Day 20: Glorenza to Bormio

We woke up once again to sunny skies and a very small breakfast where we nevertheless met Leo Verhoeven from the Netherlands. Leo was a fast rider who nevertheless was glad to show us the way to Stelvio via the bike path, so we agreed to meet with him. He was riding unloaded, and had made it to the 22nd hairpin the day before in an attempt to get acclimated.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

With Leo's help, we made it quickly to the next village where due to a computer crash, we were unable to buy sim cards for our phones. There was nothing to do but to ride the Stelvio, along the rushing river. The day quickly warmed up, making the riding inside the gallery at the foot of the mountain a welcome cool.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

At the first turn at the bottom of the hill (marked turn #47), I started feeling as though I was going to have a bad day. There wasn't a snap in my legs the way there was one the day before, and I found myself falling behind my companions. Nevertheless, they were happy to wait every so often while I caught up, and I decided to just take it easy.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Stelvio is easily one of the prettiest climbs in the Alps, with views of the Marmolada glacier all through the climb, the only large glacier in the Dolomites. Taking it easy, I snapped picture after picture, but after a while had so much sweat on me that my camera lens fogged up!

From Tour of the Alps 2011

At the 22nd hairpin, it was only 11:45am, but I was beat. Phil and I sat down and had an ice cream while Leo pushed on ahead since he had plans for the afternoon that didn't include baby-sitting a couple of tourists. The ice cream felt good but didn't do much for the emptiness I felt in my legs. I took it easy for the rest of the climb. At around hairpin number 9, a motor cyclist heading the other way took a spill and dropped his bike. Another motorcyclist and a car driver stopped to help him, as did I, but as I stopped, I realized I was too tired to help anyone lift a 300 pound bike! All I could do was to push on ahead.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

By the time I got to hair pin number 5, I was reduced to stopping and resting at every hairpin turn so I could catch my breath. I realized then that I was probably suffering from altitude sickness, which was really strange, as I had none of those effects at 2500m while at St. Moritz and hiking hard, while Stelvio was at most 2800m. By all rights I should have had all altitude sickness out of my system by this time in the tour.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

This time, the summit was sunny and beautiful, so Phil and I put on our jackets and got photos at the summit sign before starting the descent. My last descent of the Stelvio was during an impending storm, so I didn't think the other side was pretty, as it looked pretty much just like an open cast mine. This time, with more time to enjoy it, I could truly appreciate the beauty of the pass.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Coming into Bormio, we got a hotel reserved in our name and then set off to find phone stores that could sell us Sim cards. After 2 failures we finally found the Tim store, which sold us prepaid phone cards for 17 Euros each, including free unlimited 3G internet access until the end of September!

We got to our hotel, took showers, and hung out our clothes as a storm blew in, raining hard right after dinner. The forecast tomorrow was pretty bad, but we were still optimistic.

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Day 19: St. Moritz Bad to Glorenza

We woke up to beautiful sunshine that led us to believe that staying the extra day was the right thing to do. We eat a quick breakfast, rode out to the post office and then mailed all our hiking clothes back to our hotel in Zurich. That meant shoes, hiking pants, GPS wrist-band, and cotton shirts (which had all been laundered the day before). This left us with the lightest possible cycling load as we set off towards Zernez.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

We first used the main road to get to Zernez but after a while found the bike path and followed it. Since we had time, I didn't mind too much when the bike path zig'd off the main road and then headed up into the mountains on an unpaved road. We passed a few interesting places, including what looked like a summer military camp for boys. By the time we got sick of the bike path we were within 5km of Zernez, and rolled into the tourist information center. In the 2007 Tour of the Alps, I had wanted to stay at Il Fourn, a hotel set in the Swiss National Park just before the summit of Ofenpass. We discovered that the hotel had plenty of availability and so we didn't need to make a reservation.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

We ate lunch at the coop in Zernez, which was next to a shop that sold wallets and flip-flops. I found a Swiss wallet which had separate pockets for two currencies (including coin pockets). I bought that. Then I found a pair of flip flops on sale at a good price, so I bought that as well.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

It was warm as we headed up Ofenpass, but clouds came over after we climbed a few hundred meters and we soon had a nice breeze that cooled us off. Ofenpass was multiple climbs and we got to 1200m several times before finally getting to the National Park Hotel at 2:30pm. Since we were fresh, it was too early to stop and we decided to head into Italy if time permitted. Ofenpass was not long after the hotel, and we zipped down quickly under blue skies to the Italian Border.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

I gave Phil a run down of all the options: we could climb Stelvio from the East or over the Umbrail pass. The East side is the pretty side, so he opted for that, which meant running down to Glorenza.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

By the time we'd gotten to Glorenza it was well after 5:00pm. The tourist information center was a bit hard to find as it was hidden away in the corner of the castle town's entrance, but once we found it the lady running it was very helpful. It turned out all the hotels in town were taken, but there was one just outside town that was available. We found it but nobody answered the doorbell. Upon returning to the tourist information center, she called them and they said they were present if we would just barge in like guests instead of knocking at the door like visitors. The information office also informed us that there was no place to buy a SIM card in town, but Prato, the next town on the way to Stelvio would have a place to buy one.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

We checked in on the second try, getting a room for 29 EUR/person, and then getting a nice fancy dinner in town. It was so warm that everything dried over night.
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Review: Monster Hunter International

Larry Correia's Monster Hunter International is what John Steakley's classic Vampire$ would have been if it had been written by a gun nut instead of a war weary soldier. While both novels feature mercenaries out to kill monsters for money (contract dollars in the case of the latter, government bounties in the case of the former), Vampire$ has a gritty, brooding feel while Monster Hunter International seems written by someone who'd never been shot at in anger.

