Monday, October 5

From	To	Distance (km)	Average Speed (km/hr)	Max Speed (km/hr)	Odometer (km)	Riding Time (hr:min:sec)	Push-Ups
Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany	Werbach, Germany	80.58	17.6	44.8	1474	4:34:19	250

(1255 words)

Breakfast with Anja

This morning a got up at 8:00 AM and was greeted as I exited the bathroom by Duncan the affectionate cat. I sat in the kitchen for a while with Duncan all over me until Anja came out of her room. Matt got up eventually, and the three of us had a nice long conversation in the kitchen. Matt and I ultimately invited Anja to breakfast, so we all quickly washed up. Anja then led us to a restaurant that has a room with big windows overlooking the Taubertal.

We had a long breakfast and spoke of many things. Anja, we learned, is a historian specializing "world history as seen from the Bavarian perspective." As a result, I asked her many questions about about German history.

Given that Matt and I had in been riding around Germany during an election, the conversation at one point turned to German politics. I asked Anja about how the German elections actually worked, because I had once heard that the Germans somehow ensure that the party makeup in parliament accurately reflects the parties of the voters.

Anja explained that Germany has elections every four years for the Bundestag, their main parliamentary body. There is also another house called the Bundesrat. As a German citizen, you have two votes: a vote for a person, and a vote for a party. Every person who is directly elected gets to go to the Bundestag. The directly elected people make up half of the 696 members of the Bundestag. For the other half, they get an ordered list of names from each of the parties that get at least 5% of the vote. They give a seat to the party with the highest number of votes, then halve that party's votes. They then repeat that process of awarding a seat and halving the votes until all 696 seats are taken.

Battle of the Wierd

At one point during breakfast, Anja asked me why I was piling all my meat and cheese onto one piece of bread.

"Actually," I explained, "I usually prefer to eat each piece of cheese and meat separately by hand, so I can get the taste of each item isolated. But I didn't want to be barbaric or gauche in front of you, so I was eating it this way this morning."

"That's not barbaric," Anja said.

"Well, it's kind of wierd," I said.

"No, it's not wierd either," Anja insisted. "I've already met wierdest person in my life," Anja proclaimed, "and that's me."

This comment shut me up for a moment. Anja was basically asserting that I couldn't possibly be wierder than her, even though she only barely knew me. The comment, and the smug look in her eye after she said it, raised my competitive dander a bit. I decided to impress her with some other examples of my own wierdness, to show her just who she was dealing with.

"I'll give you an example of wierd," I said. "See this?" I held up my napkin, which was still perfectly folded into a rectangle. "When I eat, I never unfold my napkin. I just use it in its original shape. I didn't even realize that I did this until my girlfriend Siew pointed it out to me one day. She said, 'If it starts out a square, it stays a square, if it starts out a triangle, it stays a triangle.'"

"So?" said Anja.

"OK, how about this," I said. "When I eat a meal, I like to eat my favorite food last. So as I eat, I form a sort of mental strategy of what to eat in what order so that my favorite food will be last, so its flavor can be what lingers on for the next half hour or so."

"So?" said Anja, obviously still unimpressed. "When I eat I'll often push the good stuff over to the side of my plate and eat the rest, so I can then get the good stuff last. Sometimes, however," Anja continued, "if I'm eating with my Mom and sister, they'll reach over and grab the good stuff and eat it."

"Something like that happened to me once," I said. "One time I was eating at Burger King with my Dad. I had some kind of sandwich, a drink, and a bag of fries laid out in front of me. I had mentally pegged the finest french fry specimen -- a long, firm yet tender, not too soggy, not too crunchy specimen -- as the last fry I would eat. I ate the lousy fries first, the short brown crunchy ones and so on up through to the reasonable fries, but always avoiding the chosen one, the best fry of the bag, so that I could eat it last. Suddently, right in the middle of the meal, my Dad non-challantly reached over to my pile of fries and grabbed the chosen one, and, as I watched helplessly, annointed it in my ketchup and ate it, staring at me blankly as if nothing had happened. After that, I altered my french fry strategy for that meal. Given that I then realized I was in unfriendly territory, I ate the rest of my fries in order from best to worst."

In further discussion, Anja and I agreed that in general in life, it is good to try and delay gratification, though sometimes it is good to eat dessert first.

Matt, having sat silently through this battle of the wierd, decided to try and help me out a bit. "I'll tell you something that's wierd about Bill," Matt offered, "He talks to himself."

"Oh, at least I don't talk to myself," Anja said. "I only talk to my cat, my plants, and my computer."

In the end, I didn't think Anja was wierd at all. I liked her and so did Matt.

Riding the Taubertal

After breakfast, I snapped a photo of Anja in front of the Taubertal. We all walked backed to Anja's apartment, where Matt and I finished packing and loading our bikes. We gave Anja a hug goodbye, and we were off.

Anja had suggested we ride the Taubertal north to the Main. So Matt and I headed past the Goethe Institut, through the Burggarten, down a very steep path to a little covered bridge across the Tauber, and turned north.

The Taubertal was beautiful. It felt like a real fall day. It was blue jacket weather all day, cloudy in the morning and early afternoon, sunny in the mid afternoon, cloudy again in the late afternoon. I left my sunglasses off all day to better see the fall colors. Going down one street lined with tall aspens, I craned my head back and looked up in the trees at the yellow-green leaves, most of which were still twittering on the branches, but many of which were gliding slowly down through the air as I rode under them. We also saw lots of apple trees pregnant with apples in their branches, and surrounded on the ground by apples that had already fallen. At one point Matt and I stopped and each chose a good apple off the ground beneath a tree, and stuck the apple in our panniers for later eating. It was a nice ride.

Even though we started late (12:15 PM) we rode 80 kilometers, stopping only in Konigshofen, to buy groceries and visit a bathroom in a gas station. We ended up in Werbach, at a hotel with a pushy proprietor.