[conspire] Geography, your friend

[Rick Moen]

As I said a couple of weeks ago, since our Mediterranean cruise got
cancelled (essentially) while we were en-route to board it, we booked a
fallback river cruise from (a river port near near) Bucharest, Romania to 
(near) Vienna, Austria -- up about 1/3 of the Danube River,
second-longest river in Europe (next to the Volga).

The Danube, if you pretend you're a scout for Emperor Trajan and
explore it upstream, goes upriver from the west side of the Black Sea:
Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, a little tiny sliver of
Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, and reaches headwaters in the
Black Forest, south Germany.  (There are continuous paved bicycle paths
the whole way, a luscious thought now that nobody is shooting for a
while.  Yay, EU!)

Our cruise suffered a serious bout of late-fall weather.

Just after we passed the stunningly scenic Iron Gate section (Romania to
starboard, Serbia to port) and passed through the locks of the second
Iron Gate dam, authorities in Belgrade (Serbia) advised the captain that
the river was closed to navigation because of an inpending storm
expected to raise three-to-four-meter waves on the river.  Which if true
would indeed have been nothing to laugh off.  A later e-mail elaborated
that '22 meter per second winds' had been expected (80 km/h, 50mph).

This threw the schedule into partial chaos, cancelling both the bicycle
tour segments I'd been strongly looking forward to, cancelled a bunch of
tours, and we missed Croatia entirely.  And for the remainder of the
trip, there was a _lot_ of rain.  And cold.  And wet cold.

Anyhow, geography reminder:  latitude matters.

On the way home, taxiing to Vienna airport, I happened to see a marker
in large letters on the side of the airside wall:  48.2082° N, 16.3738° E

Er, _48 degrees_ north of the Equator?  D'oh.  Right.

The Bay Area sits around 37.5 degrees north; Portland, just north
of 45 degrees (and there's a marvellous sign on I-5 stating you're
halfway between Equator and North Pole).  Los Angeles is 34 degrees north.

The Big Island of Hawaii is 19.5 degrees north.  (And those other people
call themselves Southerners?)[1]

We hadn't been totally prepared for cold and wet, because we'd packed
clothing for a Mediterranean cruise, but generally following standard 
San Francisco advice ('Dress in layers') helped.

The Norwegian take on this matter is 'There's no bad weather, only bad
clothing' -- 'Det finnes ikke dårlig vær, bare dårlige klær'
(https://www.etsy.com/listing/172564997/norwegian-saying-shirt-roughly),
but that's easy for _them_ to say, with the Gulf Stream warming their coast.

The Danube: not so much.


[1] Sitting outside two hours on a cloudy day in French Polynesia:  
Consequence, significant sunburn.  Magic map says:  _16.5_ degrees 
south latitude.  (I was warier in Costa Rica, 10 degrees north.)