Happy Birthday Karina!

We hope that you have a fantastic day, and we wish we were closer to help you celebrate.

We love you!
Erik and Torie

A little late, but no less funny..

We have been so lucky this summer to have so many people visit us. Keep 'em coming, we love having guests!

In July, my friend from Red Pine came to stay with us for four days en route to Canada from Australia. I unfortunately didn't get to spend as much time as I would have liked with Liane as it happened to be the one week that I was actually working full time, but she managed to keep herself busy, and have an adventure or two at the same time.

My favorite story is of her trip to Versailles. She got up bright and early to make it out there before the crowds. Four hours later, after some bad advice from various employees at the train station, and a couple of broken down metros, she finally made it to the castle with the new friends she made on the way. Liane had stopped to help a group of Korean tourists who were just as lost as she was, and they ended up spending the day todgether at Versailles (one of whom had studied English at Carleton University in Ottawa!). Liane's version is obviously much funnier, especially when she told it in her frazzled state upon getting back into Paris, so I'll just leave you with the photo of her and her new friends. Maybe she'll write the good version in the comments??? Pretty please???


Thanks Liane for sending the pics! It was great to see you!

Having falafels at L'As de Falafel


Dinner at the Midi Vins

Steve and Christy

Steve and Christy arrived bright and early on Saturday morning. We spent the weekend cafe hopping, and walking around.

They left this morning for Champagne, then Bordeaux, and I think Erik will enjoy a break from all the euchre we were making him play. They'll be back in a week or so, and we're looking forward to hearing about their adventures (they're staying in a chateau!!)


Two boys with bags. They're such a great accessory!


Walking along the Seine.


It doesn't get more Parisian than the Canadian Bar.

Hot off the press!

Well, I've finished going through all of our pictures, and have organized some of the most interesting in an album for your viewing pleasure.

Enjoy!

Erik's new hobby

Can you find the pictures taken after our first day of biking?? (hint: he's wearing his England shirt)




You can click on the images to enlarge them

Two Good Looking People

Just so you don't think we always looked as good as we did in those blue rain ponchos...

We're home!

And it certainly is sweet. We got in at 7 am after a relatively painless and quiet train ride. It seems that top bunks, and older couchette-mates make for a more pleasant ride.


Without further ado, here are some pictures. We took almost 500 shots, and I thought I'd just pull the hightlights off the card, and ended up with 65. Yikes. Hopefully these ones will give you a bit of a taste of what we've been up to for the past two weeks.





Two happy bikers. We weren't lost this day, you'll notice our handy little map in Erik's hand.


It wasn't all about beer...


Look ma, no hands! Having fun in the Ford Fiesta


I clearly couldn't be happier to be eating another sausage and drinking more beer. At a street festival in Frankfurt.

Just when you think Germany has got you down...

...your hotel gives you free internet.

Today is our last day, we leave tonight from Frankfurt on the overnight train. Both of us are looking forward to getting back to Paris, and back to our regular lives. We are officially off German food, and our last couple of meals have been Chinese and Indian. A person can only eat so many meals of sausages and other forms of pork.

But I digress.

Quick update.

We picked up our rental car in Wurzburg last weekend, and were a bit surprised when they wouldn´t accept Erik´s drivers license. Turns out it expired in July, and since it´s not something we use often over here, we never realized it. So I got to do all the driving on the autobahn, which wasn´t nearly as scary as I expected. But I do now understand why everyone here drives nice cars. Trying to merge onto the highway where everyone is going 130 km/h+ in a Ford Fiesta that doesn´t really accelerate at all isn´t only not fun, it´s kind of scary. But we made it up the Rhine Valley and back in one piece, and have enjoyed some great views of the valley and it´s vineyards, and visited some great castles.

We´re happy to be back in a big city, and did a little bit of wandering around yesterday. It´s nice to see people on the street that are under the age of 60, and who probably aren´t tourists. Frankfurt seems to be a big city that doesn´t have too much to distinguish it from other big cities, but we did see an interesting museum featuring some ruins from a Jewish ghetto from the middle ages. Today we´re hoping to hit the modern art museum and the museum of communication. Or, if the sun comes out, we might just hang out on a patio. We´re hoping a few drinks will make the train ride less painful tonight.

We´re looking forward to catching up with everyone once we get home.

Tchus!

ps. I feel that I need to mention that it has rained EVERY SINGLE DAY that we´ve been in Germany. Some days have been worse than others, but come on!! Didn´t the weather hear that we were on vacation????

Happy Anniversary to Us!

Hard to believe it´s already been one year. It seems like it was just yesterday that we tied the knot. It´s been kind of a busy year, but an awesome one. Too many memories from the year to go over, so we´ll just stick to the last two days!

