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the Neuf-Brisach parking lot
Thursday, November 6 2025
location: Cabin 102, MS Grace, Rhine River, Breisach, Germany
This morning we sat with Kelly and Brian at a typical vegan riverboat breakfast, gossiping more about people in the vegan river boat scene. First we talked about that guy River, the one who natters on and on and never listens. Kelly gave us an example of this that had already happened on this cruise. River asked where Kelly was from (probably having forgotten that she had answered this question in the past) and she explained that she and Brian live in Edinburgh and that she works as journalist covering the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, among other things. River nodded his head, started talking about Edinburgh, and then, like a failing large language model, asked if Kelly had ever been to the Fringe Festival. At that point Kelly decided she would do whatever she could to avoid sitting next to River in the future. She and Brian then talked about another couple they know (also, like River, Americans) who have been on many cruises but are not on this one. Evidently they've been banned by the vegan river cruise company after having their credit card company decline payment for one of their cruises, telling the credit card company that they hadn't been on the cruise. So then Dirk (the head of the vegan cruise company) had to prove that they'd actually been on the cruise so as to get his money. Fortunately, this wasn't difficult, as the couple had posted numerous pictures from that cruise on social media. Why would someone act so brazenly? And for what? Now they can't use the services of one of the most affordable companies offering river boat cruises in Europe.
After breakfast, Kelly and Brian gave us a tour of their room and showed me a janky hack someone had attempted to make the light in the switch off when the door is closed. There's a switch that does this, but the door wasn't quite reaching the switch, so someone had stuck some padded tape on the door to make it a little thicker in the place where the switch needed to make contact. But the padding had developed a dimple and it no longer worked. So now the light was on all the time and they just wanted it off. It's times like this when I wonder about how things that seem so obvious to me never occur to others, particularly when it comes to the way objects interact in the physical world. All I had to do was fold some paper into a dense wedge and force it into the gap along the side of the switch button and, through sheer friction alone, it held the switch in the off position. Kelly and Brian were amazed by how quickly I'd solved their problem using everyday materials.
Later this morning while Gretchen was off the boat exploring the German town of Breisach, I was seated in Arthur's (the small restaurant in the back of the boat on the third floor) drinking free cappuccinos from the cappuccino machine and having ChatGPT help me begin my migration of the way configuration is stored on my ESP8266 Remote Control devices. This data had been segregated into an include file, but what I wanted to do instead was to store it all in two arrays (one for strings and one for integers) indexed to numbers stored in a table in the database. These numbers can then be looked up by name, allowing me to send commands like set CONNECTION_RETRY_NUMBER 12, which would then change the integer at index 28 in the Arduino's configuration integer array to 12. This will, when implemented, allow me to remotely change all sorts of ESP8266 behaviors remotely. I had ChatGPT help me with writing various new blocks of Arduino code that I need, which includes numerous #define directives. I also had it create a bunch of MySQL insert statements to populate a configuration_option table with the relationships between the names of configuration options and their indexes in the two arrays.
At lunch, Gretchen and I dined with Kelly, Brian, and new couple Gretchen had befriend: Celia and Clement. They were from the French-speaking part of Switzerland and were in their late 20s to early 30s. Professionally, they were both train drivers in the Swiss rail system. Clement spoke pretty good English, though Celia struggled a bit with it. Neither spoke German. Clement and Celia told us all about what it is like to work as train drivers, though there wasn't much in what they said that you wouldn't know. Switzerland is a small enough country that they both get to go home at the end of their shifts. As this conversation was happening, I was eating a surprisingly good spagetti made from black beans (it was gluten free).
This afternoon, Gretchen and I borrowed bikes from the boat so we could bike across the Rhine into France to visit the town of Neuf Brisach. Celia had shown us a Google Maps satellite view of the town and it looked like something created by artificial intelligence. It was a perfect eight-sided grid of streets surrounded by walls and greenery. Getting there wasn't difficult, as there were good bike paths from the Rhine. As we were arriving through one of the few town entrances (the northeast one), we were greeted by a massive oversized sculpture of an ape made, we later discovered, of straw stuffed around a skeleton and constrained by chicken wire. The actual town inside the walls was unremarkable, despite the regularity of its street grid. And for some reason in the center of the town there is no town square. Where that should be is a square parking lot measuring 1.6 acres in size (it's easy to measure the size of square geographical objects using Google Maps). We parked our bikes near the Eglise Royale Saint Louuis de Neuf-Brisach and marveled at a tiny car parked along the street. Not only was it tiny, but its owner had left the keys on the seat, apparently unconcerned about the possibility of grand theft auto.
We walked out through the northwest exit through the town walls, this one being an actual tunnel through the wall instead of a gate. Just outside the wall was another big beautiful sculpture made of steel and straw, this one being what Americans would call a bison. Since the outside of the town was more interesting the inside, we decided to walk counterclockwise around the outside of its walls, admiring the many little art installations along the way in addition to the big straw sculptures (I was particularly struck by a massive straw triceratops). The wall itself also had some interesting details, such as voids built into its sides that looked like brick pizza ovens.
We re-entered the town through the southwest entrance, which was pedestrian-only and involved a metal staircase. After befriending a cat and retrieving our bikes, we exited again through the northwest gate and continued counterclockwise past the things we'd seen and going all the way to the southeast and then via various roads back to our boat in the Rhine.
Back on the boat, Gretchen and I again had dinner with our Scottish friends. I ordered the bean stew, and it wasn't very spicy but it was plenty flavorful.
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A straw bison sculpture outside the northwest gate of Neuf-Brisach. Click to enlarge.
A metal seahorse outside the walls of Neuf-Brisach. Click to enlarge.
A driftwood sculpture outside the walls of Neuf-Brisach. Click to enlarge.
A straw triceratops sculpture near the southwest gate of Neuf-Brisach. Note those mysterious pizza-oven structures in the wall. Click to enlarge.
The southwest gate of Neuf-Brisach. Click to enlarge.
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