My brother inherited our family photo albums. He has set himself the huge project of scanning and distributing the pictures in case his house burns down. He’s now finished the oldest album’s 187 photos and sent me the original hard copies of ones featuring me, which is most them since I was the first and most photographed child in our family.

Rather than store the photos in a box placed out of sight until I’m ready to downsize, I plan to display them in my writing den in batches of five to look at for a period of time. The photos will be my blogging project through the summer — and a trip down memory lane.

The first five photos, randomy plucked from the box, are ones of me at around age two-three, when our family rented a bungalow on Pine Beach Boulvard in the Montreal suburb of Dorval.

Two of the photos show me with my first friend, Denise, who lived next door. I don’t really remember Denise, although I have a vague memory of her tied to a tree in her front yard. This was because Denise had habit of running onto the street, and Pine Beach had a lot of traffic.  Her being tied up likely struck me as interesting because I was a more cautious child who wouldn’t have run onto the street. I remember the first time I left our property on my own I cut through back yards to get to my destination rather than take the busy road.

Well, that might not have been my first venture out. My parents used to talk about Denise’s other habit of taking her clothes off. To stop her doing this, her parents put her clothes on inside out. One day Denise managed to strip and got me to do the same. The two of us ran up naked to the store on Pine Beach corner, where her father worked.

Denise moved away when I was around four years old. I wonder what she’s up to these days.

Yikes. I haven’t written a blog post since last August. What have I been doing with my time?

1. Writing:

I finished my novel, Ten Days in Summer, the sequel to Deadly Fall, and am waiting for word from publishers.

While waiting for word, I’m revising a non-mystery novel that is into its fourth draft.

I polished a 12,000 word short story I wrote a few years ago and sent it to three contests. It made the finals in the Glimmer Train Fiction Open Contest. Within the next few weeks, I should hear how the story fares in the other two.

2. Travel:

In November, Will and I spent 16 days in Hawaii, on two islands we hadn’t visited before — Oahu (Waikiki-Honolulu) and Big Island. We loved them both.

Highlights included a jungle hike (pictured here), swimming with sea turtles (usually not on purpose – to my surprise they appeared beside me on busy Waikiki beach), hiking Koko Head – the steepest hike in my life, Pearl Harbour; on Big Island driving to the summit of Mauna Kea volcano for an astronomical tour and viewing stars and the moon through a powerful telescope, hiking Kilauea Iki Crater backdropped by a spewing active volcano; beaches, pools, strolling the streets after dark without a sweater and good food.

In Calgary, memories of warm Hawaii quickly faded this cold, snowy winter. In late February, Will and I escaped for a week in Cancun, Mexico. Sunshine. Thirty-degree highs every day. Mostly we relaxed on the beach and by the pool, but we included two full day outings. One was was a ferry ride to nearby Isla Mujeres (Island of Women), where we rented a golf cart, saw the whole island in three hours and finished  with a swim in shallow, calm Playa Norte.  The other excursion was a bus tour to the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza, which we’ve wanted to see since our first trip to Mexico some years ago. It was a long drive through jungle, but the ruins were awesome. I’d love to return to spend more time there.

Despite the hat I wore constantly on the trip and covering up on the beach, I still have my tan.

3. Teaching

Since September, I’ve been teaching A Novel Approach at the Alexandra Writers Centre. The class runs every second week and ends in June. It’s been a challenge for me to keep up with the students. I hope they’ve learned as much as have and go on to finish their terrific books.

The weekend after I returned from Mexico, I taught a two day intensive workshop on Novel Revision. It was inspiring and great learning for me, too, if a tad exhausting.

4.  Writing related activities

A surprisingly fun activity was working the AWCS casino in December. Will and I took a night shift in the counting room and somehow managed to stay up until 3:00 AM. We really enjoyed hanging out with other AWCS members and getting a glimpse of casino activity.

I organized the Crime Writers of Canada and Calgary Crime Writers tables at the Calgary Public Library Writers Weekend on February 1st. I spent the day at interesting sessions on publishing and writing humour in between my shifts (wo)manning the table.

5. All the rest of life.

Family. Reading. Walks in city parks. Friends. Snoe shoe trips to Kananaskis, Banff and Lake Louise. Zumba & Fit and Fab at the gym.

Life away from the blog has been busy and good, but I promise not to wait this long before I post again.

