Lifting our bikes may have slowed us down a little (not actually a weekend photo):

I never figured out how this guy mounted his bike:

The bike polo was definitely a good way to end the day.

This is why it’s critical to invest in a few good pairs of bike shorts. They let your friends breathe, and keep friendly friction to an absolute minimum. If the internet is to be believed, quality shorts are one of a cyclist’s most important pieces of gear.

That’s not all the internet has to say about the matter. I’ve been doing a lot of questionable googling recently, and apparently it’s very important to let your friends have an intimate, trusting relationship with your shorts. No barriers, no judgement, and most importantly, no underwear.

I’m not the jealous type, so that’s fine with me. I know that my friends need room to breathe. But like a protective mother, I’m worried about my friends. A speed dating session in a sports-store changing room seems like a great place to meet interesting shorts, but what about safety? Those sports store shorts get around. I don’t like thinking about how many other men have pulled this very pair of shorts over their sweaty, hairy friends.

I guess meeting new shorts always comes with risks. I just have to let my friends run free, and live life on the wild side.

I have no idea of how to properly plan a bike trip, but my gut is telling me that if I want to pedal a weighted bike for 10 straight days, I’m already behind in my non-existant training schedule. My legs enthusiastically agree. The internet tells me that my ass should be screaming in terror, but it’s currently passed out, beaten and bruised, from the first day of real biking in months.

To prove (or disprove) the motivating power of public humiliation, I’m going to let the entire internet judge my training. I’ll log my workouts in a public google spreadsheet. You can use it for drinking games, you can forward it to all of your friends (you’ll have good luck if you send it to at least five people!), or you can just feel sorry for how badly I’ll embarass myself when I fail. Or maybe, just maybe, you could even give me some advice. Who knows, maybe I’ll even listen.

Oh, and to make it interesting, my bike is in Canada.

Until May.

Like most other languages, German has a system for the two digit numbers above twenty (zwanzig), only the Germans decided to mix things up a bit. Instead of saying twenty-one, you flip it around, and say one-and-twenty (einundzwanzig), like some ancient founding father whose car got 40 rods to the hogshead.

Things get worse when you start using larger numbers. German’s notoriously long words are usually compound words on steroids, since German encourages you to pair up any remotely related words, like some kind of redneck singles club. If you ask a English salesman about the price of a new car, he might tell you that it costs twenty-four thousand three hundred ninety-five Euros. A German would say this:

“Das Auto kostet vierundzwanzigtausenddreihundertfünfundneunzig Euro.”

word by word, that’s four-and-twenty-thousand-three-hundred-five-and-ninety. Simple, no?

A flight back to Germany, a series of trains, and a handful of levels in FFIV.  An uneventful day, which was just what the doctor ordered after a week and a half in Austria.

I definitely didn’t expect the surprise birthday party. I think that I could grow to like it here.

After a day of hiking on a mountain, a day spent walking around town is child’s play in comparison. For the record, child’s play is becoming increasingly difficult for us old timers. We attempted another geocache, designed by young scouts for young children. We wandered in circles in the woods for 30 minutes before deciding that the cache was lost and that our search was futile. Several days later the intrepid young scouts confirmed that the cache was where it should be, and we were in fact just very old and dumb. Those scouts should learn to respect their elders, and keep that racket off my lawn.

Our spirits crushed and energy drained, we headed out for some tranquil, relaxing rock climbing. I should really look into picking up the sport. It’s certainly more legitimate than Parkour, although the shoes hurt a lot more. The pictures are less awesome, to boot.

Two days of rigorous exercise had put us in the perfect state of mind to enjoy the culmnation of our trip: all-you-can-eat sushi. With surprisingly little sushi.

You can only spend so much time nestled at the foot of Austrian mountain ranges before you find yourself seduced by high altitudes and the thrill of the outdoors. We grabbed our gear and headed up Bärenschützklamm.

We stopped at the peak of the hike to do some Geocaching and stop for a break. Felix surprised Nina and I by pulling a camping stove and pot out of his bag and cooking us some garlic soup. I don’t care if it was the mountain air, the exercise, or the suspiciously tasty powdered soup mix, but I wonder if every meal tastes better when you’re on top of a mountain.

When we were back on solid ground, we experienced the legendary burgers from Brot & Spiele. Felix made the bold claim that they served the best burgers in town, possibly the best burgers he’d ever had, and I have to admit that I won’t be challenging his claim any time soon. The hike might’ve affected the flavour country we found ourselves swallowing, but there was no time to slow down and savour the experience: WALL-E waits for no man. The movie was incredibly well done, and pretty much everyone will find something to like in it. As a computer geek and someone who spends a lot of time thinking about video games, I was floored by the graphics in the early scenes of earth, and the characterization the writers brought out with just a few sounds and gestures was phenomenal. Story-telling and technology at its best.

But the best part of the day was yet to come: On the fourth or fifth attempt, I beat Dr. Lugae in Final Fantasy IV DS. I loved that game on SNES back in the day, and now I can love it wherever I go.

You just can’t have an Austrian vacation without a trip to the Zotter chocolate factory. We opted for a self-guided tour, feeling like Charlie let loose in the factory. We sampled, snacked, slurped, and became totally gorged, almost unable to move.

 

That was when we found out that we’d only visited half of the tasting rooms.

We decided to walk off our blood sugar levels with a tour of Riegersburg Castle.

 

The castle has stood for over 850 years without ever being taken, although I presume that its threat level is reduced every century or so.

 

The castle now houses – er, castles – 3 hectares of vineyards, with grapes ripe for the sampling. Since the vineyards grow on the slope of the mountain the castle is built upon, the grapes get more sun than the rest of the region. This means that grapes for red wine, notorious sunbathers, can grow here in an otherwise inhospitable region.

Our stomachs wised up to our plan, and they started to rally against us. We’d anticipated this gastronomical mutiny and arrived at a local Buschenschank just in time. We were pleasantly surprised to find that the couple that owned the Buschenschank had spent several years in America, where they met. Ms. American added an untouched North American accent to our dinner conversation. If fluent English speakers keep popping up in every small town and unexplored corner we visit, learning German might be slow going. We ate good food and smiled as the locals finished their drinks, paid their bills, tipped their hats, and hopped on their tractors for the drive home.