México!

Ok, so it has been a while since I blogged - sorry about that. Not much has gone on actually. I haven't traveled (until this week), nothing exciting has happened in Bonn, and as my son says after I get home from a ride, "No fresh booboo's".

But, that all changed on Monday, the traveling, not the booboo's. I had meetings in México City this week. Fortunately, there is a direct non-stop from Frankfurt to México City, unfortunately it is 12.5 hours to get there. Thank goodness for personal entertainment systems on the airplane. I watched two movies, two TV shows and played a few games. I also worked a little bit...

I really liked México City, mainly for the food. Everything has a great flavor to it. A lot of really good spices and salsa on everything! The other thing I liked about the trip was my hotel was right in the airport and the offices I had meetings in were right in the airport as well. All I had to do was roll out of bed, walk to the office (deciding which of the 3 Starbuck's to stop at) and I was at work. Same thing at the end of the day - no Taxi's! Although the taxi's are cool. They are old VW Bugs, well, old body style since they still made them for México until 2 years ago, and are green with white tops! Very cool looking.

Finally, what trip to México wouldn't be complete without a margarita? Well, just in case you missed out on one while you were there, Lufthansa offers one as a welcome beverage in addition to the normal champagne, water or orange juice. Very nice start to the long return flight... Next week, Prague!

Driving and Music

It has been a while since the last blog entry...

So I did go for the bike ride on Sunday. It was a great ride. I went out with a new riding partner who is used to flats and not much climbing. Now I have heard he is a really strong rider on the flats, so I was a little worried about going for a ride as I do not consider myself a super strong rider. However, the hills leveled the playing field. All in all, it was a really good ride. The weather was good and the roads were dry. In the end it looks like we will ride some more in the future and he invited me to use one of his bikes in the States next time I am in town and want to go for a ride.

After spending the day with family, I had a quick business trip to Brussels, well, the meetings were at the airport, so I didn't really see Brussels at all.

Anyway, it is 235 km (141 miles) from Bonn, 225 of these are on the autobahn :). The company has a fleet of cars we can rent out for trips like this. I had a relatively new BMW 320 with a 6 speed :) I really enjoyed cruising on up the highway on this trip. Even though the car was a combi (stationwagon), it drove like a sports car. Plus the car even had a hook up for the iPod, so I got to listen to good old american music for the entire ride up and back!

This leads me to my last good tidbit for the day, one of my favorite artists Toby Keith is releasing another album in June! Thank goodness for iTunes. It makes buying music so easy and the iPod makes travel so much better, especially on long flights like the one next month to Mexico (12 hours).

Sun at last!

Today was a great day. We dropped our son off at school and then went shopping for the babies room. We actually got a lot accomplished!

The best part of the day though was the fact that the sun came out! It was gorgeous. So, after getting back from many different stores, I finally was able to go out for another metric century (62 miles for those of you across the pond). Since I have made plans to ride another century on Sunday with someone whom I have never ridden with before (and happens to be a pretty high ranking executive in my company), I decided to take it somewhat easy and not to try to kill myself. I should try that more often! I finished the ride in 3 hours and 30 minutes, a whole 45 minutes less than last Saturdays ride. Of course, the lack of rain and the lack of blood probably helped this some.

Well, I think tomorrow will be an easy day instead of the 4 hours I had planned, need to save the legs some for Sunday!

More... Rain

Today I did not get to ride again because of the rain. This weather is just horrible. Once it rains one day, it seems like it rains forever. The only thing that made today better than others is that it was a holiday so I did not have to work today. Unfortunately, that also meant that not a thing was open in Germany today.

This gave us the perfect opportunity to go to Roermond, Netherlands to check out an outlet center there. Of course, about 5,000 other German's decided to do the same thing so a 1.5 hour drive, became 2.5 hours, but it was worth it. We got to walk around a nice shopping center with great stores. My wife made out really well with some new sneakers.

One of the coolest parts of the trip was as we were traveling up the A 61, we came upon a group of 8 Polizei Motor Officers. For a while, they were right in front of us, it felt like we had our own escort going!