This is not to say that Monster Hunter International isn't a fun novel. It's a lot of fun, especially if you're a gun lover. Every detail about guns is lovingly described. There are lots of opportunities to use them---the amount of fire power brought out by these folks are only barely enough to put down minor vampires, let alone the more fearsome types.

There's an occult sub-plot, as well as a romantic sub-plot, but both of those are trite and predictable, put in there so that the reader has a break between awesome gunfights, bombings, and of course, the occasional tactical nuke. The villain of the piece is a cartoon cut-out, and the prophecy was predictable from a mile away.

If this was the kind of competition Lev Grossman's Magicians faced, no wonder Grossman won the Campbell award. Recommended for gun nuts and a long flight where you're too tired to think. Otherwise, read Vampire$ instead. Heck, even if you're too tired to think Vampire$ is a far better novel.

Worldcon Notes: Discussion with Bill Willingham

Fables is by far one of the most interesting comic books today. One of the big draw of WorldCon was the chance to meet author and creator Bill Willingham. I met him on multiple occasions, and since I did not take notes, I wanted to write down various bits while they are fresh on my mind. Note that I very likely paraphrased him, so don't take this as literal quotes.

On Long Story Arcs

One of the things I learned was that you cannot write long story arcs without owning the characters. I got addicted to long story arcs when I wrote Elementals. One of the big villains was a shape shifter, and basically showed up as the boyfriend of one of the characters. When the big revealed happened, I got so much fan mail that I decided that this was my schtick. I tried this again when I wrote Batman. I was going to do this long story arc where Robin's father (we had a female Robin at that time) would slowly pierce together that she was Robin and then they'd have a confrontation about it. But then DC had this crossover where Robin was going to die, so I had to compress that story arc into 3 issues, which was really lame. I got all sorts of mail saying how Robin wouldn't be so stupid, but I couldn't defend myself. Now as owner of Fables I get to do long story plotting again and I love it.

One reason that I'm doing the Fables spin-off is I'd like new writers to get a chance to do this as well.

On the Fables Movie

DC has tried to sell rights to Fables movies/TV series for a while. It's a very frustrating process, because what happens is we'd get it all but approved by a TV executive, and then he'd switch jobs and the new executive would come in and kill everything approved by the previous guy. That's because if he's successful in the series, the success would be credited to the prior executive, but if he fails, he'd get the blame.

For the movies, DC set it up so that I wouldn't have approval over any Fables movies. But when I read the scripts proposed, it always seems like the script writer has never read any issue of Fables or understood the story. It might very well be that it's easier for me to learn how to write a movie than to wait for someone else to write a decent Fables movie.

Elementals

There's no chance of Elementals getting reprinted any time soon. The guy who owns it is basically a douchebag. I sold the rights at a time in my life when I really needed the money and this guy was willing to pay me. Every time someone else would want to buy the rights from him, he'd counter with a doubling of the price, and even if that person agreed, he'd immediately back off and decide that he wanted even more money. He's just proven himself to be too hard to work with.

How many Fables comic book readers are female?

I'd like to think that it was 50/50, but to be honest we don't have the money to do proper demographic analysis. At this point, the collected published printings have outsold the individual issues. What happens is that as each new book comes out, the previous books all sell, while the sales of the individual issues have held steady.

Why is it so hard to get a subscription to the individual issues? They used to have a subscription service but what happened was that so many series got cancelled, and each time you'd have to refund the subscriber. So at this point, individual issues are the province of the comic book store.

I found Fables at my local library

Isn't it wonderful that libraries have turned around? It used to be that librarians hated comic books. Now, the big metric that libraries are measured on is circulation. So some guy said, why don't we have a shelf for comic books and a brave librarian finally did it and discovered lo and behold, that comic books circulate like crazy! That's why libraries have finally gotten around to stocking comic books.

The ending of the first long arc looked kind of rush. Were you pressured by the publisher to keep the page count down?

No, we did this silly thing where we tried to do something special for issue #75, which was pretty arbitrary. Given the chance to do it all over again, I would have just let the story run out at the natural pace and then it would have ended on issue #77, which was just as good an ending issue. We learned from this and for issue #100, I asked for 100 pages, which solved the problem of the story arc length nicely.

Worldcon Notes: Publishing in the Age of Ebooks

The two most useful panels/seminars I attended at WorldCon were "How to give an effective reading", and "Publishing in the age of ebooks". Here's the notes from the latter. I apologize for not writing in sentence fragments, but I don't have time to do more editing, nor do I remember who said what. Note that below were notes taken from what the panel was saying, not my opinion. If you think this is good and want my notes from "How to give an effective reading", please drop me a note or leave a comment on this page.

