Author: Chris C.

I’m down in Florida at Kennedy Space Center to see a space shuttle launch. In all the years of following space activities, I’ve never actually seen a launch. We tried back in December 2007, but that trip was foiled by problems that it eventually took them 6 weeks to fix.

So, it’s another winter later and I’m trying again. I only try to do this in winter because the weather tends to be drier and more stable (e.g. no scrubs due to thunderstorms). This is the STS-119 mission, which has the Discovery taking the last truss (backbone) segment up to the space station. There’s only 9 shuttle missions left, and so the chance of seeing a launch is rapidly dwindling. By 2010 or 2011 it’ll all be over.

By way of work, I have a press pass that gets me into the press site at Kennedy, right next to the VAB and as close to the launch as any human being is allowed to be — except for the 7 people strapped into the shuttle itself.

Try #1

On the day before the scheduled launch, I went in to look around and check things out. After a few hours of lounging around the press building and getting lunch in the cafeteria, I set up the new telescope (which I’ll write about soon) at the edge of the turning basin. This first picture shows it with the large countdown clock in the field in the background, and the large silver boat is the covered barge that they used to transport the large orange fuel tank from the factory in New Orleans.

All afternoon the STA was doing landing simulations, probably with the two pilots of the space shuttle, practicing for the next day’s launch. It would coming roaring down at a steep angle, with the engines in reverse, simulating the space shuttle’s aggressive glideslope, touch down, and then roar right back up to 40,000 feet to go do another pass. I was able to follow it with the scope and manual slewing.

At one point a bird fight erupted over the water. About a half-dozen ospreys were quite upset with a bald eagle. Eventually one of the ospreys got a good dig into the eagle’s back and he hauled ass out of there. I attempted to take pictures, but my camera only got one picture before declaring that it had weak batteries, oops it meant dead batteries, and quickly going dead. Thanks Canon! In this one picture, you can see the eagle at the left, turning hard just below the tree line, but you can’t see any ospreys (the bird on the buoy is just a heron or something watching the show).

As dusk fell, feral pigs came out of the brush to sniff around on the grass. One of the reporters here said he’s seen bobcats, and once almost stepped on a rattlesnake.

On Wednesday, I arrived at midday ready for a long day of countdown and launch monitoring. However at around 2:30pm (well into the countdown but still 7 hours to go) the scrubbed due to a fuel leak. After moping around the press site for a while I pulled out of there and went to dinner with some work folks. As of right now the word is that they will try again on Sunday. I was planning on driving back home on Saturday, but I’m going to tough it out and stay until this launches. Yes, extending my vacation in Florida, it’s rough!

Killing Time

Methods for killing three days in Florida:

Struggle with decisions like A) go to beach, B) get lunch or C) read book.

Work on a tan.

Read Mike Mullane’s book; much of the first part is grating because he’s such a sexist asshole, but he freely admits it and even laments it at times. That aside, this book is an unfliching look inside the world of shuttle astronauts, with everything laid bare including marital tension, office politics, space toiletry, grieving over lost comrades, selfish ambition.

Go on the “Now and Then” bus tour of the old Cape Canaveral launch pads. Ending up at the Saturn V site, which by the end of the day was largely empty, allowing me to get a nice quiet look at the business end.

Visit the Astronaut Hall Of Fame, which is interesting enough once you get inside, but the outside entrance and the entrance lobby staff are quite creepy.

Stumble across an air show (e.g. fighter jets) at the Titusville airport.

Troll around the press site, hoping they’ll do a “VIP” tour of the OPF or VAB, like they’ve done in the past in case of scrubs. Alas, not happening, but not for lack of trying (I asked them about 5 times).

Keep up with news of the Atlas launch, which I was hoping they’d fit in before the shuttle launch. Alas, not happening. Reminded once again of how, during the Dec 2007 trip, I completely forgot about the Atlas launch happening then (after the shuttle scrubbed) and it launched as we were sitting in a theater taking in a movie.

One day to go!

Try #2

Sunday March 15th. Tanking took place between 10am and 1pm; by 1:30pm we knew they’d gotten past the problem that caused the scrub last Wednesday.

To the right, here are three screenshots from NASA TV:

1. Astrovan driving past the VAB, with me on the sidewalk waving at it (circled in photo, click to enlarge). I knew that they would stop around there some place to drop someone off, so I was ready to take pictures and wave at astronauts. Unfortunately, I was standing in the wrong place and the convoy flew right by me!

