This Past Saturday.

Honestly, Michele and I tried for three weeks to take a bike ride—but we were bedeviled by a series of challenges: the first weekend I got a cold and decided that despite the fantastic perfect biking weather, I would spend the weekend, at home, cooped up in bed.

Which I did reasonably well, until my cold morphed into laryngitis.

Then we made plans for the following Sunday—until I had the bad news/good news that I had to cancelled because I needed to be in Berlin Monday morning to give a presentation. In the process of cancelling Sunday evening, we moved our bike ride back to Friday afternoon. Saturday, as you might recall, was Eurovision and there’s no way this faggot is going to miss that show.

When that Friday came around, it was raining and we ended up cancelling.

After I returned from Berlin and my presentation, we re-scheduled for this past Saturday—which amazingly enough, worked!

We met at Domplatz in Erfurt, which was the site of a sport-festival (see the pictures below) and bicycles that one can rent by the hour. Michele dialed up a magic phone number, punched in some other numbers, and presto, a seconds later we could unlock the bicycles and I was promptly accosted by some locals who asked me what I knew about the bicycles and I had to direct them to Michele because I was totally clueless—I’ve only read about these really cool rent-a-bike schemes before, I’ve never actually participated.

After answering their questions and picking up her husband, we headed west from Erfurt, shadowing a river-like body of water and the train tracks toward Frankfurt. Fortunately we did not get that far, we instead ended up at a lovely beer garden—it was maybe a 30 minute bike ride, which considering I haven’t ridden a bicycle in at least four years, was just about long enough that I started to think that my knees needed oiling, but not so far that I started looking for a quick lube.

Amazingly, and the best part of this, is that we were bicycling up hill all the way to the beer garden, so a couple hours later, after two beers, a schnitzel, and a piece of cake, going back to the middle of Erfurt was easy—and it went much faster. Really a whole lot faster.

It was really a great Saturday evening—I ended up getting home at midnight and sleeping like a baby.

Waiting for a wayward volleyball.

Reaching for the ball

Maybe God is watching over the players?

No grass for caged soccer.