Publishing in the Age of E-books

• Kindle shock-wave eliminated the marketing/publicity problem
  
• $3 in Kindle sales for every $1 from Barnes and Noble (paper books!)
  
• 3X in ebook sales on Baen Website, which are tied to the paper edition of the book.
  
• Ebooks will dominate paper books the way automatic transmission replaced manual transmission.
  
• Publishing is currently dominated by a small number of big corporations. The rise of small presses over the last 10 years was driven by Print on Demand and will be further accelerated by ebooks.
  
• Magazine subscriptions are going up for the first time: Ratio is 10:1 selling subscriptions versus individual issues. This compounds every month because of new subscribers.
  
• Color is not optional.
  
• Textbook industry is a monopoly.
  
• 14% of book sales are now ebooks. This is the beginning of the end for paper: once kids are using them in schools, there'll be a generation of kids growing up who will view paper books the way we view vinyl records and cassette tapes
  
• Transition to ebook will happen a lot faster than publishers believe.
  
• People sample books a lot electronically. You can use ebook as a promotion for paperbooks.
  
• Eric Flint: 20-25% of sales are electronic. Displaced paperback income, but not hardcover income.
  
• Mike Resnick: huge back list generating $2300/month on Kindle store (self-publishing by an established writer)
  
• International distribution of ebooks means greater opportunity to reach wider audience.
  
• Too many new books/authors. This is a temporary problem as no one has figured out how to market ebooks yet. Over time, people have learned to effectively used print on demand, and will eventually learn to effectively use ebooks.
  
• There will be gatekeepers for content serving the current roles that publishers do, but we don't know who it's going to be. The same goes for reviewers. Some will be the new gatekeepers/editors.
  
• Publishers are not a service for authors. They're a service for readers in providing a selection filter. This was a historical accident because it cost lots of money to print books. The problem isn't the horrible stories that are obvious within a paragraph or two. It's the ones that are good enough for you to keep reading but go nowhere and burn a lot of time. "Like oatmeal."
  
• Most major publishers are deciding to price the ebook at the same price or higher than the paperback price. A recent series by the Bertelsman Group was put up at $7.99 for the paperback and $8.99 on the Kindle. 2 back list titles were put up by the publisher at $5.99, and sold much better than the new books. You should definitely make ebooks cheaper than the hardcovers.
  
• Del Rey put up ebooks for $16 each. Sales were pathetic. At $7.99, the sales became something approaching reasonable.
  
• Piracy/Spillage: all through the history of books, 5-6 readings of a book were free for every paid copy. During the Korean War/Vietname War, the ratio was probably 10:1. 1 book would go through an entire infantry company during the war! In otherwords, don't worry about piracy, used book sales, etc.
  
• Difference between music and books. Big dominant format in music is short songs. In fiction, dominant format is novel, not short fiction. Short fiction is less than 2% of the market. Hard to use music industry as a model because those people were so stupid and so greedy that I live for the day when they're wiped out and are standing on the street holding up signs saying, "Will gouge for food!"
  
• More publishers are moving away from DRM. Amazon is easy to deal with compared to Apple. They provide you with the world’s biggest online bookstore. The catch is: you can’t sell on better terms anywhere else than you’re selling on Amazon.
  
• The thing that kills small press is the returns. Book distribution is not a consignment system. If distributors and big bookstore chains can’t sell it, you’re absorbing the cost when they return the books to you. Traditional publishers take 52% discount. American laws on bankruptcy mean that the burden of bankruptcy falls disproportionately on publishers. Borders closing: Penguin lost $41M. Hachette $36.9M. Those executives who declared bankruptcy awarded themselves $8.1M in incentive bonuses. Ebooks are a haven compared to paper books in this situation.
  

Trip Report WorldCon

This year, I decided that since I no longer have a day job and can in fact take as much time off as I wanted to, I would do a really geeky thing that I'd never prioritized before, which was to go to a Science Fiction Convention. I picked WorldCon in its guise as Renovation because it's the site of the Hugo Awards, one of the two prestigious awards in Science Fiction. I avoided ComicCon San Diego because it could have conflicted with the Tour of the Alps, and GenCon required flying while Reno was within a day's drive of us. XiaoQin decided to come along (bravely) even though she didn't really know any of the authors there.

Worldcon 2011

The big thing that I didn't expect was that the WorldCon is small, about 3000 people or so. What this means if you're a fan is access! You've got access to nearly every author who shows up, including some small group meetings (called "Kaffee Klatsches" or Literary Beer") that approach a small intimate experience. I signed up for Bill Willingham, Alastair Reynolds, Glen Cook, Michael Swanwick, and David Brin. I got to ask Willingham how far ahead he plotted (24 months!), discussed the Drake equation with David Brin. Reynolds gave us a preview of his next book (not a Revelation Space novel). Glen Cook told us stories about how he wrote. He worked on the assembly line and had a one minute thirty second cycle, could complete his task in 45 seconds, and wrote in the other 45 seconds, because it was all muscle memory and he had all that time to think about wha the wanted to write. (Incidentally, the Black Company RPG rights sold for $8,000) This was by far the best part of the con for me. One Kaffee Klatcsh was with Patrick & Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who provided some insights as to how editors and publishers think.

