Bavaria Report

Day 1-3, Aug 5-7

The town of Ulm boasts to have the tallest cathedral in the world (I can relate because I once won an award for “tallest dog.”)  Though it was never the seat of a bishop so technically it’s not a cathedral (I can also relate, because technically I’m not a dog).  Nonetheless, the spire that reaches towards the sky (the 4th tallest structure built before the 20th century) is a freakshow of nightmares condensed, somehow, into a form of architecture.  The spire would certainly be my blueprint for an evil alien spaceships in any kind of sci-fi horror music.  The stone work is so fine and intricate it seems as though it was once a beautiful lace doyle calcified over time with atrocities and corruption into a hardened dark grey matter that broods and looms over our imaginations, reminding us of the fucked up times when things like this could not only be dreamed up, but then built, and built well.

I imagine all the people that must have fallen to their death in the construction effort and somehow they are all me, and then all the people I love and I dropped them and it’s over 100 Degrees and my whole body is crying sweat, grief sweat, fear sweat, WTF how can be sweat!?  All I want is to be somewhere in the long shadow cast by this obscenely intricate historical relic.  But I’m not.  I’m in the sun on its photogenic side (the other side is covered with scaffolding) and now I’m jealous.  Jealous because I would love to just put scaffolding up over the parts of me that i think are less than presentable and refer people to my good side, but i can’t.  And it can.  Whew, man!  … CATHEDRALS!

After riding for 13 days straight we made it to Ulm and to my friend Manuel.  Manuel is a fit, young, successful adventurist, mostly of the surfing and skiing persuasion who is fighting his way through engineering school.  We arrived the week after he had finished all his final exams and since then he has just been “getting crazy” and “doing so much of the sports, man.”

He talked us into going on an “easy” ten kilometer hike into the Alps on our first day off from riding (one of Manuel’s favorite things to say is “it’s easy, man.”).

The hike was anything but easy.  The only thing easy about it was that it was easily in the top five steepest ascents I have ever done.  To his credit, it was not the hike he intended to do.  Similar to most of our trip we proceeded into the unknown without a map and ended up not where we had intended but somewhere equally, if not more, rewarding.  

Manuel spryly leaped, and bounded, and did a lot more standing and waiting for us to stagger up the 3,000 ft vertical climb.  The view from the top was completely bullshit.  All you could see was more mountains in every direction, peppered by hanging valleys with lakes as blue as my own eyes, and small villages crowded in by gorges.

It took my cascadian pride, balled it up and tossed it, forever rolling down the infinitely steep and immeasurably beautiful slopes of the Alps.  I can see now, why the Alps where the gold standard for mountain ranges for so long.  

I was so awestruck that I forgot to do a classic “yodelayheehoo,” but not awe struck enough to keep me from opening an energy drink.  It ruined everything.  The crisp mountain air suddenly smelled pink.  My serene calmness dissolved like sugar and taurine into a motivation to get down and get in the car and drive as fast as possible.  YodelayheBWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

I know two German phrases.  Or so I thought.  One, “fantastic mustache,” seemed to go over okay.  The other, “my eyes are blue” had people in hysterics.  Questioning them about why this was so funny, I learned that I wasn’t saying “my eyes are blue,” I was saying “my evenings are blue.”  Blue in German doesn’t mean sad, it means wasted, like drunk wasted.  So here I was telling germans that my evenings are spent totally obliterated with the emotionless, factual, stone cold confidence of someone describing the color of their own eyes.  

I can see why that is funny.

Day 5-10, Aug 8th-12th

It was the hottest day in Bavaria since people started keeping track of temperatures.  More descriptively, my protractor melted.  The heat has warped the purity of geometry.  My pencil sharpener melted.  The heat has rendered tools useless reducing humans to the level of animals, left to bask, mouths agape, in the blistering confusion of a record setting august summer.  

We defeatedly took the train to Augsburg after riding only 30 km out of Ulm.  

Augsburg was a ghost town.  Apparently, Augsburg has its own holiday separated from the rest of Germany.  One of those EVERYTHING IS CLOSED kind of holidays, something to do with the end of the 30 years war… All  it meant to us was that the grocery stores were closed, and more importantly, the pharmacies.  Sometime in the last few days my leg became a pasture land for some freakish flesh eating bacteria.  

Once alerted to the horrors I had been cultivating over the last couple days our German hosts (a nurse, and the son of a nurse) became very concerned and gave me special killing creams and bandage wraps as well as their last gauze bandage.  

Our own first aid kit, which I usually think of as containing ONLY gauze actually had none.  With the lack of available bandages I was forced to use one of Anna’s “Always panty liners,” adding an additional level to maximum romance.  We share panty liners.  That’s hot, right? No, Augsburg is hot, remember!

Without any real or fabricated direction, we took the only course of action available to us, which was to pass out, drooling mouths to the ground in a park near our Augsburg host’s apartment.

Through a chain of friends of friends (long enough that the end of the chain, Peter, has no idea who the beginning of the chain, Manuel is) we were set up with a room in an apartment.   

Once the sun went down, like vampires, we finally had the power to walk amongst the living and meet Peter who graciously and forcefully showed us around the town.  “You will get the meat salad, and you will drink a liter sized glass of beer,” he said, and we acquiesced like marionettes at the hands of a puppet master.  All we wanted was to use Peter for his room and hospitality, but instead Peter used us as a vehicle to seem social and knowledgeable.

Sleep as the goal but drinking was the result.  

Regrets, however, are easily evaporated in the shameless heat of summer as everyone, no matter what the shape of one’s body or condition of one’s skin disease, is comfortable wearing next to nothing.  

And so it was again, that we guiltlessly boarded a train to Munich to avoid the skin crisping rays of an overconfident sun.  There we would be joined by three of our friends and be transformed into the pentagon of power where everyone took on equally ridiculous names.   So goodbye Anna and hello Arrowhead.  I’d also like to introduce you to Party Blower, Drug Doll, and Ranger as well.  As for me, my nickname is still formless like a faint light in the distance.  Sometimes the brain takes stabs at completing the darkened, blurry image and names like Galaxy, Supernova, and Flamo the Fireman Bear, have all been uttered in half seriousness.    Like all good pop songs, my nickname will find me eventually and like all good pop songs I will embrace it and repeat it in times of boredom and excitement, over and over, until it loses all meaning and a new one is needed.