Touch it, wimp!

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With Katrina having a broken leg and getting all the press, I thought I'd give you a glimpse as to what Jordan is up to.  We have spent the last few days playing a game that HE made up.  It involves electric fences and is called, "Touch it, wimp!"

What Jordan doesn't understand is that I grew up around electric fences.  I can guess with about 90% accuracy the conditions under which a farmer actually turns the fence on.  So, Jordan doesn't stand a chance.  I'll tell him.  Eventually.

We have been planning this "World-the-Round Trip" since before the kids were born.  In the last several years we have made several "test runs" to test both equipment and people.

One such "test run" was to Switzerland three years ago.  We came to the Lauterbrunnen Valley, whose name means "loud springs."  The "springs" are actually waterfalls -- 72 in total, circling this high mountain valley, but it is anything but loud.  The effect is actually quite peaceful.

At the time we were here three years ago I wrote that "...the kids are having fun, but as far as they are concerned we could be in Fresno.  All they know is that the snails look different."

We knew then what we still know now:  Katrina is destined to become a bleeding-heart environmentalist, probably working for Greenpeace sitting in a rubber dinghy and trying to stop a nuclear powered aircraft carrier from passing.  But I digress.

One of the things we did three years ago was to hike down from a high mountain peak (Mannlichen) to a small town named Grindlewald.  The hike was several hours long, and we stopped and had a picnic lunch halfway down the mountain, looking over the entire valley below.  The precise spot where we ate this picnic lunch was at a certain tree stump near a gondola station halfway down the mountain.

The reason this is important is because per Katrina's pleading, we took the apple seeds from the apple in our picnic lunch and planted them near a tree stump.  And we couldn't just plant the seeds.  Oh no.  We all had to agree to return to this spot and visit our apple tree when we went on the World-the-Round Trip.

September and I relectantly agreed to let the kids plant the seeds, and we knew it was a lose-lose situation.  To deny the request was to solicit a firestorm of "why nots" that would have no conclusion.  But to allow the kids to plant the seeds was to seal our fate.  We knew we would have to come back to this pirecise spot, or else.

That was three years ago.  Now, to paraphrase the famous line from The Terminator:  We Are Back.

Unfortunately, our kids forget nothing (except their times-tables.)  To listen to the kids talk about it, visiting the apple tree was going to bring world peace and help find a cure for the common cold.  In fact, Katrina and Jordan's top two priorities for the World-the-Round Trip are, in order of importance, 1) to visit the apple tree and 2) to see the Great Wall of China.

We have faithfully prepared the children for the reality of seeing absolutely nothing where they planted the apple seeds, but this has not deterred them a bit from wanting to revisit the spot.  However, Katrina's broken leg has made the possibility of making it back to the spot require some complex logistics.

To put some of those logistics into perspective, I refer to the old lawyer joke that a room full of lawyers can agree on only one thing, and that is that their fees are justified.  Dur to our recent experience, it seems that a room full of doctors can agree upon...absolutely nothing.

When we had Katrina's leg x-rayed at the 6-week point, we were in Copenhagen, Denmark.  The doctor there took one look at Katrina's x-ray, pointed to the 5-mm gap in her tibia, and decalred that it would be AT LEAST 2 or 3 more weeks until her leg was ready to come out of the cast.  Clearly there was structure missing, and just as clearly, her leg was not up to the manufacturer's specification.  The Danish doctor was emphatic that if we removed the cast right then and there, Katrina's leg wouldn't survive 5 minutes before she refractured it, and we would be back at square one.

Two weeks later, we found ourselves in Friedrichshafen, Germany getting Katrina's leg x-rayed yet again, in hopes that the leg had finally healed.  But our new German doctor declared that the difference between the x-ray at 6 weeks and the new one (8 weeks) was indistinguishable.  The 5-mm gap in the bone was still clearly displayed, but the doctor declared that the cast must absolutely come off.  I was stunned.  Not only was that contrary to the Danish doctor, but it was contrary to my gut instincts as a mechanical engineer.  I exclaimed, "But doctor, there is no bone there. No structure to support the weight!  Won't she just refracture her leg?!"

The doctor's enthusiasm for removing the cast was not dampened by our concerns.  He said that in cases like this, the bone needs some stimulation to heal.  Why should it go to all that work when it didn't need to support any weight?

To me, this sort of sounded like a union argument:  "I don't have to heal and regenerate this 5-mm gap because the cast is doing all the work."  Since when had Katrina's tibia joined the Teamsters?

With much fear and trepidation, we agreed to have her cast removed.  She would have to keep using her crutches for the next two weeks and put only partial weight on her leg, but we would be cast-free.  As we were making our way, cast-free, from the doctos's office, the doctor remarked in an off-handed way, "Just don't trip or stumble!"

Thanks for the confidence boost, doc.

After a few days our confidence increased that we wouldn't be right back in the orthopedics section of the hospital again.  Katrina still walks aided by crutches, unless she's too lazy to use her crutches, in which case she simply hops around on one foot.  Due to her slightly increased mobility, we decided that it was time to follow through on our promise to the kids to revisit the site where we planted the apple seeds three years ago.  So, back to Switzerland, land of stunning beauty and stunningly high prices.