Secondarily, I got to attend several panels, and since this was a multi-track program, I actually had to triage. As a self-publisher, I attended several panels on publishing, writing, pitching, and contracts. Some were useful, others not so. By far the most helpful one was a panel on publishing. There turned out to be another self-publisher on the panel, Sandra Tayler of Schlock Mercenary. Everyone else on the panel was either an author who had gone through the traditional process or was a literary agent. Tayler was a lot more diplomatic than I would have been. Essentially, she was the only one who'd ever run a business, and actually understood what authors were giving up by going with a traditional publisher. "You have to decide what your goals are. Do you want to be read and put food on the table, or is it more important for you to see your books in a bookstore and do author signings an so on." Afterwards she gave me some time and helped out by providing numbers for color printing a book very similar to Independent Cycle Touring, and gave me an idea for an experiment that I should run. I also used the time to make contact with several other self-publishers. Fundamentally, we're at an interesting point where the large traditional publishers still have no clue about the ebook tidal wave and think that they can make it go away by over-pricing ebooks. An independent, self-published author has a window of about another year or two to make a splash by not making those mistakes, and it was gratifying to see that the ebook panels at least were composed of people who understood that.

I was surprised by how accessible the "big-name" authors were. Gardner Dozois, Robert Silverberg, Lois Bujold, Jo Walton, and John Scalzi were all walking around without entourages and you could easily grab a person to sign your book, take a photo, or even chat. Many of these authors did start out as fans.

The big ceremonies like the Hugo Awards or the Masquerade were OK, but also the lease personal part of the con. In any case, time management was crucial, as at any given point I had to triage my time and figure out what to do, where to go, who to meet, or whether to actually go get something to eat.

I'm not sure if I'd go to another con any time soon. I suspect that something like once a decade is about the right interval for these, but if you've never been to one and are thinking of going, I'd recommend at least going to one, and the WorldCon is exactly the right size. Small enough that your favorite authors would be accessible, but large enough to have plenty of choices as to what to do and what interests you. My friend Ellie, for instance, turned it into essentially a long seminar about costumes and costume making, while I made it into a seminar about self-publishing/publishing/contracts, with a little bit about ancillary fields like comic books and fiction. If you enjoy reading, and like science fiction or fantasy, maybe 5 days of it might be a bit much, but 3 or 4 days would be just about right. Recommended.

P.S. None of my votes for the Hugo awards panned out. I guess my tastes are very different from anyone else's!

I'll be busy the next few days working on my next book, but expect the Tour of the Alps trip reports to continue after that.

Day 18: Corvatsch Hike

The night before, I had looked over all the literature and discovered that there was one cable-car way that accepted the half price card, and that was the Corvatsch cable car way. Since it was a short bike ride away, we could even save money by biking to the ski station and biking back after the hike.

We started by taking the back way from St. Moritz Bad to try to avoid the main road, but soon found ourselves having to ride on the road around the Lej da Champfer. Fortunately, there was a bike path around it, and we took it and found ourselves having to climb about 130m up to the ski station. It was overcast but there were rays of sunlight coming through the clouds, so we hoped to avoid the fogby taking the cable car.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

At the cable car station, we bought the Wandern ticket, which allowed us to take the cable car up to the peak, ride it back down to the middle station, and then heck to a different cable car station and then bus back to the ski station where we had parked our bike. From the ski station, the views were pretty but the Corvatsch cable car was packed! For once we felt like normal tourists.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Our trip to the peak of Piz Corvatsch was not to be, however, as the cable car broke down at the middle station! It would probably be fixed later that day, but we were not willing to wait around to find out, as we had a hike to do. First up, a view of the local town and lake at Silvapana.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

The trail went down steeply from the middle station, so much so that we had to go very slowly. After a half hour or so, we finally manage to get to the climb, but were sad to discover that the weather was starting to turn sour.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

At a bench off the trail with a beautiful view, Phil said to me: "I don't know why, but I'm feeling like I've been out to lunch all day." Well, between that and the impending rain, we decided to cut our hike short and just do the Wasserweg (water way) trail that would take us through 5 lakes before the second ski station.

As we walked past lake after lake, the clouds got gloomier and gloomier until it finally started raining. Surprisingly, however, as we approached the end of the hike and were within view of the cable car, the rain stopped and the sun came out! While it was still cloudy and things didn't look all that great, we felt safe enough to have lunch on one of the benches while watching the fog.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

From Tour of the Alps 2011

We timed our descent to the cable car just right, with only a 20 minute wait until the bus arrived and took us back to the Corvatsch ski station. There, we were quickly refunded the unused portion of our cable car ticket, since the interruption was due to the station's technical difficulties.

We rode back to the youth hostel with an amazing tailwind, and got to our room just as it started pouring outside, so we were lucky Phil was having a bad day. We spent the rest of the day catching up on e-mail, doing laundry, and relaxing. Stinky guy was still there, but I figured I could put up with things for one more night and then we'd be on the road again.

