A Rainy Day in Padstow

Friday 21 August 1992. We've made it! This is the final post covering our 1992 Cornwall holiday. Read, enjoy, laugh if you feel the urge, then please close the door and switch the lights off. Next on the list will be an up-to-date 2026 cruise around the Western Mediterrannean with Tomas and Maris!

This is Padstow on a very rainy Friday. Mum stayed at the tent and Dad, Fran, Gill and I walked around in teeming rain. We went into a cafe and asked for coffees and 4 towels...

Did I mention it rained? A typical case of making the best of it!

There is a long harbour wall at Padstow that takes the broadside force of any storms, keeping the boats and trawlers relatively safe from any battering.

The shipwreck museum had two World War II guns outside. One had to wonder whether they were connected... A sort of self-continuing business...

Dad takes a professional interest, having been kept well away from instruments of destruction during his army days! "Er... I think you look down this bit to aim it..." he tells Gill.

Later in the day it cleared up. We collect Mum and walk into Newquay, wishing a last farewell to it's beaches.

And a similar goodbye to Porth Island for 1992. In fact goodbye to quite a chunk of what you see here as a lot of it has fallen down onto the beach or into the sea depending on whether the tide was in at the time...

Cornwall 1992 Holiday Index

At Salzburg's Hohensalzburg Fortress

Thursday 17 August 2000. At the end of the previous episode we took the funicular railway up from the many squares and churches of Salzburg to the Hohensalzburg fortress.

It's an impressive chunk of masonry and design, far bigger than you would find most castles in the UK to be. In fact inside those formidable walls is an entire village.

It therefore gives an air of both calm beauty and impregnable mass.

It was never taken by force. Even when under siege during the Peasants' Revolt of 1525, with food running out, the defenders coloured their only bull a different shade every day and paraded it around the walls in view of the besiegers below, to convince them there was plenty of food left.

We spotted at least two wells within the confines of the fortress, so presumably water wasn't a problem.

We had gone up there thinking that we might spot a few locations from The Sound of Music, but not so much really. We've already seen that the courtyard seen in the film housing the von Trapp Family Singers competition was down in the city itself...

Just about the only reminder of the film was this. The puppet theatre that had provided the puppets (and no doubt the puppeteers) for the Lonely Goatherd scene. We didn't have time to watch a performance, but I bought a couple of postcards showing some of the puppets. The theatre began in 1913 when friends of sculptor Anton Aicher convinced him to turn his private hobby into public performances. The family by the time of our visit in 2000 had amassed some 2000 puppets.

An underground passage leads you out of the inner fortress to the path leading back down to the city. We had gone up by funicular railway but opted to walk back down.

The way down is steep. Boarding with slats across, like a ship's gangway, are laid down the street to help you keep your footing. In winter it must be almost impossible! The fortress is immensely popular with tourists. After the Schoenbrunn Palace in Vienna it is the most visited tourist attraction in Austria.

We came down and turned to visit the cemetry of the church of St Peter, one of Salzburg's gems. We found these intricate iron crosses set up on short gravestones. We had seen some similar ones in Kitzbühel.

Finally we get back down to the city level and in a grim reminder of the reality that was behind the fluff of The Sound of Music, passing through a small square we read a plaque on a wall that told us that Himmler's Gestapo had made their headquarters there during the war.

Not the best quality photo but in 2000, digital cameras were very new and not capable of the high-quality that we take for granted today. Even then, you would not have dreamed that they would be an add-on to a phone you could carry in your pocket! These are eggs. Blown and painted and displayed in their thousands in a shop that sells nothing else but painted eggs!

When I say in their thousands I'm not joking! Miss Franny restrained herself from buying any but then regretted it for the next couple of years until we visited again. On that as yet future trip she would be known for the rest of the week to the coach drivers as The Egg Lady...

It was getting time to return to the coach station. Just time to look at the river - well alright, so we got lost and found ourselves at the river... Anyway we had a look at the river, a look at the map and found we were not so far off track after all!

No need to catch a trolleybus then! Not been on one of those since the 1950s in Manchester...! And they weren't bendy in the middle then!

We got back to the hotel, had our evening meal and decided (gluttons for punishment that we are) to have another bash at walking into Zell-am-See after our meal. Tomorrow night, after all, will be our last night so we would be spending it packing and having a last night with our fellow passengers. So it was tonight or never.

