New Plan

Going to head north to Lyon: through Provence, staying with many awesome hosts! Then to Dijon on a bike path (our current host is a bike tour guide who lives in an amazing property outside of a little castle town: we are BBQing tonight; he is very friendly, and filled with information). Then North to Belgium, and to the Netherlands, where we will stay with Thomas and Thea, with whom we rode last summer down the coast, part of the way. When we get to Germany we will take a train if we are running out of time...

It is going swimmingly so far. We woke up at 5 this morning to beat the heat. We arrived at our location by 1: amazing!

Some maladies thus far:
1. Food poisoning and throwing up outside the tent.
2. Overheating.
3. Small small pain from the knee.

Not so bad, I suppose.

Inventions?

plus

1. A generator powered by bike wheel that charges something plugged into an outlet (I phone?)

2. A handle bar clip camera stand for taking photos of yourself(s). Apparently this already exists and costs $1. Jeez...


Also, a how to tip: water is always available in cemeteries, even when everything is closed on Sunday and you are going to die due to dehydration.

In the Groove

We have gotten our biketour groove on! A few very exciting things have happened:

1. Full appreciation of biking distances meausured in kilometers.
The faster the distance decreases, the faster you feel like you are biking! We finally figured out (by we i mean jonathan) the kilometers to miles conversion relationship-- 5 miles equals 8 kilometers. We have been doing about 80 km a day, so 50 miles. But 80 km sounds better, right?

2. Pre-planning warm showers visits.
For the last two hosts, we called them the day of (2a. Bought a cell phone!), and were lucky enough that they were both free, but now we are trying to go to internet cafes more often and call people earlier. The last hosts we had were SO nice and said that if they had known we were coming earlier they would have bought us American breakfast ingredients and made us pancakes like they had for their last American biking guest!

3. Routinely visiting Boulageries
This morning we stopped at our 3rd boulangerie of our France route. I had a coconut merengue cream ball for breakfast and Jonathan had a chocolate croissant followed by an apple turnover. This is the type of bike tour groove were talking about here.

4. Unabashed use of Baby powder and butt cream
Hopefully the only people reading this blog are close friends and family that know i have to share about the condition of our booties. Sooo riding for 7 to 8 hours a day can really rub your skin in some weird ways. Our gracious most recent hosts, Jean-Michel and Magalie in Villenueve gave us a cream that has been extremely helpful. So now the routine is: stop at the public bathroom, get water, then stand in the street rub this crea, on our bottoms and shake baby powder in our shorts. Its working!!!

5. Actually planned our route
We finally sat down last night and counted the number of days we have in Europe and mapped out what we want to do with those days. So here it is in 3-4 day chunks (We are currently in St. Maximin):
St. Maximin -- Lyon
TRAIN from Lyon-- Paris
Paris -- Burssels
Brussels-- Amsterdam
Amsterdam-- Berlin
PLANE Berlin -- SFO
I cant believe we didnt really plan it all the way before, but we had to feel out a few things I guess...

We miss everyone and hope everybody is enjoying their various summer endeavors!

nice is nice!

we are in the cote d'azur in the blazing hot and beautiful city of nice. we have taken full advantage of the bike tourists coach surfing; called warmshoaers, and are staying with a generous and friendly older french woman, whose computer and washing machine have been muchg appreciated.

yesterday we crossed through 3 countries! italy to france to monaco and then back to france again -- its easy when one of the countries is the size of a thumbnail on our route map. we were going to break in monte carlo, monaco, but got overwhelmed with the disneylandesque qualities of it bright green lawns with bricked pathways and trolley cars; so we continued on and had a more typical break outside of a dingy supermarket back in france. nothing against disneyland, by the way.


we have decided to send back our camping stove and long sleeved clothing as neither of these items is appropriate in countries with delicious fresh food at all supermarkets and intensely sunny and hot weather. 345 hanover , you will be receiving an exciting package!

so far italian has been easier to understand, but surprisingly more french people speak english. either way were trying to pick up as many little phrases as possible such as....
aurevoir!

EUROPE2011NOREGRETS!

We've landed safely in Milano, Italia. Staying with Annibale Osti (Hannibal to us). He is an awesome middle aged guy with a 25 year old flatmate and also a girlfriend. It is like a European movie. All the walls are covered with bikes, or with pictures of bikes, or with books. He made us pesto pasta.

We put our bikes together in the airport with little incident. It was pretty smooth considering our relative inexperience, though we sweated a lot.

In Italy everyone is staying up late, sweating, making food, and walking around. It is like New York City in the summer with all of the fun and none of the stress or anger.