"St. Moritz was nice," I said to Phil, "But it's not Rosenlaui. I don't think I'd come back here again. There's prettier places." "Yes," came the reply, "And it feels a lot more touristy."

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Review: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

I was given this book by a Couchsurfer who stayed at my place last year. I set it aside, but found myself needing to take a break from Royal Assassin, which I'm on the verge of abandoning because it's characters are far too stupid, and of course what do I do, I picked up the book, which is about a nerd who can't get dates.

A few things you should know about this book. First, the nerd's from the Dominican Republic, where the men are suppose to be real men "with atomic level-G". Secondly, the novel's written by an MIT professor, MIT-textbook style. That means long multipage footnotes telling you about some interesting story behind the story behind the story. Third, the book was written in 2007, after pop culture, especially nerdy pop culture, has become hip. Hip enough that even with passages like these:

Sometime before dawn he dreamt about all the girlfriends he'd never had, row upon row upon row, like the extra bodies that the Miraclepeople had in Alan Moore's Miracleman...

or this:

Beli, who'd been waiting for something exactly like her body her whole life, was sent over the moon by what she now knew. By the undeniable concreteness of her desirability which was, in its own way, Power. Like the accidental discovery of the One Ring. Like stumbling into the wizard Shazam's cave or finding the crashed ship of the Green Lantern! Hypatia Belicia Cabral finallly had power and a true sense of self... Telling Beeli not to flaunt those curves would have been like asking the persecuted fat kid not to use his recently discovered mutant abilities. With great power comes great responsibility... bullshit. Our girl ran into the future that her new body represented and never ever looked back.

The book still won the Pulitzer prize. The book is steeped in nerd culture, nerd metaphors, and is written in a heavily Dominican Republic voice. The narrator (who's not Oscar De Leong "Wao") clearly is sympathetic to Oscar, but didn't belong in the same universe. The narrator's not revealed until near the middle of the book, and sadly, the identity of the narrator is not of any interest whatsoever to the plot.

So that's the hook that Junot Diaz uses to draw you in. What about the meat? It's mostly about Dominican Republic history. Footnote after footnote discusses the reign of the dictator of Rafael Trujillo, its effects on the lives of its people, and what growing up and raising children of that era is like. Fascinating stuff if you're interested, and read with impatience if you're not.

In the end, I have mixed feelings about this book. The author does a good job of blending nerd culture metaphors into an appropriate narrative. The plot itself is non-existent. If your expectation is that you're reading a Pulitzer prize winning novel that's mainly about the author's voice and the Dominican Republic's history, then I think that's ok. But if you want a good read, the book feels a little empty where the shell is merely there to draw you into reading something that you weren't terribly interested in at the beginning and still aren't interested in at the end.

Let me offer up this recommendation: if you're into the history of the Dominican Republic, read this book cover to cover. If you love the two sample pieces of prose I provided above, go ahead and read the first 10 pages to see if you get sick of it or if it sucks you in. Then feel free to give up after the next 100 pages. If you read till the end to get fulfillment, some sort of redemption, or satisfaction, be prepared to be very disappointed. If you want a Pulitzer prize novel worthy of attention, read Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose instead.

Day 17: Pontresina Hike

We woke up in the morning to dense looking fog and forecast of afternoon rain. Dinner the night before was nothing special, but breakfast actually looked pretty good, with lots of bread, jam, ham, cheese, and fruit juices, we could stuff ourselves full in readiness for the hike. We also met Lydia and Marrijtje. Lydia was a medical student from Chicago who was doing a term in Zurich. Marrijtje was a runner who was in St. Moritz for altitude training, and had spent the last 2 weeks at the hostel. As a result, she knew every menu item for every day in the week!

From Tour of the Alps 2011

After breakfast, Phil and I hopped onto the train to get to the Punt Muragl funicular train. We were disappointed that the train didn't take half priced tickets, but since we were there for the hiking we paid and went to the top. The views from the end station was nothing short of spectacular, and only properly viewed via a panorama viewer:

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Far off in the distance we could see St. Moritz Bad. Below us, we saw the dense fog in the valley we had just left; since we were high above the clouds, we were bathed in sunshine. Any misgivings about paying for the expensive funicular went away with the view.

We hiked along the trail that went along the ridge. I had given Phil the option of hiking to one of the peaks in the area, but he said he wasn't sure how much hiking he was actually capable of, given that he had injured his toe a few weeks before getting on the plane. Even the "low" trail was gorgeous, winding us around pastures with cows that did not have the characteristic cowbells. Peculiarly enough, that made the cows more vocal, and we could hear them mooing away at each other from across the valley.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

The trail went over a stream and then up over a ridge where we could look back and see the train station. Despite being only around 7000 feet we were well above the tree line.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Eventually, even the pasture gave way to scree. But the trail had been built to Swiss standards and we had steps cut into the scree for us to walk on.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

We reached a mountain restaurant at 10:30am, but it was too early to lunch, so we pressed on towards Alp Languard. Past the restaurant the trail headed steeply down, in places cable ways were installed so you could hang on to them while hiking.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

While these cableways looked dangerous, we saw folks of all ages doing it, including children around 6 or so. I guess that's why the Swiss are so strong. They get started on the outdoors young and they never give it up.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

