It’s insane! In three days, my Fuggle rhizome grows for about 4″ already.
More will be updated!
The budding hop
April 23rd, 2009Midway
September 6th, 2008So I came back to Stuttgart today. Carrying a minikeg of Mahr’s Brauhaus Kellerbier and a bunch of glasses from Czech really made me all sweaty from Universität station to Telecom Hotel. Oh well…
The good news was that Telecom Hotel has Internet as part of the stay.
Some random note:
Sophie Brauhaus: Beautiful! Lovely service! Well, all right beers. I grade their Schwarzbier as the the best of what I tried there. I tried both the house bright beer (Pils perhaps?) and Schwarzbier. They both had the shared note sour and somewhat unclean flavor. Sadly, their Schwarzbier could not surpass the industrial brand Köstritzer not to mention good old American ones like Samuel Adams Black Larger, Saranac Black Forest, or Gordon Biersch Schwarzbier. Perhaps I just came at the wrong time they tap the keg. Other that that, the Swabian beef dish was great. I couldn’t complain.
Germany, Poland, and Czech
August 31st, 2008Quick update: sore right heel, feel great, great foods, great scenes, great pilsners…
Day 1: 105 miles.
Day 2: 73 miles. Some decent climbs.
Day 3: 78 miles. Lovely climbs all the way to Prague.
I will update the entry later when I am in Bamberg.
Stuttgart to Dresden
August 26th, 2008What a ride, 10hrs!
Thanks to the long ride, I re-read The Call of The Wild by Jack London. What a great book! I first read it in Vietnamese and it was even better in English. Buck! Hm…great dog! The relation of Buck and Thornton gave me a whole new meaning of what a puppy love was. It could be rough, uneasy going, fragile at times with terse communications…but what protected it from falling apart was the fortress built by good deeds that they did to each other.
Hahaa, I almost took the wrong train from Wurzburg to Erfurt. On the online ticket, it was printed as train from platform 10a/b. Little that I knew of, two parts of the train would split at one point. One would go to Erfurt and the another would go some where else. Luckily, when I talked to a man who was also travelling with his bike realized that. So he told me to walk to the 1st half of the train at the next stop. Phew!!!
Some observations:
0) There was a sign of no smoking @ Weissenfels and yet the train driver took off and got a smoke break right there. Train riders also smoked there before depart. Hm…
1) Once I got close to Leipzig, I could see that many buildings and manufacture-like ones were abandoned. Was that the fault line of the old and the new after 1989?
Some pictures.
PS: Paderborn Pilsner was so much better than Dinkel Acker Pils. Moderately hopped, medium body, creamy head…something that I could love. 
The coming Anarchy
August 25th, 2008So I spent of most of Monday reading “The coming Anarchy” by Robert D. Kaplan. Good stuff! It’s rather bleak in some way but prophetic. Keep in mind that he wrote the book back in 1999 and published it in 2000. I was half way off the book already.
Later evening, Martina took me to the Fernsehturm, the tall TV tower. It’s really neat to be able to see the surroundings from 150m above the ground.
After that we had dinner @ the Saigon restaurant. It’s interesting that two ladies at the restaurant had two very different accent (in Vietnamese); one was straight from Hanoi and the other one must had been from Saigon. As it turned out, they both had been in Germany over 20 years. No wonder that they still had the authentic old school accent. The food was good. However, from what I had heard, I would not recommend the soup ones. So I had the grilled pork with rolling rice paper. They met the standard. The Dinkel Acker Pils….well not so good. I couldn’t wait to have som real Pilsners from Saxony or Czech.
Photos are @ here.
Bye bye for now.
PS: Preparing stuff for my coming ride was exciting. I felt like being back in Tech Cycling team: got excited before the race and then would get dropped few minutes later from the poleton. Well, not this time with folks to Poland and Czech.
Journey to the East
August 25th, 2008It´s really neat that I found some bugs before I left.
Despite my preparation (or lack of), I still managed to forget the wine bottle from California for Martina. Luckily, I had Tina’s picture of the Big Sur. It’s neat that the Smart Way bus had enough space for my oversize bike box. 3USD from Blacksburg to Roanoke Airport, geez, you can’t beat that.
One thing that surprised me at the Airport was the stupid fee that US Airways charge folks on the luggage. I wished that I still had the U.S. Cycling membership to use the bike voucher. Oh well…
It seemed to me my flight was full of delays. Starting off was almost 30 minutes waiting the US Airways lady to find the option to charge me for the bike box. ‘Cause I booked the ticket way early before they changed the fee but she couldn’t find the option to do it. After a frenzy of calls, she managed to get it done. The only thing (or two?) to smooth out my impatience was her darling Texan accent and waving hair that reminded me of Kerri Russell.
After that I thought that everything would went well. Oh no, here came the cool thing. The seasoned Dash-8 airplane taxied to runway, made the run…and slowed down and turned back to the gate! So the pilot said that the instrument that indicates the decending and climing had some mismatch. In layman words, it was showing the aircraft climbing while it was still running on the runway! Now that was fun!
So we came back and everyone frantically asked for another ticket instead of waiting for the avionic crewmen to replace the glitched instrument. So I ended up having one hour delay. Once I got to Charlotte, I had to run like crazy to the catch the flight to Frankfurt: 2K run with backpack and camera bag was fun!
….
My ICE train from Frankfurt am Main to Stuttgart was 25 minutes delay! So much for Express. Apparently, I Cee Express now.
I was on and off sleeping mode while touring Stuttgart and Esslingen. See my pictures for some impressions. But it was nice to seat down to enjoy some Schwarzbier with Martina after a long walk around Stuttgart.
Pictures: http://photo.neofob.org/excursions/Euro08/
PS: The TSA agents need some serious fitness training. I mean, how can you sprint to catch terrorists with that shape?
Tentative plan
August 20th, 2008So Reimund emailed me a few days ago about our biking trip to Poland and Czech Republic. It will span over 4 days with a century for 3 days in a row! I wonder if I will survive that. At least I brag that I did a 4 days ride on Blue Ridge Parkway before. Should I bring my D300 and 18mm/3.5 AIS lens? Probably!