Off topic

As I’ve said before, I think that most freelance translators (and really, people in general) need to have more fun. So, the sole purpose of this post is to tell you about something I did that was fun, and to explain where I was during my July-August hiatus! You can also read previous off topic posts on my travel A-Z, my 40th birthday trip to Costa Rica and llama trekking and making sugar skulls (not at the same time, although the llamas probably would have liked to eat the skulls! This post will mostly appeal to bike geeks, so feel free to skip it if you’re bored!

This summer my family spent two months in Europe, partially for my husband’s job and partially to do a bike trip. You can hear more about it (and about freelancing on the road in general) in a Speaking of Translation conference call here. I need to write up some thoughts on my experience freelancing from Switzerland; it worked out very well overall, but I have some specific tips for anyone thinking of taking their business abroad. In the meantime, let’s talk about the fun part…riding bikes from Lake Geneva to Salzburg, which we did at the end of my husband’s consulting gig.

Q: Who was on this trip?
A: Me (age 40, somewhat in shape); my husband (age 46, legs of steel); my daughter (age almost 10, little legs of steel).

Q: What bikes did you ride?
A: My husband and my daughter rode our Burley Duet tandem road bike, and I rode a single titanium touring bike that we ordered from XACD Titanium Products in China. Here’s me, somewhere in the foothills of the Dolomites!

Q: How did you get the bikes to Switzerland?
A: Both of the bikes have S and S couplers that come apart, allowing the bike to fit in a 26 x 26 x 10 inch case that goes as regular luggage on an airplane as long as it’s under 50 pounds total. You can read about the couplers and the cases on S and S Machine’s website. Our tandem goes in two cases and the XACD bike goes in one. We purchased three of S and S’s “designer-style edge-pull” hard cases for $170 each and were really, really pleased with them. On the domestic flight we paid $20 per case to take them on the plane and on the international flight we paid nothing. If you don’t have a bike with couplers, be prepared to pay a lot to take your bike on an international flight; we saw prices of up to $300 per bike, per direction with our tandem potentially charged as two bikes. And after riding a bike with couplers for the whole trip, I agree with S and S Machine that you don’t even feel them; it rides just like a single-piece frame. To get back to Switzerland from Salzburg, we mailed the empty cases to the owner of the apartment we were renting, then re-packed the bikes and took them in the cases on the train. Like this:

Q: How far did you ride?
A: Almost exactly 1,000 kilometers, so about 600 miles. We rode 14 days, took 3 rest days and then stayed in Salzburg for 4 days.

Q: With a kid?
A: Yes! And actually, my daughter complained much less than I did…seriously. We never really biked toured before my daughter was about 7 and we got our first tandem, and now I actually think it’s a fabulous activity with kids as long as you have a very strong adult to captain the tandem. For example I cannot captain our tandem on hilly/mountainous terrain because I can’t pedal it fast enough. Tandems have a higher minimum speed than a single bike, meaning that you have to pedal a lot harder/faster to keep a tandem upright. So not every adult is well-suited to captain a tandem, but my husband and my daughter love riding ours. Also, it’s worth noting that not everyone who loves to bike tour is cut out for “stoking,” aka riding the back of a tandem. I love bike touring and I kind of hate stoking because you have to pedal at the same rhythm as the captain and you have no brakes or steering. So don’t set off on a 3 week trip with a stoker who’s never done it before.

Q: How did you carry your stuff?

A: In paniers (bike bags) on our bikes. We stayed in hostels or bed and breakfasts and did not camp, so we didn’t have a ton of stuff. Plus, when touring in Central Europe, one really does not need to carry a huge amount of food because there’s a town every few kilometers. When touring in Colorado we sometimes have to carry an entire day’s worth of food and water. For example when we did Trail Ridge Road, the uphill took me six and a half hours (I warned you, I’m slow!) and there is no place to buy food or even refill your water. On this trip, other than the longer pass crossings, we rarely went more than an hour without going through a fairly sizable town.

Q: Best part?
A: We all agreed that the Dolomites were the highlight! The Swiss and Austrian alps are beautiful but they look very similar to where we live in Colorado. However the Dolomites really are otherworldly looking; rolling pine forested hills with 3,000-foot rock formations jutting out of them, like this:

Q: Worst part?
A: Oh, now that’s hard…there really was no worst part, other than the hotel we booked in Bolzano that turned out to be up the side of a mountain. But they were understanding when we called to cancel, and we found a great hotel right in the walking district. And you know the stories you’ve heard about how expensive Switzerland is? They were probably understatements, and I have a $27 bottle of sunscreen to prove it.  Switzerland is gorgeous, but the beauty doesn’t come cheap. Just ride fast toward Italy, which is considerably cheaper, and you’ll be fine. Mostly we felt very lucky that in three weeks, we had only one day of rain. We’ve talked to bike tourers who had the opposite conditions, and during the month we were in Switzerland, it rained at least a couple of days a week. So we felt fortunate!