At one point we ran into a bunch of Italians who were hiking over to the restaurant we had just left, and they advised us when we got to Alp Languard to go up the mountain for another hour to take in the view of the San Bernina glacier. The area we were at was already pretty, but having climbed Bernina pass last year I was now curious about how the glacier looked.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

The trail turned steeply uphill just before Alp Languard, and as we approached the intersection we were told that trail looped so we could just take any direction we liked and we would get to the same place. We decided to pick the less steep trail, which happened to be right off a stream.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

We finally got to Cafe Paradis, which had the view of the glacier. Behind the mountains we saw tendrils of fog floating over the peaks, threatening to invade where we were. There was no sign of the promised rain, however, so we were in luck! "I guess we can hike all the way down to Pontresina and save on the cable fare!" I told Phil. We were out of water and there were no free water fountains anywhere nearby, so we were forced to pay 6CHF per bottle from Paradis for more water.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

The descent from Paradis down to Pontresina was short but steep. It started with a bunch of stairs and then turned into a regular trail that was nevertheless steep enough to make me wish I had hiking sticks.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

We had eaten all the food we had brought, so when we got to town we headed to the supermarket for more ice cream, fruit, and chocolate.

At dinner (which was spaghetti with as many different types of sauce as we wanted), we caught up again with Lydia and Marrijtje. Lydia was going out for an evening run after dinner as the sun was still out and it looked like it would be a nice sunset. Not being runners we declined to join her, but that gave us an idea. We picked up our bikes from bike storage and rode around St Moritz Lake instead. It was blocked in one direction for cyclists but riding it all the way around from the other direction was ok. The sun set over the mountains just as we finished our little after dinner jaunt.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

From Tour of the Alps 2011

All was not well in St. Moritz Bad, unfortunately. The hostel decided to place a fourth person in our room, and he stunk. Literally. After smelling him for 2 minutes I couldn't stand it any more and told him pointedly to take a shower. Unfortunately, despite the shower he didn't smell any better. Phil (who had a more sensitive nose but also had a bunk near the window) told me later that not only did he stink, all his stuff stunk too. So not only had he not showered for months, he hadn't done laundry for months.

Fortunately, with enough hiking, sleep over took me fast enough.
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Day 16: Zurich to St. Moritz Bad

I woke up around 4:45am so XiaoQin and I could catch the 5:00am bus to the airport for her 6:45am flight. While at the airport, I noticed that there was an option for checking in the luggage the evening before (Air Berlin calls it the "late night check-in", but since it started from 7:00pm until 9:00pm, it was hardly late at night). This normally cost 5CHF per person, but both Phil and I had the TopBonus service card so we wouldn't even have to pay that fee. This would eliminate all the stress of getting in line first thing in the morning and would get us an extra half hour or so of sleep.

Once XiaoQin was safely into the hands of the Swiss equivalent of the TSA, I went back to the hotel and started researching trains to St. Moritz. Last year while in the Canadian Rockies, I met Petra Fassler, who had several hikes to recommend in the area, and looking at Arturo's photos also from last year, it definitely seemed like a place worth visiting. The earliest train left at 10:00am, so I woke Phil up, we repacked our bags on the assumption that we would ship our hiking clothes and shoes back to the hotel, and headed off on the 4 hour train journey.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Even the train ride was spectacular, hinting at the possibilities to come. The train tunneled through mountains on high bridges and gave us high views of the surrounding villages. Unfortunately, the closer we got to St. Moritz the worse the weather. By the time we got to St. Moritz proper, it was mostly overcast with a hint of blue sky.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

I had previously booked the youth hostel at St. Moritz because it was cheaper than the other youth hostels (which didn't include a mountain train pass), and because I was worried that arriving on a Friday, we'd have a hard time finding lodging. I asked at the tourist information center where the hostel was, and it turned out to be at the far end of St. Moritz Bad (the town). We first went to the supermarket to have lunch, then rode over to the hostel. The hostel had WiFi, complementary lunch and dinner for the price of the stay, laundry facilities, and a bike locker/ski room. It was too late to do any serious hiking, but the hostel staff suggested walking over to Pontresina.

The walk led us through a forest with an exercise circuit and various other accouterments. It started raining right after we started walking. We had brought a long our rain gear and hiking umbrella, so we were good to go regardless.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

At the far end, we got to the Pontresina train station and rather than walk back the same way in the rain, decided to hop onto the train and catch a bus afterwards. Since we had half-price cards with us it was relatively cheap to do so. We stopped by the supermarket again to stock up on drinks so we wouldn't have to pay the outrageous youth hostel prices, as well as lunch for the next day, as we planned to spend most of the day hiking.

That night, we discovered that we would not be alone in our room, as they hostel had assigned an elderly Japanese gentlemen to our room. As far as we could tell, he only stayed in bed during our whole stay. We would talk to him and he would claim that he went out and went places, but he was always in bed when we left and in bed when we came back so we could never tell.

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Day 15: Carouge to Zurich

From Jennie's apartment in Geneva, Saleve dominates the landscape. All dinner we could see the light on the mountain, which was shaped in my mind the same as Uluru, but of course much more forested and in a much friendlier climate.