This time we made it all the way! Well, perhaps we did catch the little train seen a few times previously... Asking for a ticket in an unknown language is quite something - especially on the return journey where we wanted to get off at Kitzteinhornstrasse...!!! Actually I must have done ok because the driver/conductor launched into a long spiel which I just about gathered was advice on buying a weekly ticket to save money. "Ja, danke, but wir ist der trundlink homevards zer day after morgen"...

You might have guessed how the weather changed once we got there... Ah, lovely.... lightning show over the lake anyone? We sheltered from the light rain to give it time to get really hard again, then dashed for the station, getting wet at the level crossing, waiting for a mainline train to go through then again after the train ride as we walked back to the hotel. "Been out taking pictures of the rain again?" came a cheerful voice...

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Down In Time For Tea And Thunder

Wednesday 16 August 2000. The trip back down the mountain was again one that left some of the passengers unable to look outside at the steep drop!

The water that flows out from under the glacier at first takes on a muddy appearance as it is full of bits of rock and frozen detritus that the glacier has scraped away over the centuries. It collects in a lake which overflows here and which in turn fills a lower lake where the rubbish sinks to the bottom leaving the water to purify a bit.

Here you can see the difference in height between the two bodies of water and the difference in colour of the water.

At the bottom end of this lower lake are two enormous dams, built to withstand ice as well as water. The brighter patch above the lake in the top right corner is a glimpse of white water cascading from the lake at the lower edge of the glacier whilst at the left of the picture large patches of ice can be seen even in August.

The road winds down the pass in a snaking series of hairpin bends. Some people refused to look. Others kept up a less-than-soothing running commentary.

As it happened there was no need to make up horror stories - at one bend we passed a few cars stopped next to a motorbike that had run off the road. The biker looked in a bad way, flat on his back with someone pumping his chest...

We came through a short tunnel and to a patch of snow. Chris stopped the coach and the younger passengers shot out to play for 2 minutes.

12 year old Sarah was most indignant because Chris told her to wipe her pants clean before getting on the coach - she had fallen on her behind!

After our meal at the hotel that night, we set out to walk to Zell for an Austrian beer festival. We got half a mile and the heavens opened. Thunder and lightning flashed around us and we sheltered under the eaves of a small shed between the local and main railway lines.

"It'll slacken off in a minute," said Miss Franny confidently. The storm moved from the mountains to directly overhead. The rain got harder and harder and it went dark.

The shed was no shelter now. We got to the road running alongside the railway and sheltered under the porch of someone's house. They must have heard us talking because the door opened and an elderly couple, after realising we didn't speak German, motioned us to step inside. We were soaked and dripping by now so I declined - we would have wet their carpets and their porch was keeping the worst off us. We thanked them and, bless them, they went back in and then came back with an umbrella for us.

An hour later we were still there. It had now gone fully dark as night approached... The rain was so hard that the train signals shone red beams across the sky.

I took a photo using flash. The flashgun lit the drops of rain up and on the screen of the digital camera we saw just how many drops were in the air in whatever very small fraction of a second the flash fired for (somwhere between 1/200 and 1/1,000th of a second).

This photo became the cause of much hilarity amongst the other passengers for the rest of the holiday! Every time rain splashed the coach windows or we passed a puddle there came cries of "Quick! Are you going to photograph it???"

Eventually we gave up, knocked on the door to give the umbrella back and thank the owners and then we just ran for it back to the hotel. One good thing came out of it though - the lightning hit and stopped the church clock opposite our bedroom window. We had a blissful bell-free morning! Oh... and the beer festival was called off due to the storm.

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Rain, Snow and Eggs in Salzburg

Sunday 27 January 2002. It's our first day of awakening in Austria and our first glimpse in full - or as full as it gets at this time of year - daylight of the village or town where we are staying.

This is Mariastein. Whether town or village it is the smallest municipality or self-governing area in the district of Kufstein, in the Tyrol, in Austria, Europe, Northern Hemisphere, Earth (otherwise known as Terra, third rock from the sun), Sol, Milky Way. The 14th century castle is the focal point of the [whatever], standing 42 metres on top of a rocky outcrop and containing 250 stairs that lead up to a chapel. In the following century Mariastein became a place of pilgrimage (I haven't found a reason for this yet) but after a local statue of the Virgin Mary was moved to somewhere in Bavaria in the late 17th century, Mariastein's reputation as a pilgrimage destination was enhanced all the more by the statue deciding to return all on its own. If you decide to self-drive whilst in Austria, just keep an eye out, okay?

Fran, Jock and George are in front of the hotel or Gasthof (literally guest house) as we set off for a day in Salzburg.

