Bike trip: Metz to Konstanz

We're catching up mentally to the point where we can write about the bike trip, now ten days in the past. On June 11, we met up in a hotel in Cologne (LATE at night for B!). On June 12, we went off to the Radstation at the Hauptbahnhof and picked up two bicycles for a week. These were pretty decent trekking bicycles - 24 gears, front suspension, etc. 52EUR for a week - not too bad! We put my large backpack (with the books I need for syllabus prep for the fall inside) in storage, paid for a week, and headed off to Metz in France. We'd deliberately chosen the slow, local trains, partly to save a few euros and partly because it's very easy to load the bicycles on and off those sorts of trains.

In Metz, we were very nervous about whether we would actually manage to connect with our friends J&J, who had been visiting friends in Paris for a few days before joining us for the weekend. Last year, my sister's train from Strasbourg was canceled, the train my friend and I took from Tuebingen was canceled, he left his brand-new weekend pack on the train, we missed connecting with our other friend who came from Heidelberg and became unwell in the course of the day, and in the end it was only by chance that the whole group connected first in Cologne and then in Holland - let's just say that our experience with meeting friends for a bike trip was not great.

However, this time, all was well. We ran into J&J first thing in the station and headed off for lunch. Naturally, by this time it was about 14:30, so there was no fresh, hot food to be had. It is always difficult when first arriving back in France/Italy to remember that outside of very touristy restaurants, you can only eat lunch and dinner at socially acceptable times, and 14:30 is too late most places. So baguette it was.

The Esterhazer Mosel Radweg book had warned us that the first section out of Metz would not be pretty. Thankfully, the book also mentioned the stupendous Chagall windows in the cathedral. But it was both frightening and funny to see that the first road the book directed us to was something that felt much like a highway rather than a calm country road. We all expected that the police would show up any minute to ask us what we thought we were doing. This feeling was only intensified once we got off that road only to find ourselves in the middle of the port (is that the right word when it's on a river? seems unlikely) of Metz next to the trucks. We rode at a leisurely pace toward Thionville. On the way, we had the sort of encounter that belongs in books: with an elderly Frenchman who wanted to tell us that he was all of 80 years old, and he remembered the war - of course, he thought we were German, as did everyone else.

Our way from Thionville was dominated by the four huge cooling towers for the local nuclear reactor. At first, they seemed very distant, but we soon realized that they were quite close, just so huge that the whole landscape had to shift to accommodate their size. We tried for a bed in Cattenom (thankfully, one of the J's was comfortable asking in French) but with no luck, so we crossed the river to Koenigsmacker where the book claimed that the Hotel Lorraine was a rather expensive retreat.

According to the prices posted on the window, however, the hotel was right in our price range. No one was around. There was a sign on the restaurant saying that it was closed on Fridays, but the hotel did not have an equivalent notice. After about half an hour of standing around, trying doors, and ringing doorbells, a kind but rather slow elderly woman appeared and rooms were secured. It was now around 20, and we knew that did we not sit down to dinner shortly, there would be no dinner. We headed back across the river to an outdoor place where all our dreams came true - at any rate, the dreams that involved a piece of roasted meat the size of a head topped with Roquefort cream sauce. (Just B, but still.)

When we returned to the hotel, we could not help noticing that the entire village had turned out for a cover band consisting of four-five old hippies playing American and English classic rock covers. At maximum volume. For hours. And hours.

Have you ever had the experience of walking in somewhere and have LITERALLY EVERY SINGLE PERSON turn to stare at you, despite being clad in ordinary clothing, fully dressed, and in no way unusual otherwise? This was our experience in Koenigsmacker. It was quite terrifying. We had to sit down in the bar for an hour just to kill some time, assuming that at 23 the concert would have to wind down, but no.... not until 2am did those old hippies stop rocking!

More to follow.

