We headed off this morning from our motel in downtown Nuremberg toward the PLAYMOBIL FunPark, following the public transit instructions helpfully printed in the tourist guide: take the U2 to Rothernburger Strasse and then then Bus 113 direct to the park.

We got to Rothernburger Strasse in just a few minutes; only problem was that there was no sign at all of a Bus 113. Wandered around looking for pointers, but didn’t find any. Finally spotted a map of the entire system that suggested a stop off the U3, so we headed there. Nothing there either, but we did find a helpful bus driver from another line who told us, in German, something about the 113 being out of service for mechanical reasons. He suggested that we go to Furth Hauptbahnhof and take the Bus 150 from there.

So off we went again. Got to Furth, found the stop for Bus 113, but the schedule seemed to suggest that it only went once a day. Stopped into the tourist information centre and found a very helpful woman who spent 20 minutes trying to find us a way there, eventually figuring that we could take a regional train to Zirndorf and then either walk or take a series of two connecting buses. So we waited 45 minutes and got on the train to Zirndorf and were there in 12 minutes. We decided to give up on buses and instead followed the helpfully-provided PLAYMOBIL-branded signposts that marked the 50 minute walk to the FunPark.

So while I thought we might get there at 10:00 a.m., we finally walked in around 1:00 p.m. But man were we happy to be there. The FunPark itself was true to its name: Maximum Fun. There was an endless sea of PLAYMOBIL to play with, everything from trains to submarines to sailing ships. There were lots of kids there, but enough to go around for everyone. The park was in its ‘winter break’, so the theme-park activities outside were shut down but this didn’t bother Oliver at all as he happily spent 4 hours in PLAYMOBIL heaven. We took a break halfway through to pop next door to the indoor playground where, to my surprise and proud delight, Olvier worked his way up into the heights of the climbing gym. He yelled down that he was nervous from time to time, but seemed genuienly impressed with his own moxie.

Next stop: Paris. Booking the 5:30 a.m. train is seeming more and more crazy as the night wears on, but at least I booked us First Class.

Arrived Vienna this afternoon after 7 hours of train rides across the entire width of Slovakia: an amazing ride up through the mountains from spring to winter and back to spring again. We’re only here in Vienna for less than 24 hours, so will not do justice to the city at all, but we’re staying with my friend Til and got to share a nice dinner tonight and catch up and may make a mad dash into the kids’ museum tomorrow before heading off to Nuremberg.

My downsize-to-my-mobile plan fell flat on its face today as the fully-charged battery on my Nokia N95 gave up the ghost before the end of the day — the victim of too much train-based GPS usage. Alas this happened exactly at the moment when I really, really needed the maps capabilities: standing confused at 11pm on a cold Vienna night at the U-Bahn stop nearest Til’s house, charting our walk back to his place. Click. Fortunately I recalled enough to get us home, with Oliver’s photographic memory a big help.

We were going to give the Kosice Zoo a pass — visions of depressed post-Soviet lions danced in my head — but as a trip there offered an opportunity to get out into the hills above the city as well as forcing us to figure out the bus system, this became our morning outing.

The bus, like many things in Kosice, is very cheap: 25 cents for Oliver and 55 cents for me. The zoo was cheap too: less than 4 EUR for both of us. And we had the place completely to ourselves.

And while the place needed some love — perhaps the winter was unkind — it was pleasant enough and we were entertained by the antics of seals, apes, penguins, and a rather scary hawk.

The trip out there started with a negotiation at the local tobacco shop over bus tickets — more a translation exercise I suppose — followed by a winding road trip on Bus #29 out of the city and up into another weather system (chilly and a little snow).

Back in the city we had a late lunch at Ajvega, a vegetarian restaurant downtown. Oliver had very nice sheep cheese pirogis and I had spicy soy goulash and a talk bottle of dark Slovac beer.

After a little shopping we made our way to the Kino Úsmev for the 6 o’clock showing of Marley and Me (in English with Slovak subtitles). The ticket purchase was conducted entirely with hand gestures as none of the staff spoke English and indeed seemed perplexed that we should want to see the show at all.

The theatre was right out of 1950 with hard creaky wooden seats but the projection and sound were top flight.

To bed early tonight before we train west tomorrow for Vienna.

Although my knowledge of high culture is not great, I think I can be forgiven for thinking that, in buying tickets at the State Opera House for The Marriage of Figaro, I was going to see an opera.

This turned out not to be the case: this marriage was to be sorted in ballet form, albeit with operatic music.

And this was not your father’s ballet either. There were mini-trampolines. And slides. And a zip line. Oh, and did I mention that the last half of the ballet was performed with dancers slipping and sliding around on water-covered plastic sheeting? To say nothing of the video of scenes of World War II projected onto the set.

That all said, when the dancers were dancing it was pretty straight ahead pointe shoes and leaping around. At least when they weren’t doing the jive.

All of this in a gilded theatre fit for a king to a half-filled but enthusiastic crowd.

We enjoyed the entire 90 minute spectacle and Oliver may never see an old-school ballet without wondering where the buckets are.

It is proving more difficult than I thought to squeeze blog posts through a mobile phone T9 style hence the lack of updates from our journey so far.

We are alive and well and lunching at Kaviaren Slavia in downtown Kosice after spending 2 hours in the excellent Slovak Technical Museum (where they have, among other things, a huge collection of typewriters).

We had a smooth journey from Canada despite the last leg, from London to Kosice, involving a tired old Bulgaria Airlines 737.