Oh dear... by the time we get there, it's raining in Salzburg. We give the guided walking tour a miss after having done it previously. Also the first thing the guide does as the coach gets into the bus station is to walk into and nearly fall over a bollard which doesn't fill us with confidence! Admittedly I did the same once, but that was in Amsterdam's red light district so I feel somewhat justified as there were other distracting elements in that instance...

This is the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Born in 1756, he composed over 800 musical pieces covering just about every type or genre of music that was going at the time. (i.e. no rock and roll or drum and bass...) He was proficient on both keyboards (piano, harpsichord and clavier rather than Yamaha or Korg) and violin by the age of five at which age he composed his first pieces and performed before European Royalty. He is justly described as a genius (as opposed to nowadays when you only need to release a few expletive-ridden tracks and be arrested), yet he died aged only 35 in 1791.

Fran wants to buy some of the blown and painted eggs that we saw on our last visit. In fact she's been kicking herself for 18 months that she didn't buy any then!

Admittedly, this shop is somewhat amazing. The shop is well laid out with thousands of painted eggs and it just makes you want to shell out...

Fran bought some eggs. They came in a specially made presentation box...

We found a small cafe for lunch. We were somewhat wet and the place had very high tables with bar stools but did an excellent sandwich and coffee. We had a look inside the cathedral and then came though an archway into this courtyard. At the far end are two streets, one through another arch. We'll look at that below. The one left leads up a steep climb to the castle.

We didn't make it all the way up to the castle, but came far enough for a rooftop photograph before making our way back down to the courtyard and through the other archway.

The other street leads to a familiar scene from The Sound of Music. I'm not entirely sure whether it is the same or just a look-a-like cemetery where Ralf did the dirty on the Von Trapps. This did not happen in real life! In real life the Germans merely paid attention to the background music which told them whether they were close or not...

We had time for another wander round the streets and to get even more wet. Then a quick look at the river before heading back for the coach. By which time we were just a little thankful that we could get back in the dry and warmth. The drivers were curious about the bag Fran was carrying so carefully. "Aigs???" said Jock incredulously. "Wotcha gowan tae do wi' them?" demanded George as we got back on the coach. "Aye - they'll be scrambled!" chortled Jock, "Did ye no' buy any bacon?"

With rain pouring down the windows we drove past another location from The Sound of Music. Julie Andrews and the children fall out of their boat into the moat of this house. To be honest, we were as wet as they were...

Return to Austria in Winter, 2002 Index

Palais de Versailles

Sunday 30 May 1999. The coach set off at 9:00am for Versailles and although warm, it was rather dull. By the time we reached the palace it was obvious that a storm was in the offing.

None-the-less we left the coach - no choice actually as it was not stopping in the coach park at the palace - and we walked into the huge cobbled courtyard and joined a horrendously long line of people waiting to go into the palace itself. The people on the right are somewhere near the back of the queue and the front of it is between the two wings on the right.

It was going darker and darker and I left Fran in the queue and went to see if there was another way in. There wasn't. On the way back I photographed the statue of Louis XIV and the sky gives you some idea. It was to get darker however. As I got back to Fran I was surprised to see she had moved up the line quite a way. The more nervous were bailing out and heading for the cafe and toilets! A few drops of rain fell - I notice these things, being bald...

Hardly had the rain started than it suddenly got a lot darker. The automatic sensors assumed it was night and the floodlighting came on. There was a test flash of lightning and it was successful so there came a lot more... Suddenly it stopped raining and instead the air turned to water. At least that's what it felt like. I've been in Florida thunderstorms which I thought were bad but this was unbelievable. In no time at all everyone was soaked through to the skin with icy water whilst thunder and lightning were horrendously close. I'll show you the scorch marks later... The cafe and shop closed its doors as there were so many people fighting to get in they were in danger of suffocating. People were literally screaming - the air was so full of water that you could hardly breathe or see.

The gutters and drains of Versailles are wonderful. Water is collected off the roofs and pours out the mouths of gargoyles. Beautiful in a shower, but in this storm the people in the narrow space between the two wings of the building were subjected to the equivalent of a row of fire hoses directed onto them from the rooftop. It was ten minutes before another door was opened and by then the mass of people was so compacted as we huddled together that we were just swept into the building. In no time the floor of the foyer was awash as all you had to do was grip a bit of clothing and water would gush forth.

It took a long time to get tickets to go into the palace proper as by then the foyer was choked with people wandering aimlessly and dripping in several different languages. The caissier had given over asking and was simply ringing up the till and pointing at the displayed price. My glasses were misted over - I took out my handkerchief and added some water... Having got the tickets we squelched up the staircase and decided the jackets we were carrying were simply making our arms wetter. We stuffed them in a plastic carrier bag and forgot about them.

