I Don't Know, I Don't Know What the Blog is About

Christmas - the only reason Rothenberg ob der Tauber - "above the Tauber River" (from here forward referred to simply as odT) exists. Seriously. For those of you in the know, the original Käthe Wohlfahrt store resides in odT. For those of you not in the know, check out this in-depth Wikipedia page. The reason I bring that up is Penny and I visited there last Friday. It was a nice little day trip. The following day we went south (odT is southwest of Bamberg) to Ingolstadt, the town I spent a month in through a school program during the summer of 2002. Again, a nice day trip though it was much colder on Saturday than Friday. I remember eating some goulasch soup at a restaurant called The Post Wagen during my time there. To this day I claim it is the best goulasch soup I've ever had. I'm not sure if it is because it was the first time I had real goulasch soup or not, but trying it again was one of my reasons for wanting to visit Ingolstadt. Unfortunately The Post Wagen is only open for dinner during the weekends and with an hour and a half drive awaiting us on the return trip to Bamberg we didn't want to stay that long. Oh well, maybe I'll be lucky enough to swing through one time this winter on my way back from snowboarding.

Remember when athletes first signed $10 million dollar-a-year contracts? Now it is pretty common to see salaries in the teens or twenty-million dollar range for baseball, basketball, and even football players. Heck, even golf now has the FedEx Cup which awards $10 million to the winner. Anyway, it appears as though Alberto Contador, this year's Tour de France winner (also winner of the Giro d'Italia, Vuelta Espana, and the 2007 TdF) has a contract offer from Astana for roughly 8 million Euros - or about $2,928,474 billion US dollars with the current exchange rate! Ok, maybe it's more like $12 million, but still, who would have thought that a cyclist would have a contract that big? Crazy. (Just on a side note that I placed in parenthesis to highlight the fact that it is a side note, here [scroll about halfway down and read the section called Keep 'Em in College] is an interesting article about college athletes and money.)