sprocket i/o

We managed to leave Prague at 8am, just in time to avoid being ticketed for parking the motorbike in a place that is only free on the weekends. Our first goal for the day was to head West to Kutná Hora, home of the famous Sedlec Ossuary. Keeping to our theme, most of the trip was done on small country roads, which had it’s own set of challenges:

The Sedlec Ossuary, made up of the bones of 40,000 people, is amazingly creepy. The first thing you see when you head downstairs is a beautiful chandelier made up of each bone in the human body:

If you turn left or right, you will see monds of skulls:

The caretaker/designer of the site took the time to make some really bizarre creations, such as this bird pecking at a human head:

After spending way too long taking photos in the Ossuary, we headed across the Czech Republic going the slow way toward Brno. We saw quite a few classic Citroën’s heading the other direction for what looked like a big meetup. Many of them were driving a hitherto unknown van made by Citroën, the Citroen HY. It’s like a french version off the VW Bus, but designed even earlier (1947):

Seeing all of these happy folks in their aircooled vehicles really made me miss our 1971 Volkswagen Bus that we are storing in North Carolina. Much of our day riding was waiting for temporary stop-lights to trigger in the various construction zones we happened to run into. We wandered the countryside, seeing all sorts of neat little towns, and even some kids selling peaches:

We settled into Žďár nad Sázavou for some lunch and a chance to download waypoints for our next few stops.

Our intent was to stop by Moravian Karst, a network of caves, gorges, and rock formations before reaching Brno. However, by the time we arrived, the park was shut. Thankfully the roads around Blansko make for a really nice ride:

By the time we arrived in Brno, we were tired of going places and seeing things. We parked at the hotel, and walked across the street to a bar that served food. There was an English menu, but the waiter didn’t understand us very well. The food and drinks we purchased there were not quite what we had ordered, but close enough not to make too much of a fuss.

The only entertainment we had in Brno was watching all of the dogs owned by the customers at the restaurant roaming free and rough-housing with each other. This dog kept hanging around my plate waiting for me to spill my rice. He looked as hungry as I was tired:

The next morning we celebrated the closing of the first week of our travels, and headed on toward MarchEgg, Austria. We saw dozens of sunflower fields along the way there, but most of them looked rather droopy. Dallas really wanted her photo taken with a sunflower field, but each time I would ask her if she wanted to stop, she would mutter something incomprehensible in the headset, or answer a half mile after we passed it. Finally, I saw one that looked special enough that I wanted to stop by it.

The photo was totally worth the stop. We had a few more quirky obstacles before getting to MarchEgg. Typical European stuff like highways suddenly becoming a one-laned entry-way through a 1000-year old walled city:

Our intent in MarchEgg was to spend a few hours in the world-famous WWF Stork Sancuary. Dozens of White Storks fly up from Africa each spring to nest here. We saw at least a dozen ourselves while we were there:

To be honest, we only spent about 15 minutes at the park. It was all we could handle as we were being eaten alive by a very prolific colony of mosquito’s. I counted at least 25 on Dallas alone at one point. We practically ran out of the reserve to head back to the motorbike and head on to nearby Bratislava (Slovenia).

Riding toward Bratislava, we observed a magnificent green castle sitting high above the city. I was really excited to check it out, but when we stopped for lunch there, it was pretty obvious that it was just construction materials.

Bummer. Bratislava was indeed a pretty nice looking city, but we had to get to Budapest by nightfall, so we didn’t spend any time there. Bummer x 2.

Has your wife ever deleted photos from her camera and begged you to recover them? (Mine did!) Did you accidentally delete a movie off of your hard disk that you really wanted to watch? Thanks to some wonderful open-source software named PhotoRec, it’s really easy to recover your data. It’s available for free for Windows, Mac OS X, and most UNIX flavors. PhotoRec is a command-line utility, but also surprisingly user-friendly.

Installing PhotoRec

I’m running Linux Mint 7 as my home desktop operating-system, so I use apt-get to install it (as with Debian or Ubuntu Linux) so that I get automatic updates in the future. If you are running something else, just download it using the website. PhotoRec is part of the testdisk package:

% sudo apt-get install testdisk

Starting PhotoRec

This is the easiest part:

% photorec

Technically, it requires root/administrator access, but if it is launched without, it will ask to restart using sudo, which I found extremely user-friendly.

Using PhotoRec

PhotoRec has lots of options, but you are usually safe just going with the default if you don’t understand what you are doing. I’ll walk you through the steps and explain what each screen has, and why you may want to change the default. The first screen asks for which drive you would like to recover. I knew mine was a 4GB (~4096MB) SD card, which shows up as a Generic Storage Device:

Now you have to select what type of partition table the disk has. 98% of people out there are going to be using the default Intel partition table format. An exception might be if you are trying to recover files off of a corrupt Mac OS X drive:

Now you need to choose between selecting the entire disk, or just a partition of it. Like most disks, my card only has one partition, so I just went with the default value of partition 1. In my case, it was listed as a FAT32 partition, the standard that most CompactFlash and SD cards are formatted with.

The next step asks what type of filesystem type you are expecting the data to be in. This may seem redundant with the previous step, but it is possible that you had a FAT32 partition that you accidentally changed to a EXT3 (Linux) partition type. Most people should just go with the default choice here, oddly named “Other”:

Phew, that’s a lot of screens we had to cover. Now, we have one more trick question:

Do we want to recover from the “Free” space or the Whole partition? By free, photorec means “Deleted files”, rather than intact and properly allocated files. Like most people, I wanted to only recover from the “Free” (deleted) space only. Now for the final screen, which is a text-based directory browser that allows you to select what directory to save the recoverd files onto. I just hit “Y” to go with the default of dumping the photos onto my desktop:

The output

For each directory on the SD card that it found deleted photos in, PhotoRec created a “recup_dir.X” directory on my desktop. As you can see, it was quite successful in finding photos from our trip through Austria:

All told, it recovered over 1000 photos from the SD card, most of which we didn’t actually need. It’s the thought that counts!