2. View from the press site just before launch, with me standing to the right of the countdown clock. There was a staffer shooing people away from in front of the clock. About 10 feet in front of me was the water’s edge, and that’s where most people were standing and setting up their camera tripods (news photographers).

3. View from the press site seconds after launch, with me throwing my arms in the air. 20+ years!

I didn’t distract myself with taking pictures of the actual launch, since there are lots of people already doing that better than I ever could. Ben Cooper always has the best pictures, so go check out his pictures.

Here’s what two of the rock stars of NASA said at the press briefing after the launch (which I snuck into):

“I can never say enough about these launches. This launch was really special. If you saw it and you saw the clouds and you saw the SRB separation, I don’t think I’ve seen a launch that was as pretty as this one.” — Bill Gerstenmaier

“For the folks who watched this on TV, I really wish you could have been here in Florida. I’ve seen a lot of launches, either as the Test Director or as the Launch Director, and this was the most visually beautiful launch I’ve ever seen. It was just spectacular. When the orbiter and the tank and the boosters got up into the sunlight, the sun had just set about 10 minutes prior, it was just gorgeous. And then at separation we could see the boosters coming back down to earth … We could see the orbiter, from the firing room, 7 minutes into flight. At that point in time the orbiter was somewhere off the New Jersey / New York coast. Just a spectacular night.” — Mike Leinbach

With the dusky post-sunset sky, we had some of the turn-night-into-day effect of a night launch, but then as the shuttle gained altitude it climbed into sunlight again which made for a beautiful grey-to-white-to-orange transition in the plume. The skies were crystal clear and we could see the shuttle out to +7m:30s, which was aaaaalmost all the way to MECO, when I could finally relax. All systems nominal all the way up — a perfect launch.

It’s sad that there’s only 8 more of these left, maybe 9 or 10 if they throw money at NASA to extend the shuttle program a little bit more. It’s a beautiful thing to see on the pad and provided us with such gorgeous launches. In 2015 we should start to see Ares I launches, and then in about a decade we may start to see the bigger Ares V launches, which will be similar (two SRBs plus liquid engine stages) but lacking a shuttle on the side.

After spending a week here, and straining at my leash hoping for a launch, it was sad to be leaving. I don’t know if I’ll ever be back.

On the drive back to Cocoa Beach, Route 528 was a river of light from all the cars slowly making their way back from the viewing sites along that causeway and Port Canaveral and Cocoa Beach. Thousands and thousands of people all come here to see these launches — perhaps hundreds of thousands! It’s nice to see so much support for space flight.

Epilogue

The next morning I checked out of the motel, got in the car, and drove the 500 miles / 8 hours back home. The car didn’t break down on this trip!

On the way I stopped by the Ponce de Leon tracking station. Wayne Hale wrote about this little site in his blog once, and I figured I might as well nerd it up completely and stop by. It’s in the middle of a beachfront state park called Smyrna Dunes, and would make a nice day trip if you live in the area.

The Houston Chronicle has let veteran space reporter Mark Carreau go as part of a layoff there. I met him during my trip to KSC and thanked him for his reliable presence at the briefings and his always good questions (although it’s funny how he always frames them in “I’m just confused” 🙂 ). He did seem concerned about cutbacks — in space/science coverage, at other orgs; he didn’t mention the Chronicle.

And now, two weeks later, the shuttle and her crew have returned to Earth after a successful mission. On paper this wasn’t a particularly exciting mission to the layman, but it represented a milestone that hundreds and thousands (if not millions) of people have been working towards for many many years: a functionally complete space station. Discovery carried up the last of the 4 power generator segments, and that last part makes all the difference in the world, because the excess power now triples the amount of power available for research use (literally, powering more research equipment and supporting more astronauts on orbit doing research). Further, Discovery brought up an absolutely critical piece of equipment (the distillation assembly) that was going to fix the last piece of the new water system, also needed to support a full crew of 6 astronauts including more researchers. And so, in May of this year, a Russian rocket will carry 3 more astronauts up to ISS, and we will finally have the ISS fully staffed for research. Discovery’s STS-119 mission was the final step in 20 years of work to make that a reality.

