The reunion (16-18 June 2006)

Friday, June 16, 2006 - reunion begins

Since I arrived in Melk right about noon, my room isn’t ready yet. I leave my baggage and head out for a walk down to the river, hoping to catch a breeze and maybe find a cool spot to sit. I succeed, and when I head back to the hotel, my room is ready and I get a nap and a shower, for what little good it does. Then it’s up to the Stift, and I’m incredibly early for the reunion checkin. I wander a bit as they get organized and Herr Sack offers me some water, since I’m clearly in need of cooling down.

As more people arrive, I stake out a table with chairs and am joined by Ellie Schellinger and her family. She was class of 1979, so I didn’t really know her when I was at the Prep, but I recognized her from yearbook photos and we knew a lot of the same people. Her husband and I end up talking photo-geekery for a while, which is kinda cool.

Once everyone has gathered, we do a tour of both the old school area and also the museum and church in Stift Melk. The museum would have been more interesting in a smaller group in nicer weather, but I was pretty tired. I did take a bunch of photos of the church, both interior and exterior. Once the tour concluded, it was time to head to the new Stiftskellar where dinner would be served. Plus beer!

Dinner was a pretty good affair once I settled in. I ended up hanging out with some folks from the class of 1990, including Kasya Willhite and Martin (unclear on their relationship), and a classmate of Kasya’s whose name I forgot to write down. Also Gisele (?) and her husband. She was in Melk when I was there, and was in the US during the first half of my senior year at SJP, so she knew me, but my memories of her were much less clear. I’m going to have to dig out the old yearbooks to fill in some details, apparently. In any case, dinner was good, beer was good, and the company was excellent.

Saturday, June 17, 2006 - Stiftsgarten

The program for Saturday had a formal gathering with speeches and such in the morning and going through lunch. Rather than putting on my suit, and filling it with sweat as I made my way up the hill, only to be stuck listening to speeches for hours, I skipped that, and wandered on my own. But first I needed to get a watch. Stores in Melk are generally closed on Sunday, and only open until noon on Saturday. If I was going to have any chance of knowing what time it was, I needed a watch, and needed to get it soon.

Watch purchased, it was time for some more wandering about. After grabbing lunch, I headed up to the Stiftsgarten. When I’d gone to school in Melk, a lot of this area was just overgrown and more or less wild. In the intervening years, it’s been cleaned up and the pavillion has been renovated, with a coffee-shop added. It was a pretty nice area to walk around, and since it sits somewhat higher than the Stift, and much higher than the river valley or the town, there were nice breezes to be had in the hot weather.

After heading back to town and grabbing a beer with Ellie and her family, who were sitting in the café outside their hotel, I crossed the street to my hotel for a nap. I also needed to pick up some laundry. I had both T-shirts and two pair of shorts washed at the hotel, which left me in better shape for clothing. Then it was into the suit, and up to the Stift.

Rather than walk up the hill, I took a taxi up, and shared it with Charles LaFond and family who were staying at my hotel, too. He’s the brother of a gal in my class, so I at least knew a little about him. Dinner was with Alan Stone and his family, since there were seven of them and the tables were laid out for groups of eight. Alan was somewhat unique in being the only person I’d talked to who had enjoyed the morning event.

Sunday, June 18, 2006 - walking around town

I wasn’t alone in skipping Sunday mass. Quite a few folks had been out late on Saturday evening, including a bunch who had just turned 50. They had apparently gotten back to the hotel at 5am, bloodied and muddied from having spent the wee hours drinking in a cave down by the river.

I headed up to the Stift for brunch. Met with Ellie and her family again as we waited for mass to let out and everyone else to assemble. Over brunch, I talked with other folks from her class, including Joe Kroening, who grew up just a couple blocks from where I live (and visited me on Wednesday July 12 in Minneapolis), and Burt Benrud, who works in New Orleans (for Café du Monde) and who wanted some software at the friends and family price. I was happy to oblige.

When brunch was done, the scheduled stuff was done, and everyone headed back to town. I had lunch at my hotel, and ended up talking with the guys who’d been out all night, as they prepared to head out. Pat Lang, Dave Kremer & Conroy were fun to talk to, but I was pretty sure going out drinking with them would have been a bad idea.

The rest of the afternoon was mostly spent wandering Melk and stopping for a beer whenever I felt like it. I mostly looked at how things had changed in town. Gasthaus zum Goldener Stern had either burned down or been torn down, and new owners had it in a new building. A number of the smaller shops, like the hardware store where Colman, Grover and I had bought knives in 1980 was gone, having been replaced by things more oriented to the tourist trade (like the coffeeshop the hardware store had been replaced with). The big thing that surprised me was the near-complete lack of mopeds in town. In 1980 there were a lot of them. This year, there were some full-size motorcycles, but no mopeds at all.

And Melk itself is a lot more “touristy” now. Perhaps part of it is being there in the summer, instead of the winter like when we were going to school there, but there’s more to it than just that. The Danube river cruises depart multiple times per day, and there’s a major bike-trail along the river with Melk at one end of it. It makes sense, but even though a lot is the same, there have been a lot of changes in the town.