Berlin to Prague

The third leg of our trip was the longest yet: Berlin to Prague to Budapest. The route we took took us through some amazing sights within 5 countries, and was our first foray into Eastern Europe. First, lets cover the journey into Prague:

Dresden

Our first stop was Dresden, sight of the famous firebombing by the Allies in World War II. We were not visiting for a historical lesson however, but instead stopped by the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum. It’s opening in 1930 was important enough to be covered by Time Magazine (thanks Google!). I think the coolest thing we saw there was examples of faces afflicted by various diseases, such as Herpes, Leprosy, etc.

Camera’s were not allowed, so nothing to post here.

Bastei

Outside of Dresden along the Elbe River lies the Bastei, a small national park. It’s made up of a collection of rocks jutting out 630ft into the sky, with a bridge to walk across them. I was told it was one of the prettiest places in Germany, so I had to stop by. It felt quite enormous and unlike anything I would have expected. Here you can see people walking across the bridge:

This view from the bridge shows storms brewing over the Elbe River:

The biggest mistake we made was believing the sign that said it was 0.25km from the parking lot. We thought it was just a quick snap your photo and run kind of place, so we left our motorcycle gear on. 40 minutes later, we were back on the bikes, completely soaked in sweat.

Following the Elbe to Prague

We followed the Elbe River through some windy forest roads, all the way through the Czech border and beyond. There were signs showing that we needed to buy a highway tax decal, so we stopped only to find out that it does not apply to motorcycles. Dallas did snap a decent photo of me behind the kiosk though, showing the beauty of the Elbe in this section:

I saw an interesting photo in Google Earth while trip planning, so I stopped by the town of Děčín to replicate it. I love the variety of colors in this town, which shows up well in this photo (look for the castle up top):

For dinner, we stopped by the town of Ústí nad Labem, a 1000-year old industrial city off of the Elbe. I couldn’t read any of the signs, so I ended up scooting down a pedestrian/bus-only road for some time, getting funny looks from the towns-people and police officers. I wasn’t sure where the main square was, because the one I saw was completely devoid of any human beings. After circling around, we ended up eating at the one place we saw people dining at: A mexican restaurant off of the square.

The Mexican food wasn’t, but it was actually tasty. We eventually did see someone walking on the side of the abandoned city square, but it was still eerie:

Booking it toward Prague

After dinner, the night was starting to come upon us, so we booked it to Prague using the boring old highway. In Prague, we czeched into our hotel, and found a lively old brewpub beside the hotel. In the pub there were musicians playing local music as well as people singing and laughing. The pub only served one beer: their own, and the staff walked around with trays full of beer eager asking each table if they wanted another round. Everything in this pub felt like the complete opposite of a bar in Belgium. It was a blast.

The food in Prague was quite tasty, but very different than what I was used to. Lots of meat, sauce, and dumplings (reminds me of Cracker Barrel):

The next day we toured around Prague, first by foot, and then by Segway. I could not get the hang of the Segway for the first 30 minutes or so, I can only assume because the inputs were so different than that of a motorcycle (Dallas did take a video of me on a Segway later) For only 60€, we were able to ride around the bridges, castles, squares, and parks of Prague in style:

At night, we took it easy and dropped by Ta Fantastika to see a Black Light Theatre showing of Aspects of Alice. Very psychadelic. The bizarre visuals and catchy tunes were burned into my skull for the remainder of the trip.

Next up, Budapest!

On Wednesday we attempted to leave the hotel by 8:30am to ride to Berlin, but failed miserably. Our first attempt at 09:45am had some issues:

My bike decided to take a nap as I tried to leave with the disc-lock brake still hooked up (see the yellow/black hoop in the front wheel?). The R1150GS has a wet-weight of 536lbs (243kg), so I had to take the luggage off before lifting her up again. With the right technique however, even a 5′3″ lady at 118lbs can pick this bike up.

We took a good mix of autobahn and back-roads up through some gorgeous countryside in between Frankfurt and Berlin. One of the nicest stops was in Elm, outside of Schlüchtern, Germany. Dallas had some ancestors who lived in this tiny farming town, so we wandered around it’s graveyard for a while taking photos of anything that looked like a possible match.

From there we followed the twisty backroads alongside the Rhön, up to Observation Post Alpha, and had quiet lunch in Geisa, the western-most city in old East-Germany. We continued to wander the vast hills, forests, and farmland until we got up to The Wartburg, a massive, but not so picturesque castle built in 1067.

The rest of the way into Berlin was boring Autobahn, as we had a dinner date with one of my coworkers to meet up with. It ends up that I did not get a chance to spend much time as a tourist there, but did have a good time working there and meeting up with my coworkers. I had a lot of good food while I was there, but the climax was the “Napalm” flavored hot-wings at The Bird which caused me to tear up a bit.

One of the images of Berlin that is going to stick with me for some time was that of a young teenager dressed up in punk regalia, playing a catchy tune on his beat-up acoustic guitar while sitting on the dirty floor of the subway. The cheap yet well-worn acoustic guitar had writing all over it, and his voice alternated between growls and falsetto’s. He beat on the guitar and strings with a knife before dramatically dropping it on the floor of the subway which caused his strings to break. He then courteously canvased the rest of us in the subway for some change before moving on to the next car.

Berlin is surprisingly punk-rock – it’s an image you see not only in advertising, but in the people you meet out on the street. I’m not sure how much of it is to blame on the wall, but it’s good to see people who are living on their own terms.

Next stops: Dresden & Prague.