In late 1997, Sharon and I visited my sister Jen and her boyfriend Chris (now husband) in San Francisco. She lived in SF proper, in the Noe Valley neighborhood which is near the Castro. One evening while we were out for a walk, we came across some amateur astronomers who had set up their telescopes on the sidewalk, for anybody to peer into. I took a look and decided right there that I really needed to get a telescope.

Turns out that they were part of a group called the Sidewalk Astronomers. They have free plans for a telescope that you can build, called a dobsonian, designed by John Dobson. You just need to mailorder the glass parts (about $200) and spend about $40 at the hardware store. So a couple months later, in Spring 1998, I gathered the parts and spent a month of weekends building the thing. This telescope design (a Newtonian) is simple but big, so I sized it to just barely fit in the back seat of my car.

The detail pictures here show how, uh, low budget this is. Note the fancy bearing made of plywood, although I’ll admit that there’s a couple small pieces of teflon in there (that was a later upgrade, actually). See the secondary mirror suspended in the top end of the tube — I think those three legs are made of paint stirring sticks. It certainly looked pretty good after I got around to painting it. And note the bungie cord holding the mirror in place! The big primary mirror is supposed to just lay on the bottom of the tube, but when transporting the tube horizontally, or aiming at something very low, the mirror tends to flop around, which can damage it. The bungie cord simply keeps the mirror from flopping forward, and doesn’t really degrade the image so I just left it there.

We don’t have much to see from intown Atlanta due to light pollution, but I’ve taken the scope on a few trips out of town (camping and the like) and have been able to use it a bit. Frankly, though, it’s been a pain because A) it’s really hard to find the object you’re looking for, because manually moving the scope is so crude, and B) once you’ve found the object, the rotation of the earth under you causes the object to quickly drift out of view.

Last summer we went to a family get-together in West Virginia (right in the middle of the NRQZ), so I was really looking forward to the dark skies there. Alas, a full moon was up (washing out the dimmer night sky objects), and there was patchy cloud cover. And this was on top of the frustrations I’ve already mentioned. So, after 11 years of using the home-built scope, I decided that it was time to invest in a real telescope.

Modern commercial telescopes come with motorized electronic controllers that A) zip you right to the desired object (pick from a list) and B) slowly turn the scope to compensate for the earth’s rotation. However, in doing research, I saw that I didn’t know nearly enough to be able to make an educated decision on my purchase. And we’re talking about a significant amount of money here ($1000-$1500), so as an interim step I decided to buy a smaller scope used. More about that in the next blog post …

For now, this is my testimonial on my first telescope. After today, it’s going to see service a lot less often. I’ll still bring it out occasionally when I’ve got people around and multiple scopes will be useful, but for the most part it is now retired. Thanks go to John Dobson and the Sidewalk Astronomers for getting me started!

cannoli: Sicilian pastry desserts; the singular is meaning “little tube”, with the etymology stemming from the Latin “canna”, or reed. Cannoli originated in Sicily and are an essential part of Sicilian cuisine. They are also popular in Italian American cuisine and in America are known as a general Italian pastry, while they are specifically Sicilian in origin. (from Wikipedia)

Last Saturday was the annual Atlanta Open Orthographic Meet (aka spelling bee), held at Manuel’s Tavern every year on the first Saturday after Valentine’s Day. As I’ve written before (in 2008 and 2007), this is probably not what you expect when you hear “spelling bee”. For one, nobody is getting up to a microphone to attempt to spell a word; for two, there’s beer.

I am a pretty good speller but clearly out of my league in this crowd. I used to make it out of Round 1 and try to get through Round 2, but the last two years I haven’t even made it past Round 1. This year you needed a perfect first round to advance, and I made my one mistake with “cannoli”. It was the one word I struggled with so I knew I was looking at a 19 or a 20, but this was the first time that a perfect 20 was necessary to advance.

Here’s a sampling of this year’s words:

Round 1: stimulus(!), glacier, conch, carafe

Round 2: colloquy, acetaminophen, lachrymose, aril

Round 3: graupel, vicereine, bulbul, capsaicin

Round 4: hyetal, echard, johnin, secesh

Obviously, by Round 3 and 4 you are dealing with words that few people have even heard of, and are nearly impossible to spell. So you have to start winging it. This year, after Round 4 there were still two people tied and so it moved into one-word-at-a-time sudden death rounds. Six of them.

