Puff-puff to Cercany

this is THE UNFINISHED ARTICLE

 

7 tries a and 6hours later I still cannot get the last photo  to load

and I  am afraid to load the pictures into the article

 

to find out about the agony of using Gatherware—and getting booted every 2minutes, go  here to learn about the other clones that exist:

 

Gather Orange Downgrade Boxing Match in Amazon Shorts—or How to Go Stark Raving Mad in 24 hours—submit a gather article with images.

/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976782857

I coldn't get the last image in after 6hours of work-- and godaloneknows hoe many clones, but if you want to see half the horror of what it takes to load an article on Gather  follow the link above--

tremble and fear, all ye who enter here--



Screw gather
One picture got dumped and altogether the images have been loaded about 14times.

I started about 11pm and it is now 4 am
This is  the true orange gather crapware
Everytime that damnable Amazon Shorts flash ad pops up,  it  knocks out all the images and clones the article

I am pissed because it is very obvious that the gather gods never deal with their own crapware or they'd be all bald and dead


 It's just too nerve-wracking to deal this garbage

It's not only that it bounces you up but muddles  the sequence of which you've carefully loaded the images so you are frantically searching for the one that follows in dread of the damn advertising---


Believe it or not this is the sequence in which the images were loaded and reloaded several times over. I know this because of their frame numbers--




The engineer prepres for the journey. oiling the gears that turn the wheels. the engineer tends to details.





the snubnosed widow




the admirers flock to see her dressed in black








She gets up steam and hoots for us-- but the information downstairs in the information office was  incredibly rude to me when i presented the schedule and asked for the platform. fortunately she was being supervised and I am sure that she earned her black mark for the day as a result of snarling at me.







get aboard little children, there aint room for many more. in fact, the train was full a good half hour before departure and when we came into vrsovice station people were already standing in the aisles. me, for one.






not goning to bother with capitals because any moment gather could delete all this work again and I'd have to start over from scratch.  amazing that men could make steam locomotives and get people places, but gather can't provide decent software for its free content to spread its banner advertising. pretty crummy isn't it? one giant leap backwards for technology and  deadly defeat of  mankind.






trains are coming and going nearly every minute and it's not unusal to have a train coming and another departing on the same platform  within a minute  art--therefore you really need to check your ticket and know what you're doing or you just get on the wrong train. it's easy to do, but generally the international trains have loud speaker announcements and sit in their bays for  nearly a half hour for cleaning duties.




underway--  on the way to branik around the bend where the czech cowboys hang out. i didn't know about this track until i hopped the train to krivoklat from branik and found myself going inreverse around  the loop back to prague five and about the area where i live. sometimes you go backwards to go forwards.  but the reason is  clear if you could look at a topological map-- the vltava runs through a gorge and the train follows the natural grade rather than trying to climb up cliffs. 

branik also has it's own local cheap beer--  say about 5kc or about a quarter for half liter bottle. so beer is pretty cheap.  I don't drink branik, as  you know I got chummy with  ferdinand and bernard which are bottom-brewed and  12+  dark beers.

  The train here is  passing through the center of prague, but it looks like it is in a forest. All around  Prague are protected greenbelts in which deer and other small animals live. Deer here are small, about the size of an oversized rabbit as they are roe deer and not the big American version that can wipe out a car.  Actually the deer are about the size of goats with white rumps.







And into branik where all the cowboys are waiting to get onto the already crowded train. An old colleague of mine was sitting  across from me. Her hair grey and face square. her legs were definitely much stouter than Frau Steinway's and  I could remember her whining voice greeting me everyday with her litany of complaints. She had 87 first and second year English students. I had over 250  fourth and fifth year English students.  In fact I had all the upper level English students in the school and more than 14 classes of them--whcih doesn't mean tiddle to an American except that many of my classes had 40 or more students in them an in one case three different classes mixed together with three different books. I was supposed to make sense of it all. I received half her pay-- and her name ws on the door as  magistra, but I got treated by first-name basis as  scarcely a human-being.  She had very little to complain about... and I could have  taken mine to the State for code violations. it's normal. She was receiving 14,000 kc a month and I had less than 7000kc-- fair? I didn't think so.  I could use a dictionary too. I had to prepare them for their Leaving Exam. The formal English Exam that is given before graduation. You fail, you don't  go to university. I found it a joke-- but the kids hated it. Me, too.






another golf course-- They seem to flourish here...






Following the vltava south... Never mind, unlike many of the old  Prague buses, it does not rain inside and we are all too busy hanging our heads out the windows.





 a deep quarry--






Entering Vrane, a village where the old horse got off. She kept looking at me, but  my hair is still  as dark as it was, and somehow  despite all the  trauma I;ve been through, I still look far younger than women my age.  But unlike five years ago, I can't get away for late twenties.





This area is known as the Pacific-- yuup named after the  beautiful Pacific Northwest of Washington and Oregon. and we passed a hotel just below the golf course called the Kaskadia. These ridges are  named after the Cascades, but they don't look a bit the same. The Cascades are majestic mountains, and nobody can ever forget them once they've seen the grandeur of Mt Baker.


Is there a rreason why Gather is such crappy software? Other than the orange bit. And why gather gods have such a problem with hearing wax?










A small way station. On the timetable for trains, there is a sign indicating  small way stations or  unscheduled stops.  The first time I was on a train and it stopped in the center of a field, I wondered about the cows getting in the way.  Nope, it's a local stop that is custom called. You need  to hop the train in the dingle-berries, so you call the nearest office on the line and the train stops at your water pump or chestnut tree to pick you up and just tell the conductor ahead of time when you need to get off.  This one actually has a small station, but some only have trees.






a village nestled on a hill


















This was soem unpronouncible village, but all the kids trooped off which  made me suspect that the Pied Piper was in town. And after that the train was relatively silent  for the rest of the trip to Cercany.





Tynec nad Sazavou--  have to look it up to find out something about it's history, but this whole area has been fought over and embattled through warring religious and political factions that even if I looked it up, I'd have forgotten it by tomorrow.






and onwards towards  Cercany-- If you remember, the first attempt to  take the steam engine, resulted in me watching it depart from Vrsovice station on its way to Kacov. So  this journey is the first stage of the  Prague-Kacov train expedition which I missed.  It also meant that the train did not have to stop to draw on water until Cercany. So in Cercany, I stayed behind to watch the watering and cleaning of the engine.