...Bicycles?...

Wednesday morning dawned bright and sunny.  After a delicious breakfast reminiscent of those I had in Sweden Christian and I  were off to the train station to meet his friend Jan and Jan’s friend to go biking in the Black Forrest.  We waited a short period of time at the train station and I took pictures of the lovely scenery.  I was a little scared when Jan showed up because he was dressed in spandex and a professional riding shirt, his bike was obviously really nice, and his shoes clipped in to his pedals.  My fears were allayed however by his friend’s appearance in jeans and a t-shirt, hair down, and a bike meant for riding city streets with a basket in the rear.

We rode the train for about an hour, upstream of the Enz, and then were to follow the river back down stream.  The first part of the ride was through the Black Forest and then through several small towns on the way back home.  Most of the ride was absolutely wonderful.  We rode through the forest, the countryside, and many small towns which were quintessentially German.  The scenery included blue and yellow fields of wheat, rolling hills, and many a town built around small churches.  We stopped for lunch in the Black Forest and sat by the side of the river.  We stopped again later in a small town at a Beer Garden where Jan had lunch as he had not packed one.  We also stopped at the ruins of an old Roman house.  The only difficult parts of the ride were figuring out the gear system of the bike at the beginning and Christian had some mechanical issues with his bike towards the end.  We rode from about 11 in the morning to about 4 in the afternoon, with plenty of stops, and going slow enough for …. And I to keep up.  On the whole it was quite fun. 

 Upon arriving home Christian and I showered as we were both quite sweaty and dirty.  All of the teens in the house spent the early evening in the backyard on our various electronic devices – Christian and Johannes on their iPods and myself on the laptop.  Christian’s father began grilling later in the evening and again we had an absolutely delicious dinner.

Christian had to eat quickly however because he had a driving lesson.  In order to embarrass him all of us, except Johannes, went to the curb to wave, clap, cheer, and take pictures as he got into the driving school car and departed the house.  He returned a few hours later unscathed and ready for desert which was fresh fruit with real whipped cream.

For those of you who keep up with natural phenomena you will already know that there was a lunar eclipse that night.  We sat chatting in the yard for some time and after some vigorous discussion about the nature of lunar eclipses we began looking for it in the sky.  As we could not see it from the yard we drove up the side of the nearby mountain to join several other cars and vans to view the eclipse – which was actually quite interesting.  It passed rather quickly though, and then it was back down the mountain and off to bed – or in my case off to post to the interwebs about all of my journeys.