We´re in Wurzburg today, and have had a lovely day. We visited the Prince Bishops Residence, which was fantastic. The first four main rooms that we saw were absolutely breathtaking. The fresco in over the stairwell is apparently the largest in the world, and depicts the Prince´s influence on the different continents. Each continent is represented by a woman on an animal - apparently the alligator was the most representative animal of the americas. Who knew. The next room was completly done by hand in the most intricate stucco work. The artist lost his mind after doing stucco 14 hours a day for 9 months. There was also an amazing room of mirrors that was completely destroyed (along with most of the residence) in a 20 minute air raid at the end of the war that also destroyed almost 90 percent of the city. The mirrors in this room were unique because they had been painted from behind, but they managed to restore and recreate the room to its original condition. The day before, we had seen the name plaques for the restoration of the city wall in Rothenburg. Probably 50% of the names were Japanese, an interesting phenomenon.

We were also lucky because the sun was out today, and it was actually warm for a while, so we enjoyed the roses in the garden of the Residence. We also trekked to the top of the hill to the castle (which was also the Prince´s old residence) where there was a Medieval Times-type show going on for the kiddies. The rain started again before we could start cheering for the "correct" knight. The rain is still coming down now as we make our way back to the hotel before dinner.

Thanks everyone for your anniversary wishes. We are having a great time - it just happens to be periodically interrupted by vertical moisture.

Rain, rain, go away!!!

We´ve reached the end of the biking part of our adventure, and out of the three days we were riding, it rained for two of them. Actually, I think it´s rained every single day we´ve been here, and has been cold too. Where did the summer go?

We stayed at a great guesthouse outside of Dinklesbuhl, so we had to make a 20 minute walk into town. Naturally, the first walk was in the second worst rain that we would see on the trip. The town was beautiful though, and an afternoon on a patio reading Time magazine took the edge off. The woman who runs the guesthouse didn´t speak any English, so we had to get by through single words out of the phrasebook. We did understand, however, when she asked us why our bikes were "schisse." Good question, we asked ourselves, as we wrapped our smaller pack in plastic garbage bags.

We rolled into Rothenburg ob der Tauber yesterday around 4:00. We were soaking wet, and pretty tired. The plan had been to bike to Shillingsfurst and visit the castle there, before heading on to Rothenburg. It started raining just as we left Dinklesbuhl in the morning, and by the time we got to Shillingsfurst, it was raining so hard we couldn´t see. We stopped for lunch, and thankfully the rain slowed down, and we decided to just keep going, since Erik was soaking wet, and we were both pretty cold. In keeping with the theme for the daz, once we got to Rothenburg, the lady that runs the hotel that we are staying at wasn´t home, so we sat on the sidewalk for 20minutes before she showed up. The sun had come out by then, so we were just starting to warm up when she got there.

But we made it, we did most of the biking we had planned to do, and want to do more in the future, on real bikes with real raincoats, etc, etc. There was a nice Dutch family staying at the hotel in Rothenburg. They had been camping for a week and decided to call it quits after a night of rain coming up through the bottom of their tents (travelling with two small kids, to boot). At least we were sleeping in dry hotels in between each bike/swim. Also at the hotel was an English family whose car had broken down. We were a pretty depressing bunch.......but the breakfast was great!

Rothenburg ob der Tauber is also great, except that our footwear in 10 degree rain is limited to flipflops. We´ve spent today checking out the museums and other indoor attractions, and we had a great piece of Black Forest Cake at lunch. We´re off tomorrow for Wurzburg, and have just checked the weather. We´re not too happy to find out that it´s supposed to rain for the next five days. We both packed for the hot weather we had in Paris before we left, so I think we might have to pick up some warmer clothes. Or just eat more sausages.

I guess that´s it. Despite the weather, we are having a lot of fun. German food is pretty straightforward and is just what you need when you´re freezing. After biking in the rain for four hours, I don´t think a serving of pate would warm your bones.

We´re off to find a hotel that we can´t afford to stay at and squat in their warm lobby and drink their beer.

Hopefully we didn´t accidentally book a convertible for next week....

Biking Tips for the Romantic Road

Leg 1: Augsburg to Donauworth, 48km (suggested route)

70 km, 8 hours. Just for comparison, a below average Johnson male can run 20km in 3.5 hours on his feet. With no wheels. So, some tips to avoid this problem....

1. Avoid the rain at all costs. If you must bike in the rain, get a real raincoat. The plastic poncho that you bought will act like a sail in the wind, and slow you down. Plus, it may get stuck in the wheels...

2. Do wait for the tourist office to open at 10:00. Even better, buy the English map online. Remember that you are riding a bike, not driving a car, so regular maps aren´t much help. Good maps could prevent a lot of backtracking, and shave a good four hours off your time.

3. When you see a sign that you think says city centre in German, do take the time to get the phrase book out of the bottom of your backpack. It could save you a tour of the industrial zones of the city you are hoping to enjoy.