It’s a lot of fun, especially after you’re eliminated and can focus your energies on drinking in earnest!

WREK’s Underground Recordings is one of the handful of radio shows that I keep up with every week. They air old recordings of live band performances in WREK’s studio. Some of the stuff they have from the 80’s and 90’s is incredible! Check out the website linked above for a schedule of past and upcoming episodes.

This past Tuesday (Feb 10th) they aired a Nov 1993 performance by Smoke, which was fronted by the now-departed Benjamin. This was actually the second appearance of Smoke on UR; they aired a May 1994 performance about six months ago. This one is a full hour of Benjamin and Bill Taft et al. I’m not sure if Coleman Lewis and Tim Campion had joined at this point. This was right around the time that they came out with their first single, on Colossal Records. One of my brushes with greatness is that I got a credit on the back of that seven inch, as one of the 3-4 guys that helped Arthur Davis fund the pressing of that single.

Listen now via mp3 streaming: http://www.wrek.org/stream/meta/week/wrek_live-128kb/The_Underground_Recordings.m3u

Download the mp3 files now (27 MB each): http://www.wrek.org/streamripper/wrek_live-128kb/Tue1800.mp3 http://www.wrek.org/streamripper/wrek_live-128kb/Tue1830.mp3

It gets better! Last week’s show (Feb 3rd) featured Buzz Hungry from Oct 1995, David Barbe‘s band after he parted ways with Bob Mould and Sugar. You’ll hear clear echos of Barbe’s earlier band Mercyland, as they tear through a set in the old coliseum studio. Like nearly all Live @ WREK shows for a long run from the mid-80’s to the late 90s, this was engineered by Joe Whitaker, WREK’s chief engineer and world class crank. Joe used to tell me that really good bands made mixing sound easy, and Buzz Hungry proves it here. Barbe is now a co-owner and engineer at Athens GA’s Chase Park Transduction studio, birthplace of many great recordings.

Alas, the show gets cut off after about 45 minutes by Georgia Tech sports coverage, whoo. Oh well, we got most of it.

Listen now via mp3 streaming: http://www.wrek.org/stream/meta/week/wrek_live-128kb/The_Underground_RecordingsO.m3u

Download the mp3 files now (27 MB each): http://www.wrek.org/streamripper/wrek_live-128kb/Tue1800_old.mp3 http://www.wrek.org/streamripper/wrek_live-128kb/Tue1830_old.mp3

WARNING: the mp3 audio links above will only work until Tuesday Feb 17th 6pm! After that, the Buzz Hungry recording is gone, but you can still get to the Smoke recording by using the Buzz Hungry links. A little confusing but that’s how it works. After another week (Feb 24th) the Smoke recording will be gone too.

One final note: a few weeks ago, UR aired a 1995 performance by a band called Tennessee Williamson. Fantastic! They were a lean three piece that reminded me of the Minutemen and the Meat Puppets. Does anyone know anything about them? I have the recording if anyone wants to hear it.

On Sunday January 4th, I welcomed the New Year with a Sunday Special on WREK. Keith Lee, a local musician, contacts me occasionally with ideas for shows, and I basically help make it happen. People more pompous than me claim “producer” credit for the role. Keith and his wife Lynn always do a great job of putting together a tight show.

So this past show was to showcase the year of 1969, forty years later. Many landmark records were released that year, and there were many significant changes in American politics and culture. We had music as well as sound bites, exploring 1969 through the music of John Lennon, King Crimson, Sly and the Family Stone, Nick Drake, Bob Dylan, Isaac Hayes, Can, The Velvet Underground, Rolling Stones, Merle Haggard, Serge Gainsbourg, Frank Zappa and many many more.

Direct link to STREAM of archived show:

http://www.wrek.org/stream/meta/week/wrek_live-128kb/Sunday_SpecialO.m3u

Direct links for DOWNLOADING the show (e.g. to your iPod / mp3 player, or to burn to CD), 27 MB each:

http://www.wrek.org/streamripper/wrek_live-128kb/Sun1900_old.mp3 http://www.wrek.org/streamripper/wrek_live-128kb/Sun1930_old.mp3 http://www.wrek.org/streamripper/wrek_live-128kb/Sun2000_old.mp3 http://www.wrek.org/streamripper/wrek_live-128kb/Sun2030_old.mp3 http://www.wrek.org/streamripper/wrek_live-128kb/Sun2100_old.mp3

All of the links above will work until the evening of Sunday the 18th, when they will get overwritten with the next Sunday Special. Update: it’s now too late to download these; contact me if you want the show and I’ll make a CD for you.