Our view in Siena

The picture below is the view from our window in Siena. We eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner right next to the window, which is pretty fantastic. We have a huge room with arched ceilings and a sofa in the loft. The kitchen is literally in a cupboard, which seems strange at first until you realize that when you close the cupboard, you can't see any of the mess! The cleaning lady seems a little appalled at just how much we cook, but we can't exactly afford to eat out every day or even very often, and in Assisi we won't have access to a kitchen. The other day, we made farro tagiatelle with fresh porcini sauce, which was amazing even though I didn't buy the porcinis the first day I saw them in the store and so was stuck with the dregs. I've never cooked with the fresh version before, so that was fun. Now there are figs - I better make sure to get some before they too disappear. It's been a long time since I was in Italy during this season of the year, and I'd forgotten how good the fruit is: melons, apricots - all at their best. Our favorite restaurant is serving a melon risotto which I have to try next time we go - the first time, all we could focus on was the various porcini dishes. The most fantastic tomatoes are around 2EUR/kilo, so a typical day might see us eating farro salad with tomatoes and pecorino for lunch, and pasta integrale with tomatoes followed by pecorino for dessert for dinner. In the US, I've always had trouble finding farro, although I believe it's available at some health and specialty stores. Farro is around 15% protein, which is high for a grain, but more importantly, it has a nutty flavor and barley-like texture that make me think I'm eating like a true hipster contadino whenever I have it.

Before arriving in Siena last Saturday, we spent one night in Pisa because our flight from Cologne got in late in the evening. B had booked a random B&B which we picked because it was close to the train station and the cheapest place we could find - around 65EUR/night for a private room. It turned out to be one of the most charming places we've ever stayed. B will post a picture later but let me just say that we had a view of the leaning tower from our terrace! The place was an apartment with just two bedrooms and two baths that had obviously just been fixed up with satellite TV, A/C, internet, a kitchen, and, wonder of wonders in Italy, complete night-time silence. Did I mention it was around 100m from the train station? Incredible! We didn't do any sightseeing or even go to our favorite bakery on the other side of the river, since we had to get to Siena, but the place was nice enough to make us want to come back just to stay there again.

The last couple days before we came to Italy were a little crazy. Wednesday evening (the 17th), we arrived in Koblenz, having biked the length of the Mosel river from Metz in France to its end in the Rhine. More about that trip to come. Our posterior sections were not in the best of conditions after six days on rental bikes not built for us. So, on a whim, we decided to return the bikes in Cologne and head to Brussels the next day. Unfortunately, a sad miscommunication about which track our train left from (hello, B, you could have just asked!) meant that we missed the first THALYS we had booked, but luckily we were able to change our ticket without any trouble. To add to the morning's mishaps, just after we left Bonn, the ticket controller came by and informed us that our tickets were not, in fact, valid as far as Cologne - but, unusually for a ticket controller, she told us this "just FYI"! (Next time, B will actually know which Bundesland Cologne is in, and so will I.)

The THALYS was nowhere near as fantastic as we had hoped, addicted as we are to the long-distance comforts of ICE trains, but it was certainly fast. As we sped through both Aachen and Liege, we fondly remembered certain mishaps that occurred on a bike trip there last year (Luik?!?, the ambulance, and so on). We even sped through Verviers, scene of the vending machine pre-dinner dinner.

Brussels was fun. 24 hours there were far too short, and we were too physically tired from biking to do much ambitious sight-seeing, so instead we ate. The strangest experience was going to dinner at Aux Armes des Bruxelles, which is located in the incredibly creepy street Rue des Bouchers, which is lined by three-language menus and touts on both sides of the street, leading to a claustrophobic feeling remedied only by being received into the cool French brasserie nature of the restaurant. I daren't recount exactly what we ate - let it be said that the meal was absolutely spot-on, with the minor exception that my cheese was served at refrigerator rather than room temperature.

Friday morning, we did a leisurely workout in the gym at the hotel (booked on Priceline for a meager 55EUR, although they wanted 21EUR/person for breakfast so we high-tailed it to the bakery just across the street), then hopped on the THALYS back to Cologne, where we picked up the luggage we had deposited there and repacked. Now, my backpack was left in the conventional left-luggage depository, but the lockers are another story. Cologne train station has a fully-automated locker system, where you simply put your bags into a machine, and the machine whisks them away underground to some far-distant locker, then returns them to you when you insert your personalized card in a matter of 40 seconds, to any of the automated locker stations! I'm not explaining this very well, but the coolness of seeing your bags disappear into a locker-sized compartment, then knowing that they travel to some place unknown before coming back to you 30 hours later or whenever is quite fun.

Pictures of some of this will follow at some point, although B has been a bit lazy with the camera. During the first part of the bike trip, our friends J&J took all the pictures, so hopefully we'll get some from them at some point to share.