May 18, 2012
To be honest I thought I was going to sleep through the
whole day today! However, I did make it up and dressed by about 11am. Eleven
hours of sleep later I am ready to face a new day in Paderborn and feeling pretty
good about the 40 mile bike ride that Lena has planned for us today. It takes
us a little while to actually get going, but eventually we make it out of the apartment
and headed to the train station to rent the bikes.
Renting bikes in Germany sounds like an easy concept. It’s
really a tourist thing, so you would think that the people who work in bike
shops would at least speak and inkling of English. Well go figure it’s our luck
that we pick the only bike shop in Germany where NONE of the workers speak ANY
English. Somehow, through a game of charades essentially, we are able to rent
two semi decent bikes, one of which comes with a basket attached to it, the
only thing that I demanded. These bikes are nothing like I’m used to though!
For starters they weigh about as much as my horse and carting them up and down
stairs and into buses is no easy task. Luckily, most of the stair cases have
nice little ramps built into them specifically for bikes. Germans are so considerate.
Finally on the bike I realize within about two minutes that the “shifter” doesn’t
work worth a lick. I turn the knob to shift to a lower gear and about the time
I get to the top of the rise, or about the time I get my bike up to speed, the
gears actually decide that they should shift to the gear I asked them to five
minutes before. This is extremely frustrating but I quickly catch on that if I purposefully
hit a bump when I’m shifting the gears will actually shift at the right time.
One problem solved.
Lena and I make it to the bus stop that will take us to the
start of the tour and this is where the real fun starts. First off, sneaking on
to a bus is a great idea, if you aren’t carting two enormous bikes with you. So
we end up having to pay for our bikes, not the end of the world. It takes about
two minutes into the bus ride, however, to discover that we have the worst bus
driver in Paderborn, possibly in all of Germany. No kidding this guy needed to
go back to bus driving school. He would hit the gas really hard and rev away
from a stop and then at the next stop he would get about two feet away and then
SLAM on his breaks to halt before the stop. This would be bad enough with my
motion sickness if I was just riding the bus. Lena and I, however, were trying
to stand up, hold on to our bikes, and attempting to keep them from rolling
right into the older lady sitting in front of us with a walker. I think that
moment is now classified as the longest ten minutes of my life. Somehow making
it to the bus stop with all my contents still in my stomach is a miracle in and
of itself. We manage to make it off the
stop and head towards were we believe is the start of the tour. After riding
back and forth about three times we eventually realize we have no idea where
the tour starts and Lena runs in to ask somebody at the mini golf place.
Luckily, she knows where the trail head is and points us in the right
direction!
A little later than we initially planned on leaving, Lena
and I are finally on our way, determined to make the most of the trip and enjoy
actually being on a bike again. The first 20 miles of the bike ride goes
wonderfully. We pass fields, cows, stables, and agriculture. It was so nice to
be out in the country again, after being crammed into a city for the past two
weeks. I get to see my very first asparagus field, which is really interesting how
they grow it, not at all like how it was grown back in our garden growing up.
They have these long rows and you can see the asparagus shoot popping out of
the ground and you can see where they had already cut some. I suppose they cut
it by hand, I have no idea how you would do it with a machine, but they may
have some way of doing it that I don’t understand.
We go through this very adorable town called Hovelholf and,
after briefly losing our trail once; we head out to the wildlife conservatory
and start looking for signs that will direct us to our next destination.
However, at this point our luck runs out and we completely lose all signs of
our previous trail and there are no signs of the trail we are supposed to be
on. Germans are apparently very good at starting things off with excellent
signage postings and then halfway through the trip all signs completely disappear.
With no other choice but to head back to Hovelhof, we turn around and go back
in the general direction of the town. Finally reaching the town again, and with
a little help from my GPS, we locate our old trail and decide to go back on
that, since we are both tired at this point and have ridden about 20 miles
already. These bikes are not the most
comfortable to be on for six hours, but we make it back to Paderborn with no
more issues. Along the way we pass the
beer festival again and of course have to stop and get some of that amazing
cherry beer again. It was just as delicious the second time around as it was
the first.
Clearly exhausted now, we’ve been riding for almost seven
hours, we go to return our bikes and there is a different guy working. We didn’t
think there would be any problem, but somehow Lena’s bike number got written
down that she owed 9 euros still because she had kept it an extra day. We tried
explaining to the guy that we had paid in full earlier today and that there was
no way Lena had kept it an extra day because we only rented it seven hours ago.
Of course the guy didn’t speak any English and couldn’t understand anything
that we were saying to him, so Lena walked up to a younger looking guy at the
station and asked for his assistance with being a translator. Once again, due
to the kindness of a stranger, we were able to explain to the rental store
employee what was happening and asked him to get out the paper we had filled
out earlier that day that had all our information on it. Turns out the previous
person who had rented the bike had not paid his money and we were able to
straighten out the whole mess. Yup, definitely learning the language next time
I go to a foreign country.
After getting that entire bike mess straightened out we make
a brief stop at the grocery store, where I find a HUGE jar of pickles for like
1.29, we head back to the apartment. We make spaghetti for dinner, and I
actually make the sauce without burning anything! Pretty impressive for me,
though Lena does help with the seasoning of the sauce, but I still like to
think that I actually contributed to a meal for change. Then we sit down and
watch a few episodes of Smallville before turning in for the night. J
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