real time and geological time, but the temperature, worldwide, this summer, has blurred those differences a bit.
But, summer will be over in  another month or two.  And then?  Well, just as every summer gets hotter and hotter (no longer cyclic – that’s the  scary part), so nasty hurricane seasons are coming closer and  closer together.   Last year’s was horrific.  If this one tops that, we’re in serious trouble.  The hurricanes will  be followed  by  floods.  The  ice  of Antarctica, Greenland, and the entire arctic ocean is melting, which  will make the ocean level rise, which  will  make the land  flood even  more.
However, I am not among the doomsayers who say it’s all  over, disastrous global warming has become irreversible and there’s nothing we can  do about  it, we’re all going to die.   I’m now watching a show on nuclear fusion, and  saw an article today about a Chinese idea to  make solar panels double as rain powered kinetic energy devices.    Some sharp scientists may soon figure out a way to filter the carbon from the air (more trees would help, and we know how to do that), and we will avert the end of times.
It’s a hell of a gamble, we’re taking it way too close to the edge and that’s a bad idea, but I’m still fairly confident the human race will prevail.  But, brace yourselves.

We are home, we made it, the trip is over and I,  for one, count it as a raging success, one of the  best vacations we’ve ever had.  I loved the time spent in the water, I loved all the sights  we  saw, and I felt like I got my head cleared out and my body a bit, too, although I must admit there was many a moment when I was feeling stiff and old man-ish, and some of those moments  came just getting in  and  out  of  the car.
Today was a marathon drive broken  up only by a trip to Mini-Mundus in Klagenfurt, Austria.  It is a very interesting concept, scale models of lots of world monuments and great buildings, but there were a lot  of ways  I thought it could have been better (more shade, for one thing, but you can hardly blame the park designers for the fact that the real world world is heating up to a dangerous degree).  I thought it would have been better if the exhibits were aligned geographically, so  you could actually  feel like  you were walking  around the word, and I definitely thought it was too Austria-centric.  Lots of countries had one thing, the Czech Republic had Prague Town Hall, Denmark had their stock-exchange building, India, of course, had the Taj Mahal.  Some countries had two or three things, like France and England and Italy, but Austria had castles all over the place, train stations, even an airport.
Toward the end, back indoors in the air-conditioned area, there was an exhibit where you sat in a mock up of a train car and there was a film in the window, but it was just a loop of an Austrian train winding down a mountainside, maybe 45 seconds of action, over and over again.  I think it would have been cool to have that, but a film of a voyage around the world.

Tomorrow, back to real life.

Every city has something to see, but we really hit it out of the park with our whirlwind tour of Ljubljana and Celje today.  The drive in to Ljubljana was lovely, all steep, green mountains, little chalets, neatly tended farms, it looked very prosperous and Swiss (actually, the view from our Air B and B in Celje reminds me a great deal of a campsite we once stayed at in Liechtenstein, a view from the valley straight up a mountain).
Now, I wasn’t expecting much from Ljubljana.  Another European city, capital of a small country, and I’ve seen plenty of those.  It was, indeed, absolutely chock-a-block with tourists, and had the requisite pedestrian zone and shlock souvenir shops, but it had a couple of things most other cities don’t, and every city should.
Water fountains.  When I was growing up, they were everywhere,  but the bottled water industry has destroyed that.   Well, Ljubljana is fighting back.  There was one I  saw that even had a plaque, proclaiming the environmental value of not drinking bottled water.  There was another one that was dog friendly, the water dropped straight down to the ground without any catch basin.  There was another one that was a statue of a great  stag, and the water was coming out of his mouth.
Public toilets.  All over the place, well marked, and free.  At least the one I went to was free.  And that is not something you can take for granted in Europe.
Artificial rain.  This blew me away.  There was one intersection, not far from the river, where it was raining, a nice, soft, gentle rain, and I couldn’t figure out how they were doing it.  Very simple, actually.  There were some wires overhead, with sprinklers attached, understated but not invisible.  It was a brilliant idea.
Then we came back to Celje, ate lunch (after walking quite a bit, there were lots of bars and snack stands but no restaurants open), then went to Smartonoske Lake, I believe both of those esses are pronounced sh, and then drove up to the castle, from which the view was spectacular, and it was about 9:00 by the time we got back to our home away from home, had sandwiches and grapes for dinner, and that brings us up to current.
Tomorrow we drive back to Prague.

Let me just hammer this out quickly as it is past 10 and people want to get to bed.  We have just arrived at our air B and B for the next two nights, in  the Slovenian town of Celje, which we selected because it was about as far as we could drive in an afternoon after the ferry dropped us in Split at 2:40.
It is meteorologically a relief to be back, sort of, in northern lands.  Although a Slovenian might object to that description, there is a sharp split a couple hours north of split when the barren and rocky hillsides start to sprout trees and you know you are in a land where rainfall is at least an occasional occurrence, an outside possibility.  We got to Vis at 9 a.m. this morning to put the car in line for the noon ferry, and it was a damned good thing we did.  As the boat pulled away from the dock, we watched as the last 15 or so cars got turned down.  They really should organize that better.  With only a few ferries a day, it’s a serious inconvenience.
Tomorrow we will tour the sites of Celje (our accommodations are a bit different than most places we’ve stayed.  They’ve actually got it set up for tourists, with a list of sites to see written on a chalkboard on the wall) and probably drive into Ljubljana, which is not far, and then we’re staying here tomorrow night and tomorrow driving home, but we want to make a stop in Austria at Klagenfurt (I think that’s how it’s spelled) which has a “mini-world” attraction, miniatures of all the great sites of the world, so we’ll pack a world tour into one afternoon.  Something like Legoland, I suppose, and we quite liked Legoland when we went there many years ago and Sam wandered off and I got seriously pissed off at him, the kids were 8 and 4 at the time, I think.