Thursday, September 17

From	To	Distance (km)	Average Speed (km/hr)	Max Speed (km/hr)	Odometer (km)	Riding Time (hr:min:sec)	Push-Ups
Illzach, France							200

(640 words)

Lounging at Valérie's

Today Matt and I basically lounged around our friend Valérie's apartment, taking naps and thinking up excuses not to go on a day ride on Friday. Valérie is a school teacher whom Matt and I met one year ago at a German Language school, the Goethe Institut, in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany.

Matt and I attended the Goethe Institut in October of 1997, right after we completed our second European bike tour that September. Given that the September bike trip challenged our muscles, we studied German at the Goethe Institut to challenge our brains.

Valérie was sent to Rothenburg to improve her German skills, which she uses in her teaching. But Valérie was not the only school teacher from Alsace that we met in Rothenburg. It seemed like every third or fourth student we met last October was a teacher from Alsace, which meant that Matt and I ended up making a lot of friends that all live in the same region of France.

Because we knew so many people from Alsace, we decided to ride our bikes to the region as part of our bike trip this year. I sent letters to ten of the French teachers who we'd befriended, letting them know that Matt and I would be coming through and inviting them to a reunion dinner, which I called a "Stammtisch."

In German, a "Stammtisch" is a table in a restaurant or bar that is reserved for regular customers, all of whom know each other and meet regularly at that restaurant or bar. For us, however, the word "Stammtisch" had yet another meaning. Every Wednesday night when we were in Rothenburg, the Goethe Institut would organize an event they called a "Stammtisch," in which students would meet in a local restaurant for food, drinks, and conversation.

Our Stammtisch was set for Saturday night, and Matt and I had nothing planned for Thursday except for a trip to Basel (in neighboring Switzerland) in the evening. We probably needed a rest after our first ten days of riding, to help our bodies adjust to so much exercise. So we did our laundry, played with Valérie's cat Mao, and took naps. I picked up and read a German comic book, with the title Zwischen Leben und Tod (Between Life and Death), that Valérie had bought in Rothenburg. The story was set in Rothenburg, and although the plot was a bit silly, the drawings of Rothenburg were quite nice and it was good practice for my German.

Valérie left for work in the morning, came back and made lunch for the three of us, then returned to work in the afternoon. In the evening Valérie drove us to Basel, where I had organized a meeting with Mike Mannion, a software person who had e-mailed me about certain improvements he'd like to see made to the Java programming language.

Mike had told me he'd be standing in front of the Swiss Air sign at the main train station in Basel at 7:30, wearing a blue anorak. Unfortunately, I didn't know what an anorak was, so I chased after anyone wearing anything remotely blue and asked if they were Mike. Mike showed up 30 seconds late (a lateness that was, as he put it, "grounds for censure in Switzerland"), and we were off to a pizza joint. Mike's anorak, which was wrapped around his waist, was a mid-length jacket suitable for wearing in rainy, cold weather.

After pizza, the four of us went for Movenpick ice cream, and finally coffee. As it was in part a meeting inspired by a common interest in Java and software design, Mike and I spent a few minutes talking about design by contract, Java, C++, Eiffel, and other related topics. After we said our goodbyes, Valérie, Matt, and I went back to Valérie's place in Illzach.