The blog lives - I think!

I know - I promised my five (possibly six or seven) readers that there WOULD be a blog on this trip. It could still happen.

Today the word is that I need to travel with a cellphone.

It's not that I'm a luddite. In my luggage are a notebook, an iPod Touch, and a small digital camera. Generally I rely on e-mail and the net for communication and information, and generally that works well.

Then I got the dreaded "card denied" incident. Today. Saturday. High noon in Vienna, where most ATM machines are behind doors you have to open with a credit card, and almost everything official begins to shut down at about 1 p.m. Fortunately, there are still a few decent phone booths, but they have no doors, and are located on busy streets. And the "international operator" (I suspect an international imposter) assures you that in spite of what your bank said, the number you have just given him is not one he can dial free of charge. Fortunately, my other credit card still works.

So --- two phone calls, separated by a dash across the street, to get money while my card is (temporarily - 20 minutes to be exact) valid. A new card is being sent to me because somehow the old one has been hacked. Against a background of revving diesel engines, I spelled out a complicated Salzburg address where FedEx may find me next week. Stay tuned.

Other than that, Vienna is a pleasant place to be, especially since at the moment it is not suffering from the hot weather so prevalent farther east.

Picture is from Emma's yard in the village. Chicks were a day old, and would normally still have been inside, but, as Emma explained, this hen has "a mind of her own," and wants to be outside.

Finally summer (for a few days, at least!)

When I get home from a trip, I have two simultaneous desires - never to go anywhere again, and immediately to begin planning the next trip.

So far it has been easy to plan the next trip, because until today, our so-called summer weather has been so gray, cold and dreary. Today, just as predicted by the local weather guru, the sun came out and the temperature went up.

What he didn't predict was the brisk breeze, that is keeping the afternoon pleasantly warm for sensitive northwesterners who have spent all these months living under rocks.

July 4 came and went, in the rain, but with magnificent fireworks over the lake, courtesy of an intensive fund-raising campaign last spring.

And now it's the 6th, and on the 18th I leave for the next trip - this time to Transylvania and points east.