These 2 oldies (did I really say that?); we are preparing for a bike ride of some 850 or 900 k’s depending on where you check. Sadly we are not training as much as we should, but we are getting together the bits and pieces that might just make the trip manageable and we are now the proud owners of Lycra.

We both have nicely padded bike shorts so that our tender parts remain intact after spending many hours on bike seats. I want you to know though,  just in case you were worried about it. We will be wearing lycra covering things. We do not intend to inflict the sight of us  in Lycra on the eyes of the world. It might cause mass hysteria or some such. I don’t want to explore what harm we may cause.

We also have mirrors on our bikes, fingerless leather backed bike riding gloves (to manage the grip as your hands become sweaty), decent panniers, and bike helmets. We look almost “cool”

or should that be “hot hot hot”  because we will be wearing lycra and feeling very very hot under the August sun.

So if you see a news item somewhere in the month of August of two people in Lycra visiting many bars and cafes on the route from Haarlem in the Netherlands through a bit of Germany and some sections of France, all relatively close to the Rhine it just could be us. Now it will be us if the persons described are as follows – two older people, one with grey hair and the other bald with whiskers speaking with an unusual accent for these parts, so maybe they could be from New Zealand – Yes I think that would be us. If they are described as last seen entering a bar or cafe, sweating profusely and gasping for cool clear liquid, Yep that would definitely be us.

Take note of that news item cause if we do not arrive at our destination in Untersiggenthal in Switzerland you may be the only person who knows exactly where we have been and then the search for two oldies in Lycra can begin.

In short – no we are not

A beer was needed to cope with the ride through cobbled streets in Bloemendahl

We are not in good shape for our ride – but we are working on it.

And we will have time to do it, the trip I mean, after all Best Beloved will have retired – (forced to retire, unheard of in New Zealand), so we have nowhere to be at any specific time in the month of August or indeed September, other than having promised grandson we will be home in New Zealand mid to end of September.

There are 31 days in August and we plan to leave here on Friday the 5th. Why Friday the 5th? Well it is rubbish day, so everything not on its way to New Zealand already, and not suitable for recycling at de Schalm, will be in the rubbish bag and out for Friday morning early and then we will leave. We will not ride far on that day as I think we will be quite tired – so somewhere handy in the Netherlands that we have not yet visited – and then we might have a rest day Saturday.

We do plan on an average of 50k’s a day with a stop every 3 or 4 days so we can see actually see interesting places on the way. Now of course we can change tack at any time.

Why do I say that? Well I do have asthma and wind gets me badly – so if it is too windy we don’t want to be too far from a rest place or a train option. That is part of our planning to follow a picturesque route, but never so far from a rest or train option that we have problems if my breathing goes to the pot. My asthma is not extreme, just a bit annoying at times.

We haven’t fully worked out the route, so worse case scenario is that we will need to ride 950k’s and if we did that without rest days then we would need to average 36.53846 k’s a day. If we can ride 50k’s a day then the riding will take 19 days and that means we have 7 days up our sleeves as rest days which could mean we have 2.7142 days of riding before we have a rest day. Now that isn’t so bad – 3 days riding and a rest day. We can do that.

We also have a really great backup plan!

Son lives in Switzerland – so if we are too far from the train and too far from a bed – we will simply phone him as long as our mobiles are charged and say “come and save your parents”. And he might just do that for us.

Ready to go to the Beach at Parnassia

Now our training program is already to pot – We don’t ride our bikes in the wet, cold and drizzly weather as we don’t wish to risk a fall and bones breaking right now.

Our training program is defined in this book Cycle for Life Bike Basics + Body Basics + Challenge yourself, by Nicole Cooke – Olympic Gold Medallist Beijing 2008.

And NO it is not about cycling in the Olympics – it is about being the best and the fittest cyclist you can be from food, clothing, trip planning and then there is that word “FITNESS” planning.

Sadly the 3 x 8 week training programs we hoped to complete are now not possible. Why is that? We have only 22.4285 weeks left so cannot complete 24 weeks of the recommended training programs. So it is good there are trains, sons, rest days, and time up our sleeve.

And it will be an adventure however we get to Switzerland in August 2011.

There you go – our first bike ride in our training program – for our bike ride to Switzerland from Haarlem in the Netherlands at the end of Best Beloveds job here come August this year.

And we did manage a pathetic ride of 12.5k’s – and as it always does – the wind blew into our faces on the way to Spaarndam and again riding home again.

At least we have started.

I wonder if there is a widget for us use to record our mileage or is that kilometerage?

