I had the huge pleasure of doing a research trip yesterday - connected to my colleague Andrea's project of researching the so-called Albecunde belt. (I've posted about that here, with an image of the band.) So I packed my photo equipment and my digital microscope and some tablet weave samples to cross-check things if necessary, and met up with Andrea. Then we went to Speyer together, to see the band recovered from an unknown cleric's tomb, dated to the 9th or 10th century. Like the Albecund band, this was woven as a band with letters, in red silk.

It is, also like the Albecund band, a simple thing - monochrome threads, made of fine silk with no twist, and all tablets threaded the same way and turning in the same direction for the background, then switching turn direction for the pattern (which is letters). The Speyer band also has a strip at each side that was originally decorated with a bit of simple brocading in silk.

We took a look, and tried to figure out how the original colouring may have been (as there were differences in colour in the side strips depending on whether the brocade had covered a spot or not), and of course we took photos. So many photos! I learned a lot from the mostly blurry photos from the last trip, so this time, there was a proper tripod with an arm to position the camera properly over the object, and getting the lens in plane with the band. There was also a proper digital microscope instead of the cheap children's play version that I had available last time, and oh, what a difference that made.

Now I have a huge amount of photos to sort through. The most important bit, though: There really is no twist in the silk that was used for the warp, and there is the same very strong twist angle to the tablet-woven cords as in the Albecund belt. Both of these are key to making the visual impact of the pattern as strong as possible.

The only thing I need now is a few extra days (or maybe weeks) of time to play around with untwisted, un-degummed silk...

Time for some link stuff again!

First of all, in case you're looking for a plane, or if you are plain curious to know how much is in the air at a given moment: planefinder.net shows planes in real time, plus their flight path and information about both the plane and the distance, height, and so on. It's rather chilling to see how many airplanes are over Europe...

It looks like there might be a way to increase how well humans can see in the dark - though at the moment, it's mostly documented as a side effect of a specific cancer treatment, which is obviously not the thing one would want.

The bibliothèque numérique de Lyon has 55 digitised manuscripts in its collection, dating to the 5th to 10th century, as well as a large number of miniatures from manuscripts of the 5th to 16th century. And because they are wonderful people, the images are open licence, so you are free to use them however you want.

Not medieval at all, but still interesting: Here is a map of the different types of moccasins in North America, with linked instructions on how to make center-seam type shoes of that kind. And I instantly felt transported back to my teenage years, when I had a phase (a rather long one, actually) of being totally into Native American stuff, and tried to make my own shoes and clothes and stuff.

While we're at the subject of travelling: Here's a post about travel by cargo ship instead of using the plane. I could totally imagine travelling that way at some point - though at the moment, my personal desire to go into the US is about zero.

One of the big things about planes is that they are fast. Slow travel, though, holds its own charms. Less jetlag, for instance. Travelling overseas used to be a big thing, much bigger than in our modern, fast-paced age, where it's possible to go to about anywhere for just a few days. Maybe that will come back in our future, if more people decide to forego air travel. (Or maybe we'll get airships back. That would be a really cool thing...)

At the start of last year, I realised it would be a really interesting thing to keep track of what means of transport I'd use how much over the course of a year. So we hung up a sheet of paper on which we'd jot down train rides, public transport rides, and, in my case, the two flights I've taken. Bike kilometres were tracked via the odometers, and the car, of course, has its own odometer, with the start-of-year number duly noted anyways due to tax reasons.

So here's the full rundown of my travelled distances for 2019.

Winner, by far, is the long-distance train, with a sound 7845 km done. Longest individual train rides were the one to London for the MEDATS study day (about 1000 km one way) and my train ride to Leiden, where I had to take a detour to catch the sleeper train in Passau - this, together, amounted to about 1126 km to get there. Back was only 672 km, without the detour.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B4UK2Suojta/

Public transport trains in our vicinity add another 630 km to the train bill - so altogether with these, my train distance is 8475 km. (I calculated the train kilometres through brouter.de, which is a routing/distance calculator website based on the Open StreetMap, using the train option. I did not make sure that this was the exact route that I did take with the trains apart from the one very interesting one to Leiden, so numbers may have been a bit different in reality - it should work out about correctly overall, though.)