Here are the stages that we rode. I’ve included some minimal route notes, and if you’re thinking of doing a similar trip, you can contact me directly and ask questions!
Day 1: Leysin to Sierre, Switzerland. 106 kilometers, 6 hours riding. Mostly on the Rhone river towpath, which is harder to follow than you would think. Train from Sierre to Fiesch, Switzerland.
Day 2: Rest day in Fiesch
Day 3: Fiesch to Hospental, Switzerland, over the Furka Pass. 63 kilometers, 6 hours riding. It’s steep! Just put your bike in low gear and crank up those intestinal switchbacks!
Day 4: Hospental to Rhazuns, Switzerland, over the Oberalp Pass. 88 kilometers, 7 hours riding. Not as steep.
Day 5: Rhazuns, Switzerland to Chiavenna, Italy, over the Splugen Pass. 80 kilometers, 8 hours riding. Loooong day. Looong climb up the Via Mala gorge including several extremely dark tunnels. Do not attempt this section without good lights. Ride together if you are in a group. Splugen Pass is fairly exposed and committing. Allow a lot of time and save some energy for the white-knuckle downhill into Chiavenna which involves more tunnels on a gravity-defying road!
Day 6: Chiavenna, Italy to St. Moritz, Switzerland, over the Maloja Pass. 50 kilometers, 6 hours riding. Steady uphill until the very end of the climb, then crazy uphill. But then a nice coast into St. Moritz!
Day 7: St. Moritz, Switzerland to Santa Maria, Switzerland, over the Ofen Pass. 75 kilometers, 7 hours riding. Don’t even get me started on the “up and down” aspect of the Ofen Pass, but the ride through the Swiss National Park is incredible.
Day 8: Santa Maria, Switzerland to Bolzano, Italy, 120 kilometers, 6 hours riding. Mostly downhill on bike paths through the highly scenic Val Mustair to Merano, Italy, then another downhill bike bath from Bolzano to Merano. Not as hard as 120 kilometers sounds.
Day 9: Rest day, Bolzano. What a cool city!! Don’t miss the Otzi the Ice Man museum!!
Day 10: Bolzano to Selva Gardena, Italy. 46 kilometers, 6 hours riding. Nice rolling ride into the foothills of the Dolomites. Gelato!!
Day 11: Selva Gardena to Caprile, Italy, over Passo Sella and Passo Fedaia. 7 hours riding. This might have been our favorite day; the scenery is just incredible if you’ve never seen the Dolomites before!! More gelato!!
Day 12: Caprile to Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, over Passo Giau. 39 kilometers, 7 hours riding. Giau is steep, and it’s one of the standard stages of the Giro d’Italia. But you’ll have plenty of company, maybe more bikes than cars! And at the top there’s this cool weather vane!

Day 13: Rest day, Cortina d’Ampezzo
Day 14: Cortina d’Ampezzo to Dobbiaco, Italy. 30 kilometers, 3 hours riding. This is all on a bike path and is slightly uphill then slightly downhill; mellow day.
Day 15: Dobbiaco, Italy to Heiligenblut, Austria. 90 kilometers, 8 hours riding. This starts out on a bike path and is all downhill to Lienz, Austria. Then the fun really begins as you cross a small mountain (Islesberg), lose all the elevation you just gained, then regain that elevation and more on the bike path to Heiligenblut.
Day 16: Heiligenblut to Zell am See, Austria, over the Grossglockner Pass. 57 kilometers, 7 hours of riding. This was our only rainy day, and probably the hardest climb of the whole trip. The Grossglockner High Alpine Road is a great ride, but with a sustained 12% grade, it’s a thigh-buster! Also be aware (which we weren’t) that the pass is a double summit: up to the highest point, down a few hundred meters, back up to about 3 meters below the highest point, and then down the other side.
Day 17: Zell Am See to Lofer, Austria. 42 kilometers, 3 hours riding. A nice, mostly downhill cruise on a bike path.
Day 18: Lofer to Salzburg, Austria. 51 kilometers, 4 hours riding. Another nice, mostly downhill cruise on a bike path. We took the Mozart Radweg from Lofer and somehow ended up lost in Berchtesgaden, Germany, picked up another bike path and did finally end up in Salzburg, so if you do this route, be aware that it’s not totally obvious where the main bike path goes!
This was our first bike trip in Europe; an incredible experience that we can’t wait to repeat!

