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<P>Lindau is located at the border of Austria, Switzerland, and Germany,
on Lake Constance (which the Germans call the Bodensee). The main part
of the city is located on a very small island, connected to the mainland
only by a railroad that runs on a land bridge just wide enough for the
tracks. Consequently, there are very few cars on the island, and most of
the streets are occupied only by tourists on foot. There is a "sea
promenade" along the lakefront (the lake is very large). Our hotel
was located right on the lakefront, and this was the view from our hotel
room window:</P>
<P><IMG SRC="summe068.jpg" HSPACE=10 HEIGHT=480 WIDTH=640></P>
<P>This is the Lindau harbor, with the Swiss Alps in the background, mostly
invisible in the clouds. This picture has definitely suffered in the conversion
to JPEG format for Web display; the bands of color in the sky are an artifact
of image compression. Turning to your right, you would see the sea promenade:</P>
<P><IMG SRC="summe073.jpg" HSPACE=10 HEIGHT=480 WIDTH=640></P>
<P>and turning your back to the lake you would see many cafes such as this
one:</P>
<P><IMG SRC="summe069.jpg" HSPACE=10 HEIGHT=480 WIDTH=640></P>
<P>Here's our hotel. Our room has two windows right under the huge letters
giving the hotel's name (the center and the right window were ours for
five nights).</P>
<P><IMG SRC="summe072.jpg" HSPACE=10 HEIGHT=480 WIDTH=640></P>
<P>Here I am enjoying what the Germans call a "small beer":</P>
<P><IMG SRC="summe075.jpg" HSPACE=10 HEIGHT=480 WIDTH=640></P>
<P>A street artist worked with chalk directly on the sidewalk:</P>
<P><IMG SRC="summe084.jpg" HSPACE=10 HEIGHT=480 WIDTH=640></P>
<P>Of course, working hours were given over to scientific lectures and
discussions. About 200 scientists were in attendance. The upside-down A
and backwards E are not mistakes but puns--they are symbols used in logic,
as well as the initials in Conference on Automated Deduction. The 15 indicates
that this is the 15th such conference.</P>
<P><IMG SRC="summe083.jpg" HSPACE=10 HEIGHT=480 WIDTH=640></P>
<P>Lindau's conference hall is used at least all summer, and perhaps all
year. Each year the Nobel prize winners gather there. They had preceded
us this summer.</P>
<P>Tuesday evening, there was a reception in the Old City Hall. The vice-mayor
gave a welcoming speech and offered us all a glass of wine. We were told
to keep the glass as a souvenir. Here's the old city hall (despite valiant
efforts, in a reasonable time I couldn't remove the white side strips left
after rotating the picture to vertical).</P>
<P><IMG SRC="summe081.jpg" HSPACE=10 HEIGHT=480 WIDTH=640></P>
<P>Breakfast in our hotel was served buffet-style. Here's the first of
three big buffet tables:</P>
<P><IMG SRC="summe115.jpg" HSPACE=10 HEIGHT=480 WIDTH=640></P>
<P>The other side of this table contained cereals, and there were three
kinds of fresh juice, and a big table of croissants, breakfast rolls, and
various breads. For those who prefer an English breakfast there were bacon
and eggs. There was even champagne on ice, although nobody drank it. (After
all, we were on our way to hear lectures.)</P>
<P><IMG SRC="summe114.jpg" HSPACE=10 HEIGHT=480 WIDTH=640></P>
<P>The dining room, like the whole hotel, had an air of ancient elegance.