The highlight of the day came at the very end when Oliver somehow locked himself in the bathroom of our apartment. After 20 minutes of trying to talk him through unlocking the door and another 20 of the helpful front desk clerk trying various things, the Kosice Fire Brigade was summoned in the person of a very kind man who eventually pried open the door enough to allow Oliver to pass the key out. Oliver emerged none the worse for it (well, he may never pee again).

We celebrated with a meal in a smoky Moroccan restaurant where a large pizza, a glass of wine and an orange juice somehow only cost 4 EUR.

Kosice feels both foreign and like coming home.

We hope to make it through the day without involving any public service agencies. We’ve got tickets to see The Marriage of Figaro tonight (8 EUR for the two of us) so that shouldn’t be too hard.

I took at sabbatical from Plazes for a while — a side-effect of my experiments with going dark. But with our Euro-journey about to commence I went looking for some sort of multi-pronged service that would let me send pithy georeferenced messages from the road and then remembered that’s exactly what Plazes lets me do. So I’ve fired up the Plazes toolset once again and plugged in the main landmarks on our journey, and will, on occasion, chime in with messages from the road. If nothing else my mother (and Sandy’s mother) should be happy.

I’m traveling laptop-free this time, relying entirely on my Nokia N95 to tether me to the web, so don’t expect 1000-word missives on the architecture of eastern Slovakia for the next 10 days: if I manage to squeeze a blog post out of my mobile phone it will likely me more along the lines of “lost in mountains, all okay, but please send help.”

Tomorrow, March 15, 2009, marks the 16th anniversary of the day I started my first job here on Prince Edward Island. I’d arrived from Ontario the week before in my 1978 Ford F-100 pickup with a U-Hail trailer behind and my old friend Simon bringing along the rest of our possessions in his mother’s Chevette.

My first task was to find an apartment for us (Catherine was coming along a month later), and so I turned to classified section of The Guardian. The dominant memory of that apartment search was that there was an usual number of references to apartments being “near Kmart,” to the point where I wondered whether it was actually important to be near Kmart to have a happy and successful life in Charlottetown.

Oliver and I dropped by the Robertson Library at the University of PEI this morning to allow me to check the accuracy of this memory and, sure enough, looking through the classifieds of that week it’s still the “near Kmart” that jumps out:

The Kmart is gone now, along with the K-Foods beside it (operated by Sobeys, but borrowing the ‘K’ brand), replaced by the Atlantic Superstore. I wonder what’s replaced “near Kmart” as being the big apartment selling feature in Charlottetown.

Buy the Chapter is a service from Lonely Planet that lets you purchase digital copies (PDF files) of single chapters from many of their travel and language books. I just bought the Slovak chapter of their Eastern Europe Phrasebook and the East Slovakia chapter of their Czech & Slovak Republics guidebook. Total cost was $5.00 for both.

No need to haul heavy books around the planet. No need to buy all sorts of content for places I’m not visiting. Much paper and shipping saved. And because they’re PDF files I just dropped them onto my Nokia N95 mobile phone, which has a PDF reader, and I’m ready to haggle (Aká ke vasa najnizsia cena?), pee (Kde sú tu záchody?) and ask for Milana Lasicu records (Hľadám niečo od Milana Lasicu).

So today was the end of five weeks of my new fitness program. I made it. At this stage I’m up to four days a week of about 30 minutes of cardio (running or cycling) and 30 minutes of the weight machine business. I’m managing to cycle about 7 miles or run about 2 in that period (of course it’s all “virtual” distance, the absurdity of which was one of the hurdles I had to get over).

The biggest surprise in all this is that I don’t dread doing it. Indeed I actually look forward to it, and after a workout I tend to feel about as good as I’ve ever felt, albeit slightly more exhausted than usual. Along the way I’ve lost 8 pounds and jumped down a notch on my belt, have lost my fear of being accidentally flung off the end of the treadmill, and have come to feel at home at the UPEI fitness centre.

The biggest change only became evident yesterday, however: Catherine and I had an appointment at Prince Street School in the afternoon and as I was walking to the school I spotted her a block ahead of me. Old Pete would have ambled along and caught up with her at the school; New Pete remembered that he knew how to run, and would probably not collapse from the effort, and so I hoofed it and caught up to her half a block later.

As we’re about to head off travelling for 8 days I’ll have to be more improvisational in my on-the-road fitness ways, but I’m eager to return to my routine when we get back.

For our trip to Europe next week Oliver and I are travelling fast and low to the ground, meaning that suitcases need to give way to backpacks. We spent last Saturday scouring the sporting goods sections of stores about Charlottetown — Sporting Intentions, Sportchek, Source for Sports, Zellers — but all we could find were either adult-sized travel packs or cheap, small, Dora the Explorer-sized school packs for kids.

We were almost ready to give up when I thought to look on the Mountain Equipment Coop website, where I was happy to find the Big Squeeze Backpack, described:

The Big Squeeze is the missing link between kid’s daypacks and adult multi-day packs. It is specifically designed for pre-teens heading backpacking with the family or off to summer camp. We built a compression stuff sack into the main compartment, large enough for a bulky bag.

The only question I had that was neither explained nor obvious in the product pictures was whether or not the pack has a chest strap — Oliver has wee shoulders and needs all the help he can get to keep the pack on! A quick call to MEC headquarters in British Columbia and a chat with a very helpful guy — he went down into the store to look and see for himself — revealed that not only does it have a chest strap, but one with a built-in whistle to boot.

Placed the order Saturday afternoon and the pack arrived here in Charlottetown on Wednesday morning. So far it looks like exactly what we need for 8 days on the road. We’ll report back once the trip is over.