It looked clear as we rode towards the West end of Saleve, which according to Raphael was the gentler climb, but when we got to the views, we saw that the day was indeed murky. We were denied the sight of Mont Blanc yet again!

From Tour of the Alps 2011

A little further climbing and steep descents brought us, however, to nice clear views of Geneva and its surrounds. It's always great to have a local show you the roads because you always end up with the least traffic'd sections.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

After the ride, Jennie prepared a spaghetti lunch which we ate with gusto, and then it was time for us to make the long drive back to Zurich where we had to return the car for XiaoQin to catch her flight early the next morning. We got to Zurich with plenty of time to spare, though gassing up the car turned out to be more trouble than expected as every gas station rejected my credit cards and ATM cards. I finally dumped what's left of my cash into one machine and fortunately it was sufficient to gas up the car.

We then spent the rest of the evening in Zurich, where the bookshop did not have Motorrad Reisekarten Alpen which both Phil and Cynthia wanted. We would end up ordering it from Amazon.de and having it shipped to our hotel. We walked around old town where I bought a pair of gloves to replace a pair that had mysteriously gotten lost on tour. We then got caught in the rain after dinner, but not before a final picture for XiaoQin to remember Zurich by.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

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Day 14: Beaufort to Carouge

We woke up in the morning to cloudy skies but after breakfast I still hoped that there was a chance to make it up Cormet Roseland before it started raining. Halfway up the hairpin turns a couple of cross country skiiers on long roller blades passed me, along with their support van. Professional or near professional cross-country skiiers "ski" up the passes in the summer as training, but the skis make for awkward descents so they're always accompanied by a support van to bring them down the mountain. Apparently riding a bicycle wouldn't have been sufficient training.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

By the time I got to the lake the first rain drops had started to fall, and the church we saw yesterday looked a lot gloomier. Phil had pressed on ahead but as I rode around the rain got heavy. Having climbed Cormet Roseland in near perfect weather I felt no need to ride it in the rain, so I turned around and went back to Beaufort where I found XiaoQin and we grabbed a table for lunch just as Phil showed up.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Driving out of the Alps took us to Mont Blanc country, where we got views of the mountains but they were occluded at the peaks by clouds. We found Jennie's place after having to get out of the car and walk around and call her. Her apartment was so new that it showed up correctly neither on Google Maps nor on the Garmin GPS units.

While driving, the dust cap on my valve stem had gotten too close to the exhaust and hence melted off, coating the screw cap as well as the threads on the valve stem. I hadn't been able to fix it, but we hadn't had any flats for two weeks so I was content to leave it on. But at Jennie's place, we were supplied with an exacto knife and after about 10 minutes of work I managed to scrape off most of it. 5 minutes later my valve stem was good as new!

From Tour of the Alps 2011

I had originally thought I'd needed to go to a bike shop to buy a new tail light, but Jennie's husband Raphael was an avid cyclist and had a spare LED light that worked with my bike and generously donated it to me!

Dinner was a dish new to me: Raclette, grilled meat and cheese. We must have been hungry because everything on the table was gone after an hour.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Raphael promised us a ride on the Saleve the next day, so we weren't actually done with French riding, though we were sleeping in Switzerland.
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Day 13: Saint Michel Maurienne to Beaufort

We woke up to clear skies and a beautiful day, so Col De L'Iseran it is! Saint Michel Maurienne was quite a ways from the bottom of the Col de L'Iseran climb, so we opted to drive to Bonneval-sur-Arc, passing Col Madelaine on the way, which I must have ridden over in 2005, but at that time probably considered too small a col to be of note.

The skies stayed clear when we got started and indeed, the weather was perfect. It wasn't cold or windy, and it was nice and warm, and we were climbing the easy side of the pass. What's not to like? We passed mountain goats on the trailside before turning the corner and watching the views open up.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

From Tour of the Alps 2011

From the summit, the views were considerably less interesting and there was a strong headwind on the descent which made for some pedaling. Nevertheless, we got a good view of the Val D'Isere, which is a ski resort town. Pedaling past the uninteresting ski town of Val D'Isere, the road enters several long tunnels which were a pleasant respite from the heat in 2005, but now were a little scary on a fastish descent with unlit galleries and moderately high speed traffic. I became acutely aware that my tail-light had fallen off and destroyed itself earlier in the tour and regretted not remembering to replace it.

At Saint-Foy Tarentaise, I stopped at an intersection and texted XiaoQin to see where she was. To my surprise she showed up in person as she had parked right around the corner and had run out of money on her prepaid Swisscom SIM. We waited in the shade until Phil showed up and drove down to Bourg St. Maurice. I didn't remember anything to recommend Bourg St. Maurice, so when the tourist information center told us that there was lodging available up Cormet Roseland, I jumped at it as an opportunity to get away from the heat.

The Bourg St. Maurice side of Cormet Roseland was steep and climbed away fast, but when we got to the lodging it didn't look very appealing to XiaoQin, though the price seemed very nice to Phil. Remembering the Beaufort was pretty and had good lodging, I suggested we go there, stopping by various places on Cormet Roseland for photos.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

The plan was to visit my friend Jennie Chen near Geneva tomorrow afternoon, but we would have the morning to climb it. Beaufort was just as pretty as I remembered it, and we found lodging at a reasonable price. The room was cool and there was a nice supermarket and a small downtown area to walk around in.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Our hotel even had parking! We took the half pension and got a good meal out of it.