What I love about Salzburg are the bells. The city is full of churches that chime every quarter hour. Some hours bring extra chimes. There’s also a glockenspiel (carrillon) that rings a tune on the hour a few times a day. Walking down the street, you’re regularly surrounded by the sound of bells ringing from every direction.

The glockenspiel tune changes periodically, which Will and learned when we toured the glockenspiel. It was fascinating to see the mechanism, which is a giant version of those little music whirly-gigs that play a line of song. The tour would have been even better if we’d understood our tour guide’s German. The English crib sheet he gave us offered minimal detals. That’s the hazard of visiting a country when you aren’t fluent in the language.

Our last three days in Salzburg made me realize that, for travel, weather extremes are usually better than consistent, grey skies. We had far less rain during the second half of our visit, but the almost zero sun made everything look dreary. It also got colder. I was glad I’d brought gloves as well as tights to wear under my summer pants.

To make the most of those three days, we bought a Salzburg card, which gave us admission to a number of local museums and attractions. The card easily paid for itself, even though we spent a good part of one day on non-card attractions. One of these was the glockenspiel tour. Another was a trip outside of town to the ice caves in Werfen. These were high up a hill – a gondola took us up to a path blanketed in snow. The temperature inside the caves was about the same as out. A good activity for a cold, grey day, although the views would have been spectacular in the sun.

My favourite attraction with the Salzburg card was the tour of the music festival halls, conducted bilingually in German and English. This is the largest music festival in the world. It  draws masses to Salzburg every summer. I was intrigued to learn how the concert halls, built into the mountainside, were formerly riding studios.

The guide paused for a long talk in the unique festival venue featured in The Sound of Music. He asked how many of the German speaking people on the tour had seen the movie. A few hands went up. He said that was more than usual.

Aside from the music festival, he said, The Sound of Music is the prime reason tourists from non-German speaking countries come to Salzburg.  Yet, if you ask Salzburg residents if they like the film, most will say they hate it or they haven’t seen it but  hate it. This is not because they are unfamiliar with the Von Trapp story or dislike the autobiographical book. It has been made into a German film that was reasonably popular.

The guide told us , as a communications student at the local university, he has the pleasure  — or duty — this term of taking three courses devoted to the SOM phenomenum. He’s developed four reasons why Austrians hate the film.

(1) It’s Hollywood. I assume this means they see it as sentimental schmalz.

(2) It portrays the Von Trapps as the only Austrians who resisted Hitler (by leaving), while many Austrians stayed and fought Hitler.  I don’t think the movie really does single out the Von Trapps. They just happen to represent that faction in the film. Also, Austrians, in general, did support, activily or passively, the Nazis takeover of their country. The guide added it’s natural for Austrians to not like a movie that recalls the worst part of their history.

(3) The movie is set in Saltburg, but not the real Salzburg known to its residents. Julie Andrews couldn’t run down a mountain twenty miles away and arrive at her abbey in 20 minutes. The mountain escape route walked by Von Trapps leads not to Switzerland, but to Germany.

(4) The movie is tolerable watched with German subtitles, but doesn’t make sense when dubbed. When the guide hears Julie and children singing Do, Re, Mi he wants to ask what medication they’re on and where can he get some.

But the bottom line, he said, is that Salzburg residents recognize the movie’s tremendous tourist windfall. SOM is the world’s best free advertising.

From the tour, Will and I strolled onto Salzburg’s main pedestrian shopping street. I noticed a group of Japanese girls dressed in  school uniforms. Suddenly, they stopped walking, formed into choir lines and sang Do, Re, Mi to the utter enjoyment of everyone around.

For whatever reasons, The Sound of Music  has touched people across the world.  Someone should bottle its secret and prescribe a dose to every grumbling Salzburg resident.

Calgarians love to say, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a few minutes and it will change.” I’ve also heard people in other cities make this claim. In Salzburg, Will and I lived it for three days.

We arrived to a horrible weather forecast for our one week stay: sun and cloud the first morning, with increasing cloud, cold and rain through the week.  By the end we’d be wearing mittens under zero sunshine. I felt light-deprived thinking about it.

Our first morning, we walked under sun and cloud, over pedestrian bridges and along the riverside to check out the Mirabell Palace, where we had tickets to a chamber music concert that night. On a square near the palace , we noticed a ‘Sound of Music’ tour bus preparing to head out for the day. We’d heard these tours were pretty good and figured, why not take one now and see something of the city and region before the rain hit?

