Crashes, County Roads, and Cleanliness

As you may have noticed, I failed to post on Friday. In my defense, that was due to travel between Leavenworth and Winfield. Why travel to the in-laws you ask? Two words - demolition derby (five more words - greatest day of my life):

That my friends, was the winning car. The tire was MIA for the last 15 minutes or so of the derby. In homage to the winning vehicle, I went for a ride this morning sans rubber:

A beautiful sunrise, cool temperatures, and miles of rollers:

While on my ride I got to thinking about stupid products that exaggerate a problem to help sell their worthiness. I realize as I was sipping water from my mold-free water bottle that the bike world has gotten in on the action:

Are we to believe that the same dishwasher that cleans our bowls, coffee cups, and drinking glasses does an insufficient job cleaning our water bottles? I for one may just jump on this wagon and market everyday drinking vessels with screw-off bottoms. What's next, tear-away, disposable saddle covers? What the world really needs is some sort of measuring device, or perhaps a picture-like object we could see ourselves in that would prevent us from going out in public with our ties looking like this:

If his tie were any shorter it would be a bow tie.

So to recap; demolition derby rules, cycling in the early morning in Kansas rules, short ties rules, and creating a river in order to sell a bridge certainly does not rule. Suzy Kolber definitely rules.

Be safe out there kids, there are window-less vans in holding patterns as we speak.

More Free Time = Maybe More Posts?

Yo, back in Germany for a couple months. I’ve been riding a decent amount (days that is; not miles since I’m out of shape) as well as playing mad amounts of Super Mario Bros Wii.

The new bike is sweet. It is stiff, light, and fast. Once the issue of my extremely low physical fitness level goes away, I’m sure that I’ll be able to fully enjoy riding the new Bianchi.

Penny and I will be heading back the States around the beginning of June and will spend about a year in northern Kansas. During that year I’ll study for and take the LSAT as well as apply to law schools. Not sure where we’ll end up in 2011, so the list of possible schools is too big to even discuss.

I figure with all the extra time I have each day that was previously consumed with a steady job, I should be able to post more often. We see if my slackerdom doesn’t flow into that endeavor as well.

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.