july 12th

fahrräder!
today we finally did something that we've been talking about the entire trip... we finally rented bikes. after a nice sleep through a very windy night, benjamin woke up early as usual, went to breakfast, read some bible, and kind of hung out until lazy old man bruce woke up. he gives me some crap, but it's understandable... we are on urlaub (vacation) and he isn't really sleeping all day. he typically misses breakfast (which is supposed to end at 9:30) but he is always up soon after that. i don't miss it... i think my wife would be a bit disappointed seeing as how she is the only one working right now and, well obviously, we're paying for it. she has taught me well. anyway... to the bike part. awesome.

ok, so bikes. because i hate walking to brannerburg (which i did a million times extra during the week of the hives), we took the train this morning to the tourist center and we rented bikes for the rest of the trip. bikes make everything so easy... we're spoiled in the usa where we simply drive everywhere, which is awesome, but we don't have a car, and please don't forget, we're in flintsbach. we're not in a big town... no one comes here except for a few german tourists... this is small town germany and so everything is some distance away (including our neighborhood penny markt).

we haven't looked back. we rode home, rode back to penny markt to return all of our empty bottles (you get money back for doing this), bought new drinks, lunch stuff, and rode to our very own hawaiisee. yeah, we pretty much own it by now. oh and we had the greatest idea ever!... well kinda. we figured out a way to make our beer cold in this land without ice or refrigerators. it really was a brilliant idea... bruce bought some laundry line at the penny markt which we then used to tie on 4 beers. we then sank these beers to the bottom of the lake, tying the other end to benjamin's float, which also worked as an anchor. lean. we thought, duh, the water is colder at the bottom... and because it's freakin cold on the top, it must be nearly frozen down below. if only we could put our beers there and wait, say 30 minutes, we would pull up some ice cold beers to enjoy while we float out here... beating the germans at their own beer drinking game!

yeah right. gross. we could not tell the difference and ended up pouring the beers out (sorry brent). after this disappointment, a storm looked to be coming and we rode (on our bikes) home. lean... this now takes like 2 minutes instead of 20 or 30. everything is so close now.

*later that evening, when talking to bonnie (our resident landscape architect), she thought that the beers perhaps got covered in the muck at the bottom and therefore didn't get cold. we're going to test this advanced landscape architect theory tomorrow.

after losing in cribbage (me=ben), we decided to play tennis as the storm really only teased and on clay courts, you wet them down before you play anyway. we played for almost 3 hours where i (ben) lost again 6-2, 6-4, 7-5. at least i started to make it close and have yet to lose to some 16-year-old who only slices the ball (bruce). but what can i say... i cant hold serve very well and i do get a little frustrated. but we had fun as always. after that we showered and went to brannerburg (on our bikes= 5 minutes, maybe 7) to eat at Barolo. we are home now to read and blog... it's supposed to rain tomorrow. maybe this would be a reason to sleep in. we'll see.