We hopped on the bus, which gradually filled with fans of the musical about an aspiring nun who marries a captain with seven children. The bus rambled through Salzburg with stops at the film’s settings: the mansion used as the back of the von Trapp house, the lake Maria and children tumbled into and the gazebo that sheltered two sets of lovers from rain. Throughout, our guide dressed in drindl supplied anecdotes about the movie location filming. We learned that the scheduled six weeks expanded to eleven due to rain that spring.  The cast and crew spent hours waiting for momentary breaks in the weather to shoot scenes, often in discomfort due to miserable cold.

We bussed into the lake district south of the city. Instead of growing dreary and rainy, the day got sunnier and warmer. Views of  Lake Wolfgang and the mountains were gorgeous. We stopped in Mondsee for a fifty minute break to see the church used for Maria’s and the captain’s wedding and had the best strudel of our holiday while sitting by Lake Mondsee watching sun dance on the water.

Back in Sazburg, it continued sunny and warm. We explored Mirabell park, where Julie and the children marched around fountains and hopped up stairs while singing Do, Re, Mi.

We crossed a bridge and climbed steeper stairs to another scene from Do, Re, mi, fabulous viewpoint, near the modern art museum. From there, we hiked the Monchsberg escarpment looking down at the historic town.

By the time we reached the castle, the sky was growing dark. We hurried past the abbey – another SOM settting – and ducked into our apartment as the first drops hit. Within minutes, hail pounded our roof. We ate dinner cosily inside.

Rain poured through the evening and overnight. We woke to sunshine and a forecast of cloud and rain. After the previous day’s botched forecast, who knew what today’s forecast meant? Lake Wolgang and the mountains had looked so wonderful the previous day, we decided to take a chance and drive out there to ride the cog steam train to the summit of Shafberg Mountain, with its views of seven lakes.

The steep ride was tremendous fun and the views from the top amazing. Clouds covered sections, but drifted continuously, revealing new vistas while concealing previous ones. I saw the beauty of how clouds can frame a scene.

Will and I agreed the cog railroad ride was the highlight of our Salzberg trip.

At the bottom, we ate lunch on a sunny patio, soon covered in drizzle. We boarded the Lake Wolfgang cruise boat and huddled outside in cold and rain to the St. Gilgen, at the end of the lake. Blue skies blew over the town and followed us to the opposite end of Lake Wolfgang, where we sunbathed on the deck.

Day three looked to be as variable as our first two, with a somewhat less positive forecast. We went to the lake district again, to tour a salt mine. Salzburg was founded due to the region’s abundant salt. The fun tour included rides down slides like the ones miners used to quickly get from one level of the mine to another. The tour ended with a mine train ride out. The high school students in our tour group loved it.

We emerged from the mine into sunshine, which inspired us us to have lunch on a restaurant patio on a cliff overlooking Lake Hallstatt.  After eating, we rode the funicular down to the tiny town of Hallstatt squeezed between the lake and mountain. An hour was enough to see the picturesque village before a deluge sent us scurrying under a restaurant canopy for ice cream.

Sun, rain, cloud, warmth, cold, often within the space of minutes. Luckily, the periods of sunshine and warmth were long enough for us to enjoy most of the region’s sights and views. When Salzburg looks good, not much can top her. After our dreary, initial weather forecast, our first three days in Salzburg were a gift.

Mathausen concentration camp, near the holiday town of the same name and not far from Linz, Hitler’s home town, was Austria’s main forced labour camp during World War ll. About 50 subcamps dotted the small country. Did residents really not know what was going on? Will and I wondered as we toured the Mathausen camp remains during our trip to Austria this spring.  We spent four hours on the site and didn’t see or hear it all.

The wall that used to be topped with electrified barbed wire still stands.

Two barracks line the main courtyard, the remainder having been torn down. We saw dormitories where inmates slept 2-4 to a bunk, disinfection showers, cermatoria, gas chambers and corners where disobedient inmates were shot. The audio guide described the daily life enhanced with survivors’ memories about such matters as camp hierarchy and humiliation tactics guards used to beat sprirts down. What kept inmates going and, in some cases, led them to toe the line was a hope for personal survival.

The site is part monument. Visitors leave wreathes and post documents on memorial walls. There’s a hall of victims’ names. Outside the camp’s front gate, countries have erected statues  commemorating their deceased citizens. Inmates were sent from all over Europe, although the largest number, and lowest on the hierarchy, were Russians.

