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!

You might be a traveler if...

Guess which one is mine...



For those of you who are not familiar with my travels of the past year, a little history.

I just got my first passport last January. I had traveled previously, mainly to Canada or one of the islands, but never needed a passport (all pre-9/11). So this was something exciting for me. I loved getting my first stamp on the relocation trip!

Well, I ended up traveling a little bit more than initially anticipated. Fortunately, a lot of the travels were to countries who were part of the Schengen Agreement which basically means I do not need to go through border/passport control when traveling between two countries who are part of the agreement, thus not getting stamped. However, I did make a few trips to countries that do have border control, Czech Republic, Ireland and UK.

Side note on Ireland and the U.K. They signed the Schengen Agreement, but do not participate in the open borders. I have also found, outside of the US, they can ask the most questions of anyone and make entry to the country feel a little bit like getting past the guards in "The Neverending Story". You have to solve the riddle before they let you in. In addition, Ireland uses a stamp that takes up an entire page of the passport.

Well, all of this travel, plus losing two whole pages to my German Resident Visa, put me in a little bit of a situation by the end of October. I counted the number of empty pages and realized that only a few more trips and I was going to be out of room. So, within 10 months of receiving my first ever passport, I had to have pages added to it. This did present a problem as I live in Germany, so getting the passport to the passport agency and back was not going to be a short process and it is rare that two weeks go by without me legitimately needing my passport.

Fortunately, on a business trip to the US I was able to get it to an agency to expedite it for me. When they received it, they decided that not only did I need to have a book of pages added to it, but I probably should have 2 books of pages added!

As you can see below, it adds a little bit of heft to ye old travel book. Some have looked at it and called it "dodgy", and it did cause a little bit of a stir the first time I was in Costa Rica, but after 5 people looked at it and examined the seams, they let me leave the country...



Two trips to Ireland - two whole pages gone...



Mexico and Ireland (left page) UK x4 and Czech Republic (right page)