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For the past 6 years, I’ve also been doing a regular monthly show on WREK called the “Eyedrum Archive Sunday Special”. Starting in August 2002, on the first Sunday of every month I would host a two-hour show playing material recorded live at Eyedrum, and would frequently have guests in the studio to talk about past and upcoming events. It was a great way to keep up with what was going on at Eyedrum and in the city in general. While I do a lot of things for Eyedrum, I don’t actually get out to see actual events there too often, so this was another way for me to stay plugged in. Alas, over the past year I kind of got tired of it and decided to wrap it up. The last show was in October 2008, so it had a good 6-year run.

While I was at the WREK studio finishing up that last Eyedrum show, I took a look at the old Sunday Special binder, in which are recorded the playlists of every single SS show that’s been on WREK over the past 20+ years! Hundreds and hundreds of fascinating shows on every conceivable musical topic, as diverse as WREK itself. I had done a bunch of shows over the years, so I flipped through the binder and wrote them down.

21-Jul-1991 — Gang Of Four

16-Feb-1992 — My Bloody Valentine

15-Mar-1992 — Savage Republic

13-Mar-1993 — Jawbreaker

09-Apr-1995 — The Replacements (early 81-85)

03-May-1998 — Tom Cora / Curlew / Skeleton Crew

01-Jul-2001 — King Crimson (with Keith Lee and Doug Hughes)

14-Jul-2002 — Sonny Sharrock (with Jim Moran)

04-Aug-2002 — first Eyedrum Archive Sunday Special (monthly for 6+ years); appearances by Jeff Rackley, Robert Cheatham, Nisa Asokan.

18-Aug-2002 — Umm Kulthum

13-Jul-2003 — 7-inch Sunday Special (Jim Moran dumpster diving)

14-Dec-2003 — Civilization, Phaze III; synclavier with Jeff Rackley (R.I.P. Frank Zappa 1940-1993)

15-Feb-2004 — Late 60’s Psychedelic (with Doug Hughes and Gene Thompson)

06-Jun-2004 — John Cage

04-Sep-2005 — tribute to Robert Moog (RIP 1934-2005)

16-Jul-2006 — tribute to Syd Barrett (RIP 1946-2006) with Keith and Lynn Lee

30-Sep-2007 — Arthur Lee / Lee Hazlewood tributes (with Keith and Lynn Lee)

06-Jan-2008 — Stockhausen tribute (with Stewart Gerber and Chris Swartz)

27-Apr-2008 — Atlanta Electronic Music (with Kevin Haller and Jim Combs and other guests, promoting City Skies festival)

I also put a note in that binder to not throw it out! I want that thing if they ever decide they don’t need it anymore. I mean, just the shows and playlists by Thomas Peake alone would be worth the effort to salvage it.

Update Oct 2009: I missed one above, the Tom Cora show in 1998. Also, my closing comment above about the Thomas Peake shows turned out to be terribly prescient. Please visit www.peakecast.org to see what I’m doing in memory of Thomas.

I’m posting this long after our trip was over, but backdating it to Dec 31st so it fits in the timeline of the whole thing.

So, what are some useful lessons from our trip?

Despite our griping about the cold (30 deg F), it turns out that we were actually lucky with the weather. We had sunny skies every day, and central Europe is capable of far colder weather in the winter. Two weeks after our trip our German family was telling us of 10 degree weather! I can’t imagine how miserable it would be to tramp around a city in that. So that’s one knock against going in the winter. A related caveat is that, even at mid-day, the sun is quite low and doesn’t really clear the rooftops in the city. It’s weird to perpetually have that “it’s morning” feeling because the sun is low, anticpating midday sun, and then you discover that it’s 3 pm and it’s starting to get darker. No real sun. Europe is much farther north than the US, in general, and that makes for a low sun — and very short days in the winter. So, just sayin’, avoid winter. Duh, right?