Here are the chandeliers:</P>
<P><IMG SRC="summe113.jpg" HSPACE=10 HEIGHT=480 WIDTH=640></P>
<P>Tour boats like this one ran from the harbor in front of our hotel:</P>
<P><IMG SRC="summe117.jpg" HSPACE=10 HEIGHT=480 WIDTH=640></P>
<P>We didn't take one of these boats. Instead, Wednesday afternoon the
entire conference boarded a refurbished World-War I paddle steamer:</P>
<P><IMG SRC="summe104.jpg" HSPACE=10 HEIGHT=480 WIDTH=640></P>
<P>and went for a cruise. The weather was cold and rainy, though, so nobody
was on deck:</P>
<P><IMG SRC="summe094.jpg" HSPACE=10 HEIGHT=480 WIDTH=640></P>
<P>No matter, though. Inside the boat is a nice restaurant, and we ate
lunch.</P>
<P><IMG SRC="summe091.jpg" HSPACE=10 HEIGHT=480 WIDTH=640></P>
<P>We stopped for a few hours at Friedrichshaven. This small city is the
home of the Zeppelin Museum. In this city, Count Graf von Zeppelin made
his famous dirigibles. There is a museum there in which a portion of the
Hindenberg is reconstructed:</P>
<P><IMG SRC="summe105.jpg" HSPACE=10 HEIGHT=480 WIDTH=640></P>
<P>You can go inside the reconstructed portion. It's like a hotel; there
are tables and chairs. The sleeping compartments are like old-fashioned
Pullman cars. It took three days to go from Germany to South America and
cost about the equivalent of 15,000 marks today (on the order of nine thousand
dollars). In the 1930's, Germany had extensive South American trade, and
businessmen would pay these prices because you could get to South America
and close your deal before your competition could get there on the boat.
But a major portion of the Zeppelin's income came from carrying express
mail. There was no faster way. While you walk through the Hindenberg,
television monitors outside the windows play real films taken from the
actual Hindenberg. When the Hindenberg landed, two hundred people had to
pull on ropes. There were two crew members for every passenger, as they
had to man three shifts, and there had to be a man at each engine. The
Hindenberg was 240 meters (several blocks) long. They are starting to make
Zeppelins again, and the first new Zeppelins will be sold next year. </P>
<P>Count Graf von Zeppelin was a study in perseverance. He was a military
man, who participated in the American Civil War and afterwards had an adventurous
trip in the American West. During the Civil War he saw spy balloons. (Civil
War cannons could not be tilted more than 30 degrees from horizontal and
so could not shoot at spy balloons overhead!) When he retired from the
military at age 52, he sank his entire personal fortune into the production
of the first three Zeppelins, each of which met with some disaster. Then
he convinced the German government to finance him, but they required him
to make a demonstration flight of 48 hours before getting money to produce
more than one Zeppelin. He flew to Frankfurt, but an engine ran hot. He
stopped to repair it, but afterwards BOTH engines ran hot. He tried to
continue, alternating engines; but a headwind came up and he could not
return home on one engine. He stopped at the city where the engines were
made to have them repaired at the factory. The repair was done, but before
he could take off, a thunderstorm came up and lightning struck the aircraft,
burning the skin and leaving the frame a twisted aluminum wreck. Tears
streamed down his face as he contemplated the scene--he was a ruined man.
A lesser man would have been destroyed, but Graf von Zeppelin had the wrecked
frame cut and pressed into millions of souvenir ashtrays, and sold these
ashtrays all over Germany, by which means he raised six million marks and
was able to continue making dirigibles! Now, that's perseverance.</P>
<P>The boat picked us up again, and took us back across (part of) the lake
to Lindau, leaving us at last:</P>
<P><IMG SRC="summe108.jpg" HSPACE=10 HEIGHT=480 WIDTH=640></P>
<P>Where it left us was not "home", but another fancy hotel just
outside Lindau. Here you see the scientists entering the hotel:</P>
<P><IMG SRC="summe109.jpg" HSPACE=10 HEIGHT=480 WIDTH=640></P>
<P>Inside, we had a sumptious banquet. Unfortunately, the digital camera
doesn't work inside, so the banquet went unrecorded. The dessert buffet
should certainly have gone on record. There were three big tables filled
with every imaginable kind of luscious Bavarian dessert. You could have
some of each. People returned for seconds and left the tables bare!</P>
<P>During the week we sampled several of the Bavarian desserts at the restaurants
where we ate. These were mostly delicious fruit-filled pastries of several
different kinds. One memorable dessert was "Heisse Liebe" (Hot
Love), which was vanilla ice cream with hot raspberry sauce. The sauce
was really fresh raspberries, some of which had been been mashed in sugar,
and served hot in a silver "gravy" bowl, for you to pour over
the ice cream at the table. Here's Hennie enjoying it:</P>
<P><IMG SRC="summe088.jpg" HEIGHT=480 WIDTH=640></P>
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