15 Aug 2011
Oberndorf am Neckar to Rottweil (26 km)
I believe my sister’s dogs are from here, this town of Rottweil in the German countryside. I haven’t seen an actual Rottweiler since we arrived, just a photo of one on a flyer I could not read. But it would make sense, Rottweilers being from Rottweil, so Mocha and Kona, this blog’s for you. (And for anyone who’s thinking Oh My Gosh, your sister has Rottweilers?!?, let me just say that they are the sweetest, slobberiest, gentlest pair of lazy bum dogs I have ever met. Not a mean bone in either one of their big, beautifully colored Rottweiler bodies.)
This morning definitely went to the dogs, starting with a downpour that technically was a continuation of the downpour from last night and continuing with a meager 26 kilometer ride. We’re rarely ever about the kilometers but sometimes you just want to make some forward progress and you can’t. Well, we can’t, because we refuse to be miserable on our bikes for more than an hour or two. Hard-core cycling tourists would point their pruney, rain-soaked fingers at us and laugh but we don’t care. When the water starts dripping down my neck and soaking through my sleeves and my eyelids-as-windshield-wipers can no longer keep up with the spray in my face and there’s half a dead worm dangling off my front rack, then strangely enough, I decide it’s time to call it a day, even if it is only 1’o’clock in the afternoon. If we find a room quickly, I can even get in a nap.
That didn’t happen this afternoon, our room-hunting taking a few hours as we mixed in map-hunting at the same time. Not because we got lost yesterday using the map we had but instead because that map in particular, that map that I called crappy yesterday in my anger over our off-route experience, is a borrowed map and we have decided that a borrowed map won’t do, not because it’s crappy but because we need to highlight it, highlight our own copy of it, highlight our route so we can see where we’ve been. This may sound a little silly and maybe it is or maybe it’s an artifact of neither one of us having had an office job for 9 months now and feeling the need to mark up paper, any kind of paper, with highlighters and colored push-pins and those sticky flags they give you on your first day at a new job when your manager takes you to your desk and then shows you the supply room and lets you pick stuff out only to find that when you get back to your new desk and open the drawer it seems that someone was at that desk before you and what have they left behind but a bunch of crappy pens and a packet a sticky flags. Always the sticky flags and usually the worst kind, the ones that say “Signature Here” that you can’t use for anything else or else they drive you batty because you just wanted to cleanly mark that spot but now it’s all goofy with that inappropriate text on there. But I digress.
We were hunting for a map to call our own and a room of the same. What did we find? Okay enough maps but a killer room, a room in a home just outside of town, where neither the older woman who owns it nor her emphysema-ridden husband speak any English. When we first arrived, the husband tried to shoo us away, shouting at us in German (what else) while we looked at one another with that Oh, boy, what have we gotten ourselves into now look. Then he retrieved his wife who was friendlier than my sister’s Rottweilers, welcoming us into her home, showing us our room, pulling out her English translation pamphlet, and bringing us banana creme cake. All that and all the three of us did to communicate and get along was point, smile, and give the thumbs-up sign. What a nice woman and a nice home. So the day didn’t go completely to the dogs after all and even if it had, if they were my sister’s Rottweilers it would still be alright.