The RER system (in Paris) is really a bunch of suburban transit lines that happen to have a few convenient stops in the central city. If you take one of these instead of the Metro (regular subway), be very careful: – signage is poor and they will quickly spin you around and you’ll find you’re on the wrong train – ticket kiosks may not work, which is extra evil when you’re trying to make it to the airport for your flight – some express trains (e.g. to airport) may not actually go particularly fast (i.e. brisk walk), thanks! – budget an hour from hotel to airport via RER train

We have got to find a way to invest in cutting the lines at the museums — they were typically 45 minutes and that was in winter! I can’t imagine what they’re like in warm weather when surely tons more people are there.

We really should know a little bit of French for next time. This was just a little “starter” visit; a future trip with more time spent in the city will call for more time invested in preparation.

Quotes from the trip:

Chris to Sharon: “Honey, your gaydar doesn’t work in this country.”

In Renate’s kitchen, fixing ourselves something to eat:

Chris: “Where’s the meat?”

Sharon: “Everywhere.”

After Sharon takes the first shower in a hotel room:

Chris: “How was that?”

Sharon: “It was fine, normal. Well, the new normal.”

Had a quick breakfast at the little hotel before checking out and heading straight to the airport — the shot here shows us both crammed into the comically tiny hotel elevator.

For the third time in as many days, we got screwed by the RER train system as first the automated kiosks refused to sell us a ticket, and then the “express” train inexplicably took the surprisingly long ride out to Charles De Gaulle airport at a snail’s pace. We got to the luggage check-in just barely in time to get our suitcases on the plane, and got through security (also inexplicably slow) just barely in time to get ourselves on the plane. But we made it!

Sharon was so exhausted by the experience that she was giddy with emotion. This may explain why she cried all the way through the Ricky Gervais rom com “Ghost Town”. Chris was disappointed that the lack of seatback in-demand video meant no more movie gorging, but he had reading to catch up on anyway. In addition to, of course, monitoring our progress the whole way back on the GPS receiver. Brighton! Quebecois tundra! Scranton!

And, back in Atlanta, our luggage made it too. Success! Home! Kitty hugs! Sleep.

We dragged ourselves out of bed early to get to the only thing open that early and without lines: Pere Lachaise cemetery. We grabbed a baguette with ham, butter and gruyere, some coffee and got on the Metro. Pere Lachaise is everything you’ve heard. So many periods of architecture are represented by the graves and so many periods of art represented by the people buried there. We saw the requisites (Jim Morrison and its accompanying whiskey bottles and Oscar Wilde’s lipstick covered monument) and many more. Eating a baguette while walking through the cemetery at dawn is one of Sharon’s favorite memories of Paris.

Once again the tourist-unfriendly RER train system managed to get Chris twisted up and we found ourselves on a train to the suburbs. Express, no stops. Hello Juvisy! Fortunately we managed to navigate ourselves back without getting charged for the trip(s) but we had lost a valuable hour in the process.

We ended up at our destination: Le Musée des Égouts de Paris – The Paris sewer museum. This museum shows how the Paris sewer and water systems work. Ages ago they used the Seine to both dump their poop into and drink water from. Engineers developed sewer and water systems that the Parisians are very proud of. Proud enough to make a museum about it — a stinky, dark, damp museum. With a rat diorama and rat-related gifts at the gift shop. About a quarter of the way through Sharon said, “I forget, why did we want to come here?”.

We then went on another pointless expedition to find the Musee Dupuytren, a medical museum that is part of the University of Paris medical school. Closed for the winter school holidays! Steeeerike 3 in our medical itinerary! So we walked through the Latin Quarter (through the Sorbonne, past the Pantheon) and down Rue Mouffetard where Sharon found a toy store with her new favorite cartoon character, Barbapapa, a strange morphing blobby thing.

Took the metro to the Louvre station, which features a few replicas of Actual Art on display in the station — alas this would be our only encounter with the Louvre for this trip. We did walk through the gargantuan plaza with the iconic I. M. Pei glass pyramids. We headed through the Tuileries gardens (dead for the winter) to the Musee l’Orangerie which has the giant Monet waterlily paintings but which we abandoned as soon as we saw the line. We continued across the Place de la Concorde, which Chris is familiar with because of the views from TV when the Tour de France ends there every July. There was a huge ferris wheel and carousel set up to entertain the masses.