I’m easing back into reality today after a glorious vacation; my translation partner and friend Eve Bodeux and I took our families on a 100 mile mountain bike camping trip through Canyonlands National Park last week. The seven of us (Eve, myself, husbands and three kids under ten years old) biked the legendary White Rim Trail which is jaw-droppingly beautiful, winding through the scenic canyons of the Island in the Sky district. We were lucky to have unseasonably warm and dry weather and perfect trail conditions!

One of the best parts of the trip was having no cell phone reception or computer access for four days; I really needed a break and didn’t think about work more than a couple of times. But Eve made sure that we didn’t forget about our profession entirely; she packed some snacks in her conference swag bag from ATA Boston, and we thought it deserved a pose in front of the Airport Tower rock formation! That’s Eve (the cute one!) on the left, and me on the right. Happy Spring Break to all of you too, wherever you’re spending it.

To reward myself for finishing part of my taxes, here’s a spinoff of Jill Sommer’s post on the ABCs of traveling; a great Internet meme for language geeks! I agree with Jill that just assembling this list brought back some fabulous memories, and just for fun, it also prompted me to tally all of the countries I’ve visited (Canada, Mexico, Honduras, Costa Rica, Brazil, France, Belgium, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Monaco, Austria, Italy, Greece, Czechoslovakia (when it still existed!), Hungary, Bosnia, Moldova, Romania, Portugal, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, India, Nepal, Australia, Denmark, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates).

Age you went on your first international trip: I went to elementary school in western New York and we went to Canada frequently, but I left North America for the first time when I was 13, on a trip to France with my mom.

Best foreign beer you’ve had and where: Pass. I hate the taste of beer!

Cuisine (favorite): Tie. Anything Asian and vegetarian or anything French and pastry.

Destinations-favorite, least favorite and why: Favorite destination is a tie between Nepal and Paris, because in their own ways they are utterly unlike anyplace else in the world. Least favorite: the border crossing town between Nepal and India, which is not only “small, congested, dusty and dirty” but where you can also lie awake all night listening to the various calls to prayer blasted from the various temples and mosques on both sides of the border.

Event you experienced abroad that made you say “wow”: The Hungry Ghost Festival in Singapore. My husband and I backpacked across Asia for a year after we got married (an experience that also made me say “wow”!) and this festival was on the first night of our trip; the whole city was lit up with candles, lanterns and incense. It was my first time in Asia and a truly breathtaking experience.

Favorite mode of transportation: If I’m on a road, a bike. If not, my feet. Any place is within walking distance if you have the time! And I love how these modes of transportation bring everything down to a human scale.

Greatest feeling while traveling: Losing track of what day of the week it is. Now that’s vacation!

Hottest place you’ve ever been: Anywhere in Southeast Asia is pretty intensely hot and humid, mitigated by the fact that there’s lots of air conditioning. Honorable mention to the Arun Valley in Nepal, where it was 104 degrees and I was carrying a 60 pound backpack full of winter clothes for the higher elevations.

Incredible service you’ve experienced and where: The Gite du Mont Albert in Quebec, which we could afford only because the US dollar was worth almost 2 Canadian dollars at the time. It was the dead of winter, in the middle of the mountains and although there was only 1 vegetarian item on the menu, the chef cooked a different, totally amazing, vegetarian item for me and my husband every night.

Journey that took the longest: In actual terms, probably flying from Boston to Singapore. In terms of how long it felt, riding in the unheated baggage car of a night train between Grenoble, France and Salzburg, Austria (holiday weekend: all seats were taken and the conductor took pity on us!).

Keepsake from your travels: Sugar cubes and sugar packets. A little weird, I know, but I’m really not a knick-knack collector, so I bring the sugar home and add it to my coffee and think of the place I got it from. I also like interesting plastic shopping bags (ditto on the weird, maybe this is just me!).

Let-down sight-why and where: Not the Taj Mahal itself, but its surroundings. Before we went there, I never realized that it’s smack in the middle of a huge,  gritty, industrial city. Somehow I envisioned it in the middle of a wildflower meadow or something!

