Wednesday, June 14, 2017

Monday, June 12, 2017 - Rendezvous


Back in the day, I had my physics students learn a little about orbital rendezvous, mostly using the amazing app “Rendezvous”, written by the soon to be head of NASA, Wes Huntress, back in 1984 for the Apple II.  I actually kept a couple of Apple II computers in my room to play the game up into the new century.  Then, I found someone had written an emulation for it to play on the Mac and I got rid of the Apple IIs.  That’s a a bird walk!  Anyway, the kids learned about how to maneuver in orbit from this program, but only in two dimensions.  That was difficult enough.  Synchronizing orbits when gravity is the primary force controlling the speed makes normal flight ideas ineffective.  Speeding up the ship throws it into a higher orbit.  This means the ship actually slows down. And slowing the ship down makes it fall into a lower orbit and causes it to speed up.  Getting two ships to meet up in space is hard.  Today, we found getting next door neighbors from Toledo to rendezvous in Venice is equally hard. But, with the tenacity and drive of a NASA flight director, we overcame technical issues and navigational hazards to dock for dinner.


Sally woke first this morning.  At 5:30am she was up and out of bed and heading to the washroom in the early morning mountain light.  I said 6:00 am was early enough for me, so I rolled over and snoozed for another 20 minutes, then spent 10 minutes writing before dragging myself silently out of bed. Francis and Cindy were snoozing quietly.  We did our best to keep them that way.  I had sleeping bags to stuff and clothing to pack, but rather than do all the noisy activity in the bed right next to theirs, I gathered up all our stuff and slipped out of the room.  In the large washroom down the hall I dropped the arm load on the floor and starting stuffing and packing.


Sally showed me how she coaxed warm water out of the pipes.  Because no one had run any water all night, the water in the pipes had warmed to room temperature, rather than the degree or two above freezing it usually flowed at. I went to the first sink to wet my hair, but Sally pulled me away, warning me that she had already used the warmed water in the pipes. She also showed me how she had drained the water from the first four faucets in the room and led me to the fifth sink, one she had not used yet. I put my head under the faucet and turned it on. The water was certainly not warm, but it was not icy cold either. I washed in this sink, but the water started getting frigid, so I moved to the next sink to rinse. I was excellent at conserving water.  Only took me two sinks to wash myself.  We double and triple checked the wash room and the bunk we had slept on looking for anything we might have left lying about.  Certain we had all our worldly possessions, we ate a hard boiled egg for breakfast, then slipped out of the “hut” and started up the trail to the pass.


We had braced ourselves for cold air temperatures once we stepped out of the heated and comfortable building, but to our amazement, it was quite warm outside, about 65º. We started up the trail to the pass, but had to stop to remove clothing layers.  The pass was a different world from yesterday.  No one was here.  Looking down the switchbacks to the bottom, we could see no one. In fact, looking all the way across the beautiful meadow we could not see a soul on the whole length of the trail.


Down the switchbacks we went, and across the meadows, then down the road to Compatsch.  We stopped in for another amazing apple strudel, then down to the lower free lot and our car. It was now about 10:15 am.  With the GPS set for the Europcar Rental shop in Venice, we started the nearly 5 hour drive.


When we entered the freeway via the on ramp near Bolzano we went through a gate and took a ticket, like you would when entering a parking garage. When we left the freeway near Venice, we exited through a toll station where they tallied up our distance. Charge? $20. As Sally helped me navigate to the Europcar office at the Mestre Train Station, I noticed I had three cars right in my tail, anxious to get by. We were on a viaduct and there was no possibility for them to pass. As soon as the viaduct ended, I swerved to the shoulder of the road to let them pass. I doing so, I must have jumped right in front of bicyclist entering the road next to the viaduct because a few seconds after pulling over a very angry cyclist road past me shaking his fist and yelling something at me. Ooopps. 


