Before I get into the River Cruise images…Neil decided to take the keyboard over for some thoughts on 9/11…so here he is.

Back in 2001 I was working as a Windows System Admin and my office was in Crystal City about half a mile. south of the Pentagon. Connie was headed off to the Capitol building for her legislative lobbying day for her professional society. We drove in together and I dropped her off at the Crystal City Metro to go the rest of the way and told her I would probably head over to the Pentagon that morning for some server room work. Something else came up early that day though and I never made it over for that maintenance…but even if I had it was the opposite side of the building towards the Potomac and I would have been in the basement anyway. Then we heard the news report that a small plane had crashed into the World Trade Center so we were all watching the breaking news on CNN when we saw the second plane hit the other tower. Then about 0930 there was a report that a helicopter had crashed at the Pentagon. We couldn’t see the building due to other ones in the way but saw the cloud of smoke and immediately knew it was a much bigger fire than the fuel on a helicopter would be. Nothing happened much until lunchtime or so but then management figured out the Pentagon might burn to the ground so we started thinking about where can the Defense department staff go to continue to operate and more importantly what would they need there. We immediately told ourselves they would need enterprise grade routers, switches, and servers so my buddy Chris and I hopped into his pickup truck and drove over to the south entrance parking lot where we immediately went in and started powering things down, yanking cables out and pulling them out of the racks then rushing them back to the parking lot and hauling them to our location in Crystal City. We piled them at the entrance, drafted some other folks to bring them upstairs, and headed back for more. We made 6 or 8 trips that day as I recall. Somewhere along the way I was able to get a phone call through to Connie who was stuck near the Capital with the Metro shutdown to let her know I was ok. Eventually the Metro restarted and she was able to get back to the Vienna station then walk the 2 miles or so home from there. I stayed at work the next 2 or 3 days and got home either Thursday or Friday evening. By that time we had figured out where to setup all the gear we rescued and get some staff working again.

And now we return to your regularly scheduled bear.

OK, since my last post it has continued to be hot and humid with rain just about every day…because it’s still Florida in the summer. last Friday the Fort Myers Philharmonic, a brand new orchestra in the area and her MasterSingers group performed a memorial concert for 9/11 singing the Mozart Requiem Mass. It was excellent but did require us to move Date Nite to Saturday.

Alabama opened their season with an easy win over East Carolina than opened up their SEC schedule against Kentucky. They looked terrible in the first half but after some coaching up at halftime pulled away and won pretty handily but the game was a lot closer than the final score would lead you to believe. Florida State is coming to Tuscaloosa this week and hopefully they will be able to eliminate the turnovers and multiple penalties they had in the first half against Kentucky.

Ok, on to the cruise. In my last post we finished up in Vienna and headed out on an overnight transit to the town of Melk to visit the abbey there. In the morning we sailed up the Wachau Valley (pronounced Vackow) where there are about 30 castles up on the mountains bordering the river on both sides. It isn’t quite a canyon but there were definitely some high mountains neighboring the river with the slopes covered with both vineyards and amazingly enough saffron as well.

You can see the serious current in the river as we proceeded upstream.

Shortly after lunch we docked temporarily in Melk and got off the ship for the abbey tour while it continued upstream to Ybbs an der Donau (strange name for a town) where we would reboard then proceed onto Passau. And yes…there used to be people in most of these shots.

The abbey itself is a Benedictine abbey dating from 1089 and started as a castle donated to the monks by King Leopold II. This first image is an aerial view I got from Wikipedia. The hallway nearest to the camera was the visitor’s wing and is 196 meters long. The monks lived in the shorter halls on the other side. It is still an active abbey as well as a school. The existing abbey today was built in 1702 suffered a fire in 1974 and then restoration from 1978 to 1995 with the nave (church) at the left end being built as part of the restoration.

The remaining portion of the original castle that was donated to the monks by the rulers.

This grape vine is huge.

Post tour we bussed back to the ship at Ybbs then continued on towards Passau overnight.

Cyas.