Second in line is the car - with 6621 km travelled. This is both the distances done for job reasons (3803 km) and those for private reasons (2818 km). When travelling for job purposes, I'm usually alone in the car, but it is full of stuff; when travelling for personal reasons, we're usually at least two people in the car, and we do try to fill up the car if possible.

Third in the list is the bicycle - though this is my main daily means of transport (together with just walking for the very short distances). It's only shorter distances, though, usually between 3 and 10 km one way, so it does not sum up as quickly as the things done by train or car. (If it's a longer distance, we often do a combination of public transport and bicycle, which is at least as fast as the car in many cases, and usually cheaper.) I rode my recumbent for 422 km last year, and did 2408 km on the tandem together with the Most Patient Husband of Them All - so 2830 km. (Probably a few more, since I sometimes forget the odometer, or it doesn't register things at first because the spoke magnet has been turned out of position.)

2341 km were done by plane - that was my WorldCon trip to Dublin and back. (Probably a bit more, since that is the direct distance between start and end points, but I could not find any way to calculate the actual flight path distances. It will have to do.) Travelling there by other means would have added about 5 to 6 days to that venture, and that was not possible time-wise for me, so I did opt for the plane.

Here's the list again, in short:

8475 km - trains (long-distance and public transport trains)
6621 km - car (both work-related and private)
2830 km - bicycle
2341 km - plane

So I did 1.7 times the distance using train and bike than I did with the car, and more kilometres per bike than with the plane. There's still some room for improvement, obviously - but I'm quite happy with the train quota for work stuff that I managed this year, considering that I do usually have to haul quite a bit of things when travelling for work.

I can say that apart from being really interesting, jotting down the kilometres done via public transport actually made me try a little harder to go by train if possible. The part where I think would be the most wiggle room for some improvement are the distances done in the car for private reasons; maybe that can be a little less in 2020. There's currently no flight planned for the coming year, too, but a long and adventurous train ride, so I'm already looking forward to find out how the numbers will stand at the end of this year.

So - would you like to join me in the project? I'd be curious to hear about your numbers in 12 months!

There's more to tell about the Leiden trip: Travel Adventure Stories!

I'm not someone who goes on Big Damn Adventures - I've never done trips into really far-away foreign countries with really different cultures. No hiking through China or India for me, no Turkey or Russia. But I'm fond of the little adventures. The small things that are still exciting, but there's nothing that can go desastrously wrong - and I am utterly happy when things do not go wrong, or the stories have a happy end after all.

Little adventures like travelling via the train with an interesting itinerary. In order to get to Leiden in time to have a look at the Stockings exhibition, the solution was to leave early in the evening of Thursday to catch a train in the "wrong" direction, to board the night train in Passau and then wake up in Düsseldorf. From there, it's easily possible to arrive in Leiden at noon.

I had booked one bed in an all-female compartment, which is always interesting as you never know whom you will end up sharing with. (In this case, there was only one other lady in the 3-person compartment, from Vienna, and she was very nice.) We only chatted for a very short time in the morning, as she left the train one stop earlier than I did.

The ticket for the sleeper included the bed space plus a goodie bag with some snacks, a small bottle of sparkling wine, a pair of house slippers (yes, really), a pen (to fill out the breakfast order), a pair of earplugs, a small muffin, a bottle of water, and a towel (sealed in a plastic bag) with NightJet design.

I was amazed to hear from the conductor during breakfast that these were all intended for the passengers to take away with them, and that whatever was not taken would not be re-packed, but thrown away. So I packed my towel. And the snacks (I would have taken those anyways), and the slippers, and the remainder of the goodie bag contents of my compartmentmate, who was already off the train.

Fast forward to the way back from Leiden, where I took an early train back to get home by afternoon. I had packed some food for the way, leftovers from Chinese takeout shared with friends on Saturday evening, and the bag with the food sat in the front flap pocket of my backpack. Which, in the train, went on to the shelf for luggage... until I changed trains in Duisburg (to get into the next train early, as they were predicted to be very full, and I was very much hoping to get a seat for the ride).

