Beauty and the Beast

How beautiful a sport is cycling? Seriously. I know there are a lot of drug problems in it (probably the same level as in any professional endurance sport, it's just that no other professional endurance sport has an event as large as the Tour de France each year to highlight its problems). But I'm talking about the pure beauty of a rider and his bike. Just amazing.

We got into the Paulaner tent this past weekend at Oktoberfest. Pretty cool tent, as I'm sure they all are, but not as exciting as either of the two previous tents I've been to - Augustiner and Hofbräu. Of course maybe I didn't have as much fun because of what transpired the day earlier. I'll break down the entire weekend for your reading enjoyment:

I went to the train station to purchase tickets for three people (Penny, Will, and me) to and from Munich, leaving Thursday night and returning Sunday afternoon. I also picked up tickets to and from Prague leaving from Munich on Saturday and returning on Sunday for Will and me, as Penny planned to spend the day in Munich with friends. The plan was to train down on Thursday, fest it up on Friday, hit Prague on Saturday, and return home on Sunday. As an old soccer coach used to say, "good thought, poor execution". Yeah, so on the way to Munich Thursday night I realize that I forgot my passport in my apartment. Fast forward to Friday at Oktoberfest; all I'm thinking about is how I now have to take a train back to Bamberg Friday evening and hope to get back to Munich by 8:30 am on Saturday. I get another ticket (and by now the cost is rising) that was scheduled to have me in Bamberg by quarter past eight on Friday night and back in Munich by 6:15 the next morning. Great - I can even catch a few hours of sleep in my own bed. So what happens next? I miss my connection in Nürnberg (I was sleeping) and end up in Würzburg. Now I have to spend even more money on a ticket from Würzburg to Bamberg. That finally gets me to my apartment about 11:15 pm and my return trip to Munich departs at 12:07 am. Could I have made it? Yeah, but it would have sucked because I would have been on a train right back to Würzburg, then another connection in Regensberg; not something I wanted to do. So I suck it up, buy fuel, and drive down to Munich, about a two hour drive (only because I can cruise at 100 mph due to the lack of traffic that late). So that pretty much voided our return tickets from Munich, a cost I was willing to absorb to get back to Munich as soon as possible.

In the end Prague was nice and the weather cooperated, but 29 hours of travel in a three-day period wasn't too much fun.

Enjoy.