4. Make sure you get a decent bike. Just because it felt good for eight seconds in the parking lot doesn´t mean it will be comfortable for 8+ hours. Raise the seat. Raise it again. Wish you had a real bike when all the real senior citizen bikers laugh at you. Make sure you at least sit on a bike once before attempting an extensive bike trip. Take lots of advil.

Erik´s advice:

1. Beer and sausage make all lower body pain dissapear.

2. When in doubt see number one.

3. Even though it´s raining, you should still wear sunscreen.

4. There´s a reason why pedal brakes stopped being a good idea when you were eight. Check to make sure your wife doesn´t buy a bike that has pedal brakes (in my defense, it has hand brakes too) because you´ll end up riding it (isn´t he great????) because it weighs twice as much as a normal bike.

So, here´s the story.

Being the keeners that we are, we figured that we didn´t need to hang around and get the bike map from the tourist office. We had printed off the maps of the route from mapquest, and we had the German road map. No problem, right? Wrong. When we got to the end of the bike route at the outskirts of Augsburg, things started to get really bad. Not only was it pouring rain, but our choices were 90 degree turn from where we wanted to go, industrial park, or autobahn. Seeing as we weren´t driving cars, the autobahn was quickly eliminated. Luckily the industrial park led to another industrial park that led to a gas station that had a pretty poor map of the area, in German only. By sheer luck, we somehow managed to make our way from small town to small town, with only a few moments of expecting death. We did eventually make it to Donauworth, after eight hours of non-stop biking in the rain. It was pretty bad. Our first stop, once we actually managed to get into the town, was the tourist office, for the bike map we so badly needed. They only had it in German, but we didn´t care.

So we hereby issue the "Johnson First Anniversary Challenge", to every child born in the family, and anyone else who thinks they might be crazy enough to accept.

Beat the following.

In the month of your first wedding anniversary
-no map
-less than $200 worth of bikes, that have to be bought the day before
-no German
-two weeks worth of clothes
-Augsburg to Donauworth
-less than eight hours.

If you can beat that time, or survive your second year of marriage after attempting to beat that time, we´ll buy you two beers and all you can eat ribs at the Buena Vista Hotel and Bistro.

See you there.

(by the way, we took the train to the next town to give our bums a break, and the next day of biking was much better. It helps having a map. And sun.)

Leave comments, hope you´re all well.

Bike, Bike, Babz!!!

Well, we´re using German computers, and the y and z are reversed, and Erik is going crayz watching me mix them up as I tzpe. So I´m not going to fix them anzmore.

Anzwaz, we got bikes!!!

Definetlz the most stressful part of this trip was not knowing if that was actuallz possible, but we spent most of the daz zesterdaz visiting five different second hand bike shops before we found the perfect ones. Thez´re not prettz, but thez´ll get the job done, and we´re prettz excited about it.

We´ve got to get going, but highlights so far have included sharing a couchette on the night train with four kids going to Ulm to do an exchange. Thez didn´t sleep, so neither did we. Well, thez slept for a bit after Erik told them to ´ferme ta gueule´(his first French insult).

Oh, and beer and sausages. The sausage record that was set zesterdaz bz Erik was 11. He´s a bit behind todaz, but I´m sure he´ll catch up. And 1L glasses of beer that cost less than a half pint in Paris. And I got made fun of bz a table of older German ladies at the beergarten this morning because I was onlz drinking a pint, not a litre. Thez all had their full litre steins, although some had to use two hands to get them to their mouths.

It´s a great life.

We're off!

well, not quite.

But we're all set. Unfortunately our train doesn't leave until 10:45, so we've got the entire afternoon to fill still. I think we'll rent a movie, then we're going out for dinner, so there's no dishes to wash. Time Machine, here we come!

So I guess this is goodbye, we'll try and post during our adventure, but no promises. Also, this is post #200!!! Hard to believe, isn't it?

I'd say goodbye in German, but I haven't learned how yet, and the phrasebook is already packed. I hope to hear from everyone soon, and wish us luck!

Bye for now!

Blog Updates

I've had a bit of time on my hands these past couple of days, and have been playing around with our blog.

Aside from the new look, I've also figured out how to add a link to our feed. This means that you can now subscribe to our blog through a newsreader and receive updates in your inbox. It's not quite that simple though.

I read blogs through the newsreader that is part of Thunderbird, my email program. I've never used Outlook, so I can't help you there, but I would be surprised if it didn't have a similar feature. Here is the link on how to create a RSS and Blog reader using Thuderbird.

I hope this feature helps people who don't tend to check our blog regularly (cough, cough, Alison, cough, cough). I like reading blogs this way because it means I don't have to check each site to get updates, instead I get updates that are kind of like emails. But they don't look as pretty.

There you go. Hope that keeps you busy for a bit, I'm off to pack.

Did I mention we leave tomorrow??? I should probably start learning some German...

Yay! I'm so glad that people are leaving comments. It's nice to know that people are reading (and I know that you are...).