As I mentioned before, the logistics were complex.  One day last week, Jordan and I headed for the remote corner of Switzerland where Katrina broke her leg and our bicycles were stored (Zermatt).  Katrina and September headed back to the Lauterbrunnen Valley, with the charter fo find accommodations before nightfall.  With the aid of a cellphone, we all reconvened in a small cabin, with bicycles, near the mountain in question.

With Katrina still on crutches, the only way we figured we could make it to the apple seed spot was to haul Katrina on the back of one of the tandems.  We removed her left pedal to ensure she wouldn't use her broken leg.

We did a few test rides over a few days to make sure that Katrina could handle being on the back of a bike.  We definitely got some queer looks from people as we whizzed by, as they noticed Katrina's crutches strapped to the rear rack.

On the appointed day, we put our bicycles on a train and rode up the mountain as far as it would go.  The train was a cog-wheel train that allows it to make the steep ascent.  The cog-wheel gives it an unusual gait.

Twenty minutes later we were at the end of the line in the town of Wengen, situated on th edge of a cliff about 800 feet above the Lauterbrunnen Valley.  The path we needed to take was on the OTHER side of the mountain, so we planned to put the bicycles on a gondola up to the mountain peak (Mannlichen) and then ride our bicycles down the other side.  Unfortunately, when we tried to purchase our tickets for the gondola, the ticket attendant told us in no uncertain terms, that bicycles were NOT allowed.

I pleaded, but to no avail.  I knew I had seen bikes up on the mountain three years earlier and that there was a paved access road, but as it turns out, if you want to ride a bike down the mountain, the only way to do it is to first ride UP.  The owner of the land wants to control the number of cyclists on the mountain, so to this end the landowner forbids the gondola operator from transporting bikes.

This really threw a monkey wrench in our plans.  To ride would now require us to go 40 km around the mountain, and then another 10 km up, with 2,000 feet of vertical.  With September having only half a stoker, this just wasn't an option.  Since Katrina is still on crutches, hiking was virtually out of the question.

Or so we thought.  Katrina declared that we absolutely MUST see the apple tree spot, and she would therefore hike the entire trail on crutches.  Determined.  Or stubborn.  Or both.  The reader can decide for themselves.

We took the gondola up the mountain, and started the long hike down.  Katrina doggedly hobbled down the long, curvy road for two hours until we reached the place where we had had our picnic three years ago. And in the exact location where the kids had planted their apple seeds was...a tree!  It's about 12 inches high, and, well, it sort of looks apple-ish.  So, our story is that is is an apple tree.  And we are sticking to it.

Of course now the kids want to visit it again in a few years to watch it grow.  And they want to bring their kids to it and eat its apples, once it starts bearing fruit.  Sounds like a great plan!  The college fund is probably going to be unused anyway.

After visiting the tree, we took the gondola back up to the top of Mannlichen, and then the gondola down the other side to Wengen where we had been constrained to leave our bikes.

Back in Wengen, we were faced with another decision.  Do we throw the bikes back on the cog-wheel train, or do we try to ride them back down to the Lauterbrunnen Valley?

There is no road access to Wengen.  You either take the train or come under your own power.  I new there was a bike path, but I had never been on it and didn't know if it was suitable for road tandwms.  I knew that the chances were that the bike path was a mountain bike path, and maybe even single-track.  But, I figured it couldn't be worse than cycling the back road to Hana (on the island of Maui) which we did about a year ago.

We found it was a LOT worse than cycling the back road to Hana.  It was the Ying to go with all of tohe Yang we have been having (or is it the Yang to go with the Ying?)

The bike path turned to gravel shortly after we left Wengen.  And my handlebar-mounted inclination meter was pegged at its maximum reading of 20%, the entire descent.  But the really fun part was the sharp switch-backs with a turning radius that was never meant to accommodate the long wheel-base of a tandem.

A couple of times I thought Jordan was going to hyperventilate as we inched towards the edge of the switch-back the sported a sheer drop beyond the edge as I desperately tried to coerce my bike to turn in the allotted space.

But Katrina gets the cake.  At one point she squealed, "I am NOT going down this trail on a bicycle!" and she hopped off the moving bike, scoring a perfect 10 with a one-foot landing, on her good leg.  Her crutches were still strapped to the bike, and so she began defiantly HOPPING down the cliff-side trail on one foot.  She gave us a "look" and rolled her eyes, giving us a peek at what lies ahead during the teenage years.

We were moving at a snail's pace, to be sure, but it is still unfortunate that the event wasn't captured on video.  She then grabbed her crutches off the bike and walked the rest of the way down the mountain.  And here I had been carrying her around Europe perched upon my shoulders for the last several weeks!  Little did I know that sufficiently motivated, she could walk all the way down a mountain.

Alas, not only did we live to tell the tale of our survival, but we don't even have any gravel embedded into our flesh.  Or any more broken bones.

That about summarizes our week.  With autumn firmly entrenched in the Alps, and our being 9 weeks behind schedule in our cycle plans, and still having no idea when we will have eight healthy legs, we have decided to send the tandems home.  In the next few days we will make our way to Rome, and then to Istanbul and beyond.