From the statues, we walked to a ledge overlooking the stone quarry, where inmates were led out to work every day. Numerous emaciated men dropped dead while lugging rocks up the quarry’s 186 steps. Sometimes, for fun, guards lined up four or five of these work slaves on a ledge and ordered them to push the person in front of them off.

It’s bizarre to realize this closed world existed, where abhorrent behaviour was accepted as normal.

When the US army liberated the camp, some soldiers filmed the scenes they found. Skeletal figures gaped at us blankly from the movie in the site auditorium.  The film included interviews with residents of the nearby town. A pleasant-looking man talked of making daily supply deliveries to the camp. He was horrified by what he saw, but didn’t do anything. Townspeople of the time complained about the stench coming from the camp.

Inmates in the camp prison were treated worst, so badly they lost all hope. With nothing to lose, a group of Russian prisoners organized an escape. They climbed on each others’ backs so the top ones could make it over the electric barbs. For the ones on the bottom this was a suicide mission. They knew they would be killed when the guards found out.

In the film, a Russian escapee who ultimately made it to safety spoke of running from the camp and reaching a farmhouse, where he tried to explain to the owner who he was. The woman told him, “never mind, it doesn’t matter.” She hid him in the barn.

A woman interviewed recalled her mother hiding escapees  due to her deep, religious conviction. Did she realize she and her children would probably be shot if the Nazis discovered what she’d done? I’d like to think, in her situation, I would do the right thing. But would I have risked my own children?

Will and I included Karlovy Vary in our Czech Republic itinerary because I have a vague idea for a historical novel partially set in that town. Why Karlovy Vary, a place I had never visited? My maternal grandparents were Czech immigrants and the novel will be my fictionalized story of their immigrant journey.

For years, I had heard of Karlovy Vary as Karlsbad, its German name (Carlsbad in English).  From high school history, I recalled the term ‘Carlsbad Agreement’  or ‘Decrees’, although couldn’t remember what the decrees were about. I also knew Karlsbad was a classy spa frequented kings, aristrocrats and artists.

Driving into the town, my first impression was similar to that of Venice or Disneyland: streets of beautiful architecture too harmonious to be real. A closer look revealed anomalies, like the modern Hotel Thermal as well as factories and communist era block apartments outside the lovely spa zone.

European spa towns, like those in North America, develop in areas of natural springs. Both concern healing as well as recreation, but Karlovy Vary’s large spa resorts include hospital-like corridors where attendants dressed in medical scrubs give guests massages, mineral baths and other treatments that sometimes come with a doctor’s referral.

Since walks in the countryside are part of the spa treatment , well-marked trails criss-cross the hills surrounding Karlovy Vary. Our first morning, Will and I rode a funicular to the Diana Tower for spectacular views of the town and trees dressed in fresh, spring green.

We spent three more hours walking trails and wound down to the old town for lunch in an outdoor cafe. Prices are cheaper here than in the spa zone, which is still reasonably priced by our Canadian standards.

People with digestive complaints come to Karlovy Vary to drink the heavily mineralized spring water that ranges in temperature from 45 to 73 degrees Celsius. Shops all over town sell ‘flattened china teapots’ with spouts designed to let you sip without the minerals staining your teeth.

Free springs for sipping are located in colonades through the spa zone.  They are so subtle, we unknowing walked right by them on our first evening. The next day, with our spotting map, we found them all and sampled a few. Our guidebook warned us not to drink large amounts to not cause stomach upset. No problem, as the mineral content made the water taste quite foul.

At our hotel breakfast buffet on our last day, we met Sigbert, a German who had come to Karlovy Vary to reconnect with his roots. Sigbert was born in the region and lived there until age thirteen, an unhappy time he had avoided revisting until now. After World War ll, the Czechs expelled their German occupiers and persecuted the German nationals who remained. During the easing of communist travel restrictions in the late 1960s, Sigbert’s family was able to leave the country for a suitable payment. Sigbert ultimately became an engineer for Mercedes Benz in Stuttgart after a brief army assignment of listening in on Czech radio broadcasts from across the iron curtain.

