Day 3 - A Much Better Ride
Rothenburg – Heidelberg, Germany – 296.7km

Well I still can’t seem to get online and I am a bit behind on writing, but I had a much better time today. I hooked up with three other riders apart from the main group. Two guys, John and Mike, and a girl named Liz (she is married, don’t even think it!).

Mike rides like I do, which is to say that we are here and let’s ride the crap out of these bikes. John doesn’t like the fast hard-core stuff and Liz seems to like it, but she is learning. That is OK…everyone has to learn sometime, right?

We ended up doing a pretty good ride and saw a lot of beautiful German countryside. Castles were literally “popping up” out of the countryside and we followed several riverbeds and streams. Not a whole lot of twisties, but some definitely fun routes. We got lucky a couple of times because we would be cruising at 140kmph and then about when we would slow down to enter a town we would see the police. So we definitely avoided some tickets, there.

To those of you who don’t ride bikes – I’ll keep mentioning “the twisties” as we like to call them. What are they? They are the roads that twist back and forth like a cork screw. If you have ever drove in mountainous terrain then you probably know what I am talking about. Some bikers love them, some hate them. Since I ride sport bikes, I love them. And I have a feeling that we will get our fair share, soon.

We also had a nice lunch at a café where nobody spoke English. We made out the menus as best we could and pointed at the items. The food was most excellent. I had some type of smothered ham and mushrooms with snitzel. It was nice to sit outside at the café and enjoy a refreshing lunch.

A short detour was made to an old castle. It was pretty interesting and I wondered what it must have been like a few hundred years ago. I can’t believe that they were able to get up and down the narrow staircases with all of their armor and / or garments on. I am not exactly huge and I had a pretty hard time navigating the staircases. Still, the view from the top was pretty incredible.

We finally arrived in Heidleberg and stayed at a wonderful hotel. It was in a “courtyard” area which was built around an old church. The only thing I didn’t like about the town is that it had way too many tourists (that is the pot calling the kettle black, eh?). And again, no A.C. We sat outside of the Hard Rock café listening to American rock, eyeballing the eye candy and tossing back a few cold ones. I did some shopping for some folks back home but I had the problem that the shops wouldn’t ship the items back to the U.S. or it was all your standard tourist crap. Mom and my niece will have to wait.

Now that I think about it, I am actually writing this on Day 4 and I still haven’t bought anything for myself or anyone else as of yet. I guess I better get busy on buying some souvenirs. The problem is that I don’t have room in my luggage for much and my mom and niece get priority.

Keeping the shiny side up in Europe…..