Yesterday, early evening, Friday 22nd October, we were in Amsterdam and were looking for and found the map shop – Pied a terre, to start finding maps for our proposed bike ride from the Netherlands to Switzerland. We found said shop. Said shop is huge with more maps than you could ever ever imagine exist – but that is another story.

On the way towards the Central Station for the quick journey home we happened upon an Irish pub, and we were certainly in need of a quick pint having walked several k’s on this autumnal evening. Outside said pub, was a sign stating they were showing the England / All Blacks game tomorrow.

We thought great, we knew the All Blacks were coming to Europe, but didn’t know a game was to be on today.

In trying to establish just where this game might be shown in Haarlem we visited two prospective establishments last evening. Cafe Pitcher where we watched 6 nations rugby last season and Tierney’s Irish Pub. The Pitcher said Tierney’s always show the games. So off we went to Tierney’s to check them out, and yes they said, of course we will be showing the game.

The enthusiasm didn’t seem quite right – so this morning I have checked the various Rugby websites

England plays the All Blacks on the 6th November

So there is no rugby today after all.

Why would an Irish Pub in Amsterdam have a sign out saying they are to show the All Black / England match at 12 today, Saturday 23rd October – when it is not being played for another 2 weeks.

Is that an example of Irish baloney?

Thanks all for playing along.

It was last Sunday. We were well rested, and the effects of this spring seemed to have lessened a bit for us both.

It was nearly a great day – this Bison hunting day.

We left home reasonably early, and as we always do we took clothes for the rain, and clothes for the wind. We had to stop about 1k from home to add clothes to protect from the wind.

Now Morgan has given us both a special Swiss bag for carrying across the body over one shoulder and it has pockets for everything. It is a great thing for hiking as they do in Switzerland and for cycling as we do here in the Netherlands.

Mine contained my little Samsung camera to take those all important Bison photos, my puffer for my asthma, my strepsils for my sore throat, and my sun tan lotion for the sun, tissues for you know what, and did I say it already; probably, but I also took my little Samsung camera to take the all important Bison photos.

I know you are saying out there – what am I on about.

Well, I added a sleeveless sweater vest thing to stop the wind. I took off the wonderful Swiss bag, the gift from Morgan, put on my Vest thing, and reduced the affect of the wind. I rode off happily without my Swiss bag, my camera, my puffer, my suntan lotion, my strepsils, my tissues, and oh dear, my camera.

We rode for nearly 5k’s before we realised. That is we rode to our destination – the Bison Park, well it isn’t called the Bison Park, but just now I cannot remember what it is called. But we rode there all the same, stopped the bikes, started to lock them up and I realised I didn’t have the bag, the wonderful Swiss bag from Morgan.

and that Best Beloved rode gallantly back to see if he could find the bag – not a hope.

But the best thing that happened on this day is that there were no Bison to be seen anywhere. So the camera wasn’t needed.

But I would like 4gb memory card back

So if you found the bag – you can have it, I just want the photos I have not downloaded from our boat day the day before.

So if you have the bag and camera and all the other bits and pieces in it – we can swap – I will give you the charger for the camera battery and you will give me the 4gb card with the photos on it still.

Message for Morgan don’t buy us another bag. We can replace it ourselves, as well as the camera. I just hope we get the memory card back.

We left by train for Munich on the Monday morning after the birthday garden party. Fortunately M had looked up the trip for us on the internet because we had missed the train we had intended to catch and were very surprised at all the changes that we had to make. That is, we had tickets to Zurich to Munich – and it turns out we had to change trains 5 times to get there. We had absolutely no idea. We could still have been sitting on a train somewhere in Switzerland in a yard or something and may never have been seen again.

Our tickets actually said in small print Zurich, Stuttgart, Munich – the first Swiss train conductor took one look and pretended to clip the ticket or so it seemed – because we were  not on the Zurich to Stuttgart train and I guess throwing 2 oldies off the train would not have made his day. We were on the train that we had originally planned to be on – which did not go anywhere near Stuttgart. I will look up the route and add the details of it. That is where an Oldies OE goes awry – one cannot remember all the minute details.

Previously the Amsterdam ticket office had printed out the stops for us to get where we were going – the “lazy” one didn’t do that for us and we could have been sorely embarrassed and lost. And just maybe – because the Dutch do not admit to mistakes – she didn’t print the stops out because she had in fact booked us on the wrong train. Fortunately we hadn’t reserved seats as well.