Moment when you fell in love with travel: On my first trip to France at age 13, my mom and I went to Mont Saint-Michel which is still one of my favorite places on earth. I had read a story about it in my 7th grade French textbook, entitled “Le beau paysage sauvage de Mont Saint-Michel” (The wild and beautiful landscape of Mont Saint-Michel) and I think it was one of my first experiences of seeing a place I had learned about in school coming to life.

Obsession-what are you obsessed with taking pictures of while traveling?: Animals? Mountains? My daughter? I’m not a very fanatical photographer, but I guess those are it.

Passport stamps- how many and from where?: Lots; I don’t really keep track but I do like passport stamps!

Quirkiest attraction you’ve visited and where: The ancient erotic temples in Khajuraho, India (you asked, OK!). The duty-free store in the Dubai airport, which sells Mercedes automobiles. The world’s northernmost Turkish minaret (in Eger, Hungary).

Recommended sight, event or experience: Two things I could watch all day: the astronomical clock in Bern, Switzerland and the Bellagio fountains in Las Vegas.

Splurge-something you have no problem forking over money for while traveling: A truly unique experience. I’m really not a “stuff” person and I don’t do a lot of shopping on vacation, but give me a really cool boat ride or animal-watching tour or a zipline and I’m there.

Touristy thing you’ve done: I admit it, I love cheesy tourist stuff. I’m going to side with Jill here and say that the Sound of Music bus tour in Austria (where you drive around to the places the movie was filmed, and the movie plays in the tour bus) is high on the list. Dracula’s castle in Romania definitely deserves a mention.

Unforgettable travel memory: Spending my 29th and my husband’s 35th birthday camping in a stone hut at 15,000 feet in Nepal, watching the sunset over Langtang Lirung and the moonrise over Fluted Peak. Seeing wild tapirs grazing on the beach in Costa Rica. Traveling through Eastern Europe in 1991-1992 during the first wave of tourism after the Iron Curtain came down. Partying under the Eiffel tower on New Year’s Eve!

Visas–how many and for where?: French residence visa, tourist visas to India, Brazil and Laos (got the visa but never went there!).

Wine-best glass of wine while traveling and where?: I spent a summer in the Bordeaux region; pretty much anything there would qualify.

eXcellent view and from where?: Man-made: the Paris panorama from the Pont Neuf. Natural: Mt. Everest; kind of cliché but it is really amazing in person!

Years spent traveling: A year living in France, a year trekking across Asia, summers in France and Denmark, probably at least one trip a year outside the US since I was 13 and I’m 40 now!

Zealous sports fans and where: Cricket fans in Australia. Our Australian friends even took us to have drinks at a luxury hotel in Melbourne where (no kidding) the bathrooms have a particularly good view of the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

School is already out for winter break here in Colorado, and my brain is slowly winding down for the year! So, at the request of a few readers, I thought I’d post some pictures of my recent trip to Costa Rica. As with my post about llama trekking and sugar skulls, the only larger point here is to have more fun in life!

So, this trip was inspired by an American Airlines fare sale that was just too good to pass up. I’m not usually sucked in by such things but at $1,100 for three round-trip tickets from Denver to San Jose, it was just such a tempting deal! We had visited Costa Rica in 2009 (Manuel Antonio and Monteverde) and loved it, so it was time for a return visit.

After a night at the highly-recommended Hotel Buena Vista (spring for a villa!), we flew on Nature Air (circa $150 each, round trip) to the tiny airstrip in Drake Bay, the closest point of entry to Corcovado National Park. I’m not great with small planes, but this outfit seems very professional, and as my husband said “at least you can see that the propellers are still turning.”

So we land, hop out, and the only person in sight is a guy with a pickup truck. Calling my Spanish horrific is giving it a compliment that it doesn’t deserve, but I manage to confirm that he’s somehow associated with the lodge we’re staying at, so we get in. As he’s chatting away in Spanish, the only words I understand are “rio” (river) and “caballo” (horse). Hmmm. Then the pickup truck pulls up by the aforementioned river, and I get it. River very high (lots of rain). Hence the horse. Good thing we brought backpacks!!

We split our first week between Corcovado Adventures Tent Camp and the Sirena ranger station in Corcovado National Park. Both were incredible (if you really want the details, I reviewed all of our accommodations on Tripadvisor); totally wild and amazing. Here’s just a sampling of the wildlife and scenery!