Sigbert had opted to take the train to Karlovy Vary rather than drive because he was travelling alone and because Mercedes aren’t considered safe in Karlovy Vary, which is now largely owned by Russians. Our Czech-made Skoda was probably not at risk for theft. Sigbert recommended we visit a castle in Loket on our route out of Karlovy Vary.  He remembered it from a school trip and was going that day, so we offered him a lift. Together, we enjoyed seeing the castle’s great views and torture chambers most little boys would love.

In the castle parking lot, was a statue of the writer Goethe, who had visited Loket during a stay in Karlovy Vary. At age 72, Goethe fell in love with a local seventeen year old woman. For some reason, she rejected his advances.  At least he got a poem out of the  experience.

Will and I wrapped up a rainy day in Vienna with a visit to the Sigmund Freud museum, housed in the former apartment/office of the father of psychoanalyis. A self-guided audio tour took us through Freud’s residence, office waiting room, treatment room and den where he wrote his numerous psychology books. Not much remains of Freud’s original furnishings. He brought most with him to England when he left Vienna in 1938 to escape Nazi persecution.

The tour included home movies narrated by Freud’s daughter, Anna. Scenes showed Freud relaxing with his dog in the garden of a house he rented one summer in Grinzing, in the Vienna Woods north of the city.  The pleasant, family activies were followed by shots of downtown Vienna during the Anschluss, in March 1938, when Austria joined Nazi Germany. The massive, cheering crowds and giant swastika flag suggested Freud was wise to leave when he did.

The next day, our last in Vienna, we toured a palace/museum featuring art by Gustav Klimt. From the gardens, we viewed the hilly Vienna Woods. Through our week in the city, I’d been tempted by the woods’ romance due to the title of the famous Johann Strauss’ waltz Tales From the Vienna Woods. We stayed away, figuring the woods were just trees, like I could see at home, and bound to be disappointing. With decent weather and the major Vienna sites under our belts, we decided to go anyway.

The bus travelled through Grinzing, now absorbed into the greater Vienna as an upscale suburb. The driver let us out at the end of the line. We walked uphill through forest broken by glimpses of the city below. Since any kind of viewpoint looked too far out of our reach, we were all set to catch the bus down when another bus came roaring up. It turns out that only some buses stop a little past Grinzing while others go to a large parking lot at the top the highest hill in Vienna. We followed people to a restaurant, cafe and deck with spectacular views of the city. Enjoying our pricey beer, we ducked in and out of spitting rain.

No dout this viewpoint is packed on warm, sunny weekends. This marginal, week day it was quiet and one of the high lights of our Vienna trip. Had the weather been better, we’d have walked down to Grinzing on a trail through open meadow. Instead, we missed stopping in the historic village centre on our bus ride back to the city.

If I return to Vienna, and have a beautiful week day, I’d spend it in the Vienna Woods, hiking through paths to this panoramic lookout and Grinzing.

Last fall, I wrote a series of blog posts about my encounters with literary England and Wales. My trip to Austria and the Czech Republic this spring was less literary, not because those countries haven’t produced great literature – Kafka is integral to Prague and Goethe, while German, travelled everywhere.

But, in general, writers from middle Europe aren’t part of my literary tradition, so I didn’t seek them out.

Normally, my blog posts relate, in some way, to writing. But it’s summer and I’ve just returned from a long trip. So I’ll relax my standards and blog about my travels, inserting literary matters as they happen.

Our first day in Vienna, we encountered a major one, although we didn’t know it at the time.

Tired from our over-night flight, under overcast skies, we set out on a walking tour of central Vienna, with Rick Steeves’ Kobo tour as our guide.

At a park featuring statues honouring the Holocaust, the sky looked ready to burst. We ducked under the adjascent Mozart cafe’s huge awning and spent an hour drinking cappucino (me) and beer (Will) while watching the deluge. We later learned that Graeme Greene wrote his novella The Third Man at the Mozart Cafe. The story, set in post World War II Vienna, was later filmed in the city.

The Britsh Film Institue judged The Third Man the best British movie of the twentieth century. According to Wikepedia, Greene wrote the novella with the movie in mind (he later wrote the screenplay), which shows that books written from movies aren’t always slight.

Now that I’m home, I look forward to watching The Third Man again for the Vienna landmarks, like the Wiener Riesenrad (or Prater) ferris wheel. A few days into the trip, we considered riding the giant wheel after our bike ride through the Prater park. But the skies opened once again and sent us pedalling to shelter.

Bounce sheets

fastened around our  patio table umbrella.

It works!