With the car returned, we started walking the 7 or 8 blocks to our Air B&B. The neighborhood was a little rough. We found the address of the B&B, a door with 8 names on 8 buzzers. We rang the one that most closely matched the name of the B&B owner and she buzzed us up. The room we rented is quite large for a bedroom. Valentyna gave us a quick tour of the flat and told us we were now family and could use the kitchen whenever we wanted. She is extremely kind and friendly. We retired to our room to rest for an hour before taking the bus into Venice to meet with the Caldwell’s at 6:00 pm.


How is it that we are meeting our next door neighbors and great friends in Venice?  Back in November when we started making our plans to tour Italy, we tried to coordinate our plans with them, but things were just not fitting together. They were leaving Rome just as we planned to enter, they were at Cinque Terre while we were in Venice. We couldn’t find an overlap. Imagine our surprise when we were texting to each other two days ago and found they were flying into Venice the same day, and nearly the same time, we were driving in.  How did we miss that?? Was it too far in the future and too nebulous an idea to gel in our minds?  Whatever the reason, thankfully we figured it out a couple days ago and are now on course for a rendezvous.


True to Valentyna’s description, the bus to Venice is right outside the door. 1.80 euro each and 12 minutes later we were standing in Piazza Roma at the entrance to Venice. Even though both a little weary, we decided to walk into Venice to the address Pat had given us 3889 Sestiere Castello, Venice. Google maps gave us a location to go to. With few wrong turns and dead ends at canals with no bridges, we walked to where Google told us to go, just on the far side of the Rialto Bridge.  Problem was, when we got there, the address were no where near the 3889 and there was no sign of habitation. We were a half an hour early, so we decided to look around a bit and see if we could find a trend in the numbers and navigate to their place. After walking around in circles for 20 minutes we could see our search was fruitless. Venice is a maze of narrow streets, canals and dead ends.  We tried texting the Caldwell’s but got no reply.  We told them in the texts to meet us at the top of the Rialto Bridge at 6:30 pm, a monumental landmark directly in the center of the city.


Our cellular connection was not letting my texts go out. After a few minutes I was getting messages that our texts had not been delivered. Now we started to feel bad. Bill and Pat were waiting at their rental for us, wasting precious minutes when they could be exploring Venice. By 6:30 pm we were starving, thirsty and sure we would never meet up with them. We found a shady restaurant, hoping their wifi would solve our communication problems. We sat down, ordered a beer and a bottle of Frizzante water and logged into their internet.  Within 2 minutes a text came in from Pat saying the top of the Rialto Bridge would work great! But, so much time had elapsed, and they were still quite a distance from it in their flat, how about 7:10 pm? Perfect.  Sally and I sipped our drinks. Sally had a map spread out on the table looking at the tangle that is Venice when a gust of wind caught her map and like a sail pushed it against her beer glass tipping it over and dumping the entire contents on the ground, just missing splashing beer onto the diners next to us. This Segway got us talking to our neighbors, a Scottish couple that drive their motor home throughout Europe for a couple months each year. With Sally enjoying our neighbors, I headed the 200 yards for the Rialto bridge and met Bill and Pat on top.  Rendevous!!


Back at our table, we ate dinner and caught up on the news from Toledo. After dinner we wandered Venice, eventually making it back to their flat-no where near we had been looking. Before we knew it, it was 10:30 pm, dark, and we needed to get on a bus back to our B&B. We quickly deciphered how the motorized water bus service, the vaporetta works, caught a boat and were back at Piazza Roma by 11:00 pm, plenty of time to catch a bus to our flat.  The bus was packed full of people when it finally left the station.


We got off right out side our door, walked the wrong way for a few minutes, then Sally corrected the situation and we found our place. 10 minutes later we were in our room, asleep. What a busy and exhausting day.  But how cool to find the Caldwell’s half a planet away and spend the evening with them. We had made plans to meet them at St. Mark’s Square at 8:30 in the morning, a precious 6 and a half hours of sleep away. What a great day!!











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