That’s a scarlet macaw, a coatimundi (a little hard to see in the shadows; it’s like a tropical raccoon), a Baird’s tapir (totally incredible!!), a boa constrictor, a tree frog and the beach in front of the tent camp. We also did some nice snorkeling at an offshore island.
Then we were off to the Arenal volcano area, thanks to the excellent services of Coach Costa Rica and their shuttle vans. We rented this cute little house right in La Fortuna:

You can rent it too on VRBO! It was pretty rainy in Arenal; as the locals said, “We have two gorgeous seasons, rainy and extremely rainy!” but we did get to see the top of the volcano. Our favorite experiences were whitewater rafting with Costa Rica Descents, paddleboarding on Lake Arenal with Desafio and zip-lining with EcoGlide. I had never been zip-lining before and I have to say it was very cool; my husband and my daughter also did the infamous Tarzan swing there and loved it. Our two favorite “hidden attractions” were the El Silencio nature preserve (on the left side of the main road immediately before you get to the turnoff for the national park) and the Termales Los Laureles hot springs (on the right side of the main road, past Baldi hot springs). Both of these require a car or taxi to get to and it helps to speak a little Spanish. However we thought that the trails at El Silencio were more impressive than in the national park, and the Los Laureles hot springs were a real deal at $8 for adults and $4 for kids, as opposed to $30-$60 per person at the bigger, tourist-oriented hot springs. Just be warned that it is rainy and cloudy a lot of the time in Arenal. You do a lot of cloud-watching, saying “is there really a volcano in there???”

As you can tell, we love Costa Rica and we’re mulling over ideas for at least three or four more trips. We’ve never been to the Caribbean side (Tortuguero national park and similar) or to the arid Guanacaste region in the West, and now Nature Air also flies to the Bocas del Toro archipelago which is just over the Panama border. So hopefully I’ll have some future off-topic posts about those destinations too!

This post is not intended to draw any large or important lessons about the world of freelancing, other than the fact that most freelance translators need to have more fun. Here in Colorado, one of our ubiquitous slogans is Don’t forget to play!, a reference to the fact that the Colorado Lottery is the primary funding source for the Great Outdoors Colorado program. So this is just a fun post, about two really fun things that I’ve done this fall. If you’re here only for translation-related topics, feel free to skip this post and tune in next week!

Llama trekking: One neat thing about living in Colorado: it’s hard to exhaust the options for outdoor recreation. My family loves animals and backcountry camping, so we recently combined the two with a llama trekking excursion. We rented three llamas from Antero Llamas in Salida, Colorado, and I highly recommend them not only because their llama-related services are outstanding, but because the owner’s girlfriend is a translator. Maybe the only Finnish translator in Colorado, and certainly the only one in Salida! We had to attend a three-hour “llamas 101” course to learn how to catch, groom, load and lead the llamas and then we were able to do a self-guided camping trip to a lake up high (elevation 12,000 feet) in the mountains. Here are our three trusty guys hanging out by the lake:

and carrying all of our stuff!

We had a group of 11 people including five kids, and with the llamas carrying 60-70 pounds of stuff each, it was a pretty luxurious trip and something we would definitely do again! The llamas are very mellow and gentle, and also great for motivating kids to walk faster in order to keep up with them!

Making sugar skulls for Halloween: Even if you live in a country that doesn’t celebrate Halloween or Dia de los Muertos, this is a fun project.

1. Procure some skull molds. Here in the US, many craft stores sell Halloween-themed candy molds that you can use for this purpose, or you can order them from Mexican supply shops online. I used Wilton chocolate molds: one skeleton mold (use just the head), one gravestone mold and one pirate-themed mold that had a nice pirate skull with an eyepatch.
2. Mix three cups of granulated sugar and one egg white. You want the mixture to hold its shape if you squeeze a small handful of it together. If it’s too dry, add egg white. If it’s too wet, add sugar.
3. Press the mixture into your molds, then pop the molded sugar out onto a cookie sheet and let it dry overnight. Make sure to pack the molds tightly; if the mixture sticks to the mold, add sugar and re-mix. If it crumbles, add egg white and re-mix.
4. Make some edible paint by combining a cup of powdered sugar (also called icing sugar or confectioner’s sugar), a tablespoon of corn syrup and enough water to make a paint-like mixture. Separate into three or four small bowls and use food coloring to create the colors that you want. Paint your skulls!

Et voilà! My nine year-old made these:

and they are really fun to display, eat or dissolve in your coffee!

And on that note, happy weekend! Don’t forget to play!