Then we nabbed a bus for the trip up the loooong Champs Elysees, ending up at the Arc de Triomphe. Sharon’s feet hurt too badly, but Chris climbed the stairs to see the view from the top, and wished he had more time to check out the awesome art exhibits that they had on display in the indoor galleries up there.

We went back to the Oberkampf area near our hotel for our final dinner in Paris. We were a little early (dinner wasn’t served until 7pm) so we had a bottle of wine and waited. For dinner we had an amazing steak au poivre and colossal prawns with butter sauce. We returned to the hotel and collapsed into bed.

We took the subway out north to the 18th arrondissement for a morning meetup with “Paris Walks“, a guided walk through streets of the Montmartre section of upper Paris. We saw the streets where Van Gogh, Picasso, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, etc. all had studios and the absinthe cabaret bars where they hung out and mingled (including the Lapin Agile). The Moulin Rouge and other cabaret bars were all in this area. The tour ended at the brilliant white Sacre Coeur — it stays naturally clean by virtue of the travertine stone from which it was constructed in the 1880’s. After enjoying the panoramic view of the city from the hilltop (and the living statues on their pediments), we headed back down to the Abbesses metro station and had lunch at a tiny Tibetan restaurant on Rue de Abbesses.

We headed up from the subway to the Catacombes and immediately saw a HUGE line of people. Not only did we not get there in time to stand in this line before it closed, but the line was cut off two people ahead of us. Booooooo! We were really looking forward to this (having had a memorable visit to the Sedlec Ossuary outside Prague about a decade ago) so it was quite disappointing. Strike 1 on our medical oddities itinerary. Oh well, next time; move on!

We then headed back down to the subway and on to the cathedrals Notre Dame and Saint Chappelle, located on a little island (Ile-de-la-Cite) in the middle of the Seine, where Paris originated back with the Romans. Spectacular and outrageous, Notre Dame is just as done up and redonkulous as you’ve heard. Mmmmmm, buttressy. Saint Chappelle is a little more subtle with only several thousand stained glass windows. We got there just before the sun set and had beautiful views of the mostly blue glass.

Chris insisted that we try to get to the Musee d’Orsay but Sharon resisted, saying an entire museum would take too much time out of their schedule and needed to be saved for another trip back. (The Louvre was out of the question for this trip.) Even though it was almost time for the d’Orsay to close we got there at 5:40, the guard shrugged and let us in for free. The museum is in a cavernous old train station, beautifully converted to house the national art treasures of France. Amazingly, we saw, in those 20 minutes (and the next 20 that it took to get all the other people to leave) a lot of great art. Manets, Monets, Degas, Millet, etc. We witnessed a near riot as the museum staff attempted to close the Picasso exhibit with a line of people waiting to get in.

We left the Orsay to go scout, only a few blocks away, the famed taxidermy and funky stuff store Deyrolle. It turned out to be closed for winter inventory. Again, Boooooooo! Strike 2.

For dinner we had the typical French fare: Steak frites! The other dish is a chopped beef burger topped with a fried egg, Simpsons’ style.

On to the Eiffel Tower. Lit up this evening in blue lights with huge gold stars on the sides, the tower really is an amazing architectural and engineering marvel. We should have just appreciated it from the ground. Many lines and 2 hours in the literally freezing weather with a couple thousand of our most annoying friends, and we were rewarded with a view at the top that left us … cold. Here’s a picture from under the tower. Finally got back to the hotel at 11pm or so, after some confusion on the RER transit line.

Herma and Guenther met us at the hotel and saw us to the train station. We took local trains from Annweiler to Landau and then Karlsruhe, where we grabbed lunch and boarded the French TGV bullet train that would take us to Paris. Most of the train ride was run at around 160 KPH (100 MPH) as we traveled over the rails of Germany and eastern France, but as we approached the Paris region we apparently reached higher quality rails because we sped up to a cruising speed of 310 KPH (193 MPH) and at one point hit 320 KPH (200 MPH) — Chris obviously stayed busy checking his GPS receiver. We arrived in late afternoon in Paris at the Gare d’Est train station, splurged on a taxi and checked into our tiny room (with shower!) at the modest Hotel Beaumarchais in the Bastille neighborhood in the 11th arrondissement of eastern Paris.

After a rest, we headed out to discover our neighborhood, had dinner a busy little cafe near the Place de la Republique, and then went back to the hotel to plan our attack of the city for the next two days.