When the Revolution emptied the palace of its inhabitants and showed them what a good time you could have in a condemned cell, all the furniture was being taken out and auctioned off until it was realised what was happening and what remained was left alone. Consequently many of the rooms are empty of furniture. Some contain paintings and some contain odd items. The decor though in all rooms is stunning. Gilding is in evidence throughout and there are some wonderful ceiling paintings and mouldings.

Some national stereotypes were emerging. The French were standing, dripping and sullen. The Germans were all organised and taking coats off, folding them and putting them into bags. The Brits were taking shoes off and tipping them up to literally pour a stream of water out, shouting to their mates: "Ha ha ha! Look at this!!!" A peep though a window showed that the rain had almost stopped and certainly the storm had passed over. We were later told that Paris had never had such a storm. As I said - I'll show you the scorch marks later...

It must have been heartbreaking for the staff and custodians as almost everywhere the exquisitely tiled floors were just full of water from people's feet. They were lucky the floors weren't carpeted. Meanwhile back to just before the Revolution, Paris could be dangerous and the chateau at Versailles was far enough away to have warning of any mobs but not so far as to be unaware and unable to send troops. Besides, Louis' court lived there also and thus he had them under his direct control. From 1682 to 1789 Versailles was the home of the kings of France. Everything had been built especially for Louis XIV: the palace itself, the town to house the builders and the tradesmen who served and fed them, the gardens, the water supplies, and a large hunting park. There was only a couple of villages full of peasants who had to be ejected before work could start...

The hunting park is no longer part of the estate but even so there are 800 hectares of land, 20km of roads, 200,000 trees, 35km of canals, 2153 windows, 700 rooms and 67 staircases... We had no time to go through all the rooms and the ones that we did see we saw only briefly, taking a quick glance, a photo and moving on, leaving a little puddle of water if we paused too long... Happily, water is a distinct feature of Versailles and the fountains in the garden are absolutely beautiful. We shall see some of them later, but the fountains are only switched on for a limited time and for most of that time we were indoors...

Carrying on our trip around the Palace of Versailles we complete one wing of the building and find ourselves back looking through the doorway at the beautiful Royal Chapel. Whilst the rain had stopped, as you can tell from the trousers of the chap on the left, we were still all very wet! I was relieved to find my cameras were ok. Later when Fran checked her bag, we found that any paper in it had tended to fall apart - like money for instance... I checked my pockets and brought out a few soggy scraps of paper myself - money and tickets to the garden... They had just disintegrated and there were just lots of half-inch tatters of paper!

Louis XIV's clock of 1706 in the Mercury Drawing Room. On the hour, animated figures of the King and of Fame descend from a cloud. The room was the State Bedchamber in 1682 and now contains the bed that Louis-Philippe had made for the bedchamber of Louis XIV when Versailles opened as a museum.

The Hall of Mirrors connects the War Drawing Room and the Peace Drawing Room, all devoted to the victories of Louis XIV. It was decorated from 1678 to 1686 and it was here that courtiers would wait, hoping for the ear of the King as he passed through on his way to morning worship in the Chapel. The room was spectacular to say the least and it was easy to visualise the masked and full dress balls that were held within these mirrored walls.

One of the candelabra from the Hall of Mirrors. M'sieur Vallaire had told us that there were no bathrooms or toilets in the palace. Certainly, they didn't wash as much as modern folk, believing that too much washing destroyed the body's natural resistance to disease. He also said, Napolean liked a bit of smell and always sent a messenger home two weeks in advance to warn Josephine not to wash! Perhaps that's the real reason for "Not tonight, Josephine!"

This is one of gallery rooms, hung with massive paintings, thronging with saturated tourists. The paintings depicted Napolean and someone had carelessly left a dirty great column standing in the middle of the room. Not mentioned in the guide book, I can only suppose that in a state of excitement someone put it down and forgot to pick it up again...

This gorgeous room was Queen Marie-Antoinette's bedchamber. It was here that the queen gave birth publicly so that there could be no doubt as to the true identity of the heir to the throne. In her memoirs, Madame Campan, First Woman of the Bedchamber described a huge crowd rushing into the room to witness the Queen give birth, actually climbing on the furniture for a better look. The King and Queen each had their own apartments, decorated similarly.

Ok folks, we are about to go into some very soggy grounds and gardens. The lightning scorch mark is somewhere outside - you may want some time to prepare yourselves...

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