It was a very interesting trip but bits were quite harrowing. We went to Munich, Rottenburg op de Tauber (a medieval town in all respects except their toilets had reached late 19th century standards and were pretty yuck) and Berlin. We visited the Dachau concentration camp which was the really harrowing one for me. We went there on a tour which did mean we received all sorts of information – but I am a really visual person – and the tour guide led us like lambs into the room where people got undressed to go into the showers – through a narrow door into the shower room and I was out of there so fast. I couldn’t go back because of the crowd so had to go forward through the shower room directly into the crematorium – and then out through the next room (I have no idea of the purpose of that room maybe record keeping).

We also visited the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie as well as the newish Jewish memorial which is a stunning memorial again with a very harrowing journey underground through the stories of the holocaust.

We did drive by Hitler’s bunker area – now a very unassuming car park and walked down the road under the newer Linden trees as Hitler had had the original ancient Linden trees chopped down so he could see his troops march by better – or maybe so they could see him better.

We saw many other wonderful buildings, the Brandenburg gate and more, enjoyed a meal at the original Munich Hofbrauhaus as well as having a meal of pork red cabbage and potatoe in a Munich beer garden. The beer garden was lovely and great fun until an obnoxious American decided to tell us his life story, and how very polite we are – we didn’t tell him to get lost – we just left once we had eaten when he was annoying someone else.

A Birthday in Untersiggenthal or was it a visit to Bad Säckingen?

We have just been to Switzerland for A’s (M’s partner) birthday, followed by a meandering through Germany.

The party was held in their garden, the weather was great and the garden looked absolutely lovely all set up for the day. Lots of tables, umbrellas, a couple of barbeques, food, flowers, live music and great people.

And one of the birthday presents was not an external hard drive as suggested in this picture.

M had set up a volley ball net and the youngsters played volley ball – and one older one did as well. I didn’t see Best Beloved playing volley ball but it seems that he did.

There was a lot of preparation – including creating salads for about 60 people, and there was so much pork to BBQ. All New Zealanders out there can relate well to that. The BBQs were all being used well into the night.

It turns out everyone had been asked to wear a hat – and A and I just had to have new hats – and that was a great experience in itself. The day before the Garden Party we all went from Switzerland to Germany, just across the Rhine, to buy hats at a wonderful hat shop in Bad Säckingen.

New Zealand needs such a wonderful hat shop. There was a hat for everyone, and for every purpose, (hunting, shooting, fishing, garden parties, weddings, summer, winter, fashion, small, large, many colours, many fabrics and many different fibres, terribly English and much much more) and we tried on so many. A and I had wonderful new hats to wear at this birthday garden party – and we were so busy we didn’t take any photos to show the garden, or our hats.

The photo of the boy playing with the water spout on the fountain was taken because he reminded us so much of Tomas – and behind it happened to be the hat shop, still no name but if you find the fountain and you will also find the Hat Shop. It is on the road up from the very old wooden bridge, Holzbrücke, which is the link between Stein in Switzerland, and Bad Säckingen in Germany. We have walked across this bridge many times. I found the video of the bridge on Youtube. It is of a ride through Holzbrücke, which happens to be the longest covered wooden bridge in Europe at 203,7m. It is actually the ride from Germany back to Switzerland.

We did also collect cakes and other bits and pieces for the party while there – so you can see that it wasn’t just a fun hat excursion.

Bad Säckingen seen from the Swiss town of Stein – over the Rhine to Germany. It is a rural town according to Wikipedia – located in the very south of Germany next to the Swiss border and lies on the southern edge of the Black Forest area. It doesn’t seem very rural to us from New Zealand, and it is so beautiful. It has wonderful architecture, history, stories, great urban sculpture, perfect gardens, great cake shops, bars, restaurants, and bargains and every time we have been there – beautiful weather.

We started gathering photographs and memories from family for a birthday book for him in November, and everyone was very helpful because of course our photographs etc are not all here in the Netherlands. Boxes of our personal things are at various homes in New Zealand still.

We did not remember in the 8 months or so leading up to this move that we had also planned to deliver to him the story of his life for his 40th birthday. He didn’t know that we wanted to that, we had just planned it – only in planning the move to Europe that thought had receded somewhat – until November when an urgent email went out asking for memories and photographs.

And they came from everyone and everywhere in the world so we were still able to give to him a photograph album from baby to 40 as well as a life story with his Whakapapa.

It was fantastic.

But there is also the story of our flight to Zurich, from Amsterm via Munich to Zurich – and it took us 12 hours, and then the party itself with pig on a spit, freezing conditions, and wonderful fun. There is so much more to tell