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Extracting Music off the Ipod

I tried to get XiaoQin to switch from her ipod to using her Android phone as an MP3 player. The big bonus here is that she can delete tracks she doesn't like from the phone, while the ipod interface for that is pretty clunky, if it exists at all. (It didn't exist in the old ipods I had)

It turns out that this is actually non-trivial, since Apple purposely makes it hard. If you do an appropriate Google search you'll come up with a bunch of solutions, but many of them are badly written programs. Some crash, some don't handle unicode, and some don't even understand how to do de-duplication. The solution is Sharepod. This is the best of the lot and runs smoothly without issues.

Recommended.

First Impressions: Seagate Momentus XT 500GB Hybrid Drive

My SSD "upgrade" has been nothing but disaster. Judging by other people's experiences what I experienced has been pretty typical. If you're a heavy duty user who keeps his machine on all the time, spinning platters are still more reliable, though it's quite conceivable that the Intel SSDs don't fail at the rate mine has. Suffice to say, I started looking for alternatives.

One that came to mind was the Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid Drive. This is particularly attractive for laptop applications because the capacity is large (up to 500GB) and most laptops only have one drive bay. While most people don't run demanding applications and hence can make do with 100GB hard drives, I install Lightroom, Photoshop, and InDesign, and on my most recent trip for instance transferred 72GB worth of photos to the laptop for processing during the flight. Furthermore, laptops have to startup and shut down frequently, so the 4GB read-only SSD cache seems like it would be just the ticket. Since I expect to use the laptop as my primary machine next week while on a trip, it seemed like the right time to take the plunge to see if the hybrid drive lives up to the glowing reviews.

The X201 has a great drive bay, as you can see on YouTube. This is pretty important because it turned out that I had to swap hard drives multiple times. The first thing I tried was a Windows Recovery Disk moved onto a USB flash drive and recovering from an image back up on an external hard drive. No go. Then I tried installing Windows 7 Ultimate to see if that would let me store from back up. No go. It turned out that my Windows 7 license was locked to my laptop, and I had to burn to DVD/CDs from the original HDD. So back went the HDD and I tried to burn to a portable DVD burner, but my portable burner turned out to be broken, disconnecting itself after 10 minutes of use. (It came off a 8 year old PC, so maybe that's to be expected) OK, how about burning to my 8GB USB Flash drive? The lenovo factory program gave up because it claimed the disk space was too small. OK, how about this external HDD with 500GB of free space? OK, this time it worked.

By this time I was pretty frustrated. I then swapped back the hybrid drive, and then tried to boot off the external HDD. No go. I then stuck the external HDD to my desktop. To my surprise, the recovery data was only 6GB. So why the heck did it claim my flash drive wasn't big enough? Ok, no problem, I copied over the factory data onto my flash drive and booted off it. Magic! Now my laptop was back to the factory state and I had to reinstall all the software (after deactivating all the old software). I didn't bother trying to recover the old data because fortunately, the photos had all been long imported to my desktop, and everything else was safely stored in Dropbox (I'd long abandoned Google docs as being too unusable compared to Dropbox).

After all the installs and running dropbox to sync everything up, my laptop now boots in 25s (half the previous time), logs in in 2s, and starts chrome pretty much instantaneously. This is indeed the SSD experience at $99, and without any sacrifice in capacity (in fact, my disk capacity went up!). So my first impressions are very positive. I'll wait to see how the laptop survives in normal use, but I would consider buying another one (along with an appropriate mounting bracket) for the desktop! Recommended, assuming you're the kind of person who doesn't mind losing about half a day to all those crazy things I had to do.

Day 12: Briancon to Saint Michel Maurienne

Blues skies greeted us when we moved out of the hotel, but gray skies met us on the road on Col du Lauterat. By the time we got to thee intersection with Col du Galibier, rain drops had started falling on our helmets.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Nevertheless, the Galibier was beautiful, even in the drizzle, and climbing on wet roads didn't generate enough spray to even get our bikes muddy, so we pressed on, enjoying the view.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Ahead of us, however, rain blocked our views of the surrounding peaks, and we could see that we would soon be in heavy rain.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Sure enough, by the time we got to the top it was 5C and raining, though not horribly hard. We had climbed the gentle side of the Galibier, and would be descending the steep side with its 10% grade. I was cold, Phil looked cold, so the decision to get into the car and drive down was easy. I harbored thoughts of climbing Col Telegraphe, but it kept raining all through lunch and all the way up the Telegraphe as well, so I gave up on the idea and we drove to St. Michel Maurienne to find lodging. St. Michel was a non descript town with nothing to recommend it, but it gave us the choice of routes for the next day: Col De L'Iseran if the weather was good, and Col du Madelaine if the weather was iffy.

We ended up staying at a dorm-like hotel for about 30 Euros/head, and at dinner, my coke glass looked like a can of coke.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

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