I did manage to get a seat in the next ICE which was not reserved... and there I discovered that the bag with food had quietly and sneakily fallen out of the backpack front, and thus still sat in the other train. Which made me sad for three reasons at once: I was without the lunch I had been really looking forward to (as yesterday's food was delicious with a capital D); I was without my trusty and very convenient re-usable silicone doggy bag, which would probably be thrown away by some train worker at the train's end station; and the food would also be wasted.

So I thought about trying to get it back via the lost-and-found service of DB... only to find out that a) they usually don't care for things worth less than 15 €, b) they do charge for their services, and c) they also charge for calling their service phone number (almost 2 € per minute from my mobile). Sigh.

And then I remembered that one of my friends lives in Karlsruhe, which is the end point of said train. Thanks to the magic of modern communication, I reached him in time (facebook can actually be useful once in a while), and he had, indeed, not any plans for lunch yet...

To my utter delight, he did manage to rescue the bag with food from the train, and I hope he enjoyed the meal! Also, this means we'll have to meet some day, for me to get the bag back, and to celebrate the successful rescue action. This shows that it's a good thing to know people at all places in the world...

It was also a good thing that the night train had supplied me with the snacks, and that my friends had handed me some fruit and extra cookies to take along on my trip back when I packed the lunch - because these had not been in the front pocket of the backpack. They were safely stored in the main compartment, and saved me from getting really hungry on the train. Hooray for friends!

 
 

You might have noticed Friday's blog post coming up early (on Thursday afternoon), which might tell you something about the state of things here, which is rather, um, leaning towards hectic. There's the Textile Forum coming up, I have a few days already earmarked for travelling both for my own enjoyment and for a conference, and there are some other things that have to be done before end of October - which is approaching ridiculously fast - such as taking care of tax-related paperworks.

I have also been planning how to get to NESAT next May. Yes, it's a while until then, but... well. Excitement. Also the prospect of travelling to Finland by train and ferry, instead of taking the plane, and seeing a town or two on the way up? That, to me, sounds utterly delightful.

Related to this, I found a very interesting route to follow, proposed by Google Maps, on how to get from the train station at Lübeck Travemünde port to the port itself:



Here's the original link to the routing, in case you want to take a closer look. It's about 100 m as the crow flies between the start and end point, by the way - but Maps has clearly seen that I am out for an adventurous journey, and wanted to add to this!

I like to travel. I especially like to travel by train - there are comfy seats, you can eat and drink and read or work or knit. There's no pesky security check circus where you have to empty all your liquid containers, there's no arriving at least an hour before your transport actually leaves, and it's much more friendly to the environment.

Yes, it can be a tad nerve-wracking if a train has a delay, but so can a plane. Or a car.

I've recently had the pleasure of being invited to a conference in Leiden, and I was utterly delighted to find that I can travel there with a night train. It did take some creative routing (I'm first going south-east, to catch the night train at a sensible place and time, before heading north-west in it), but it turned out to be both cheaper than a flight and, for me, train journeys are always more pleasant and relaxing. So I will be sleeping while magically being transferred from Passau to Düsseldorf...

Years ago, I already used the night train to get to Copenhagen, and that was a wonderful way to travel. So I was devastated when the Deutsche Bahn gave up their night trains; now I've found that the ÖBB (the Austrian train service) does run their NightJet across quite a bit of Germany as well. And then I found that there are, indeed, quite a lot of night trains running in Europe. So maybe, maybe I'll be able to turn the trip to NESAT in Finland next year into a train trip with a daytime stopover to visit one or two of the northern cities...

If you're curious now, here's some resources:

The Man in Seat 61 is an info site about train travels in Britain and Europe;
Night Trains has information about the various routes, and most importantly a map of current night train connections;
for those of you reading German, there's a blog called Train Tracks that offers hints and info on train travel, and some info about night trains;
and finally you can also use the Interrail Website to find out about night trains in all of Europe.

By the way, I've read a few weeks ago that the Deutsche Bahn is actually considering to re-introduce the night trains... which would be glorious!