July 8 – Slumdog Bike Army and Garmisch

Well folks, another damn good day of vacation. I started the day a little slow because I had a few too many last night during the Croatia game, but I feel like a million bucks now…probably because of this delicious wine.

Anyway, we started the day by meeting up with a good friend of ours, Christian. He’s been flying helicopters over here with his crew, defending our freedom. He met us at this sweet Biergarten with some of his fellow Slumdog Bike Army members. I had my first radler at this Biergarten, which, coincidentally enough, is going to be the name of Christian’s kid (maybe). The radler is like some lemon nonsense with beer. It was actually quite delicious!

We had some good American conversation with Christian and the gang, then left them to pillage Munich whilst we began the second leg of our journey to Garmisch. Here’s a picture of us:

I might have a conference out in Heildleberg in late November, so might try and spend Thanksgiving at the army base. Hopefully I will get to shoot one of Dem 50 cal machine guns at a German turkey, or something. If not, we will at least slum bike around and drink plenty of bier. Until next time, mein brüder!

Garmisch

To get to Garmisch, we took a FlixBus. These things are muchhhhhhh cheaper than a train, but not particularly easier. For this short ride (90 minutes) it was totally fine, though. My only complaint is the damn bus station bathroom. Like most bathrooms, you have to pay to use it (dumb). This bathroom had a broken stall, a dirty stall, and mostly broken urinals. Where is that money going ?!?!? Dumb dumb.

Anyway, Garmisch is a fine, fine place. We came here because my friend Scuba used to play soccer here, and it’s home to Germany’s largest mountain. We took a long hike and explore the place:

Just absolutely gorgeous! After spending all this time in the mountain west, it is weird to be at a mountain town at only 2,000ft above sea level. Even though the highest mountain in Germany barely cracks 9000ft (or something like that….idk didn’t bother to look it up again ), the prominence is quite impressive.

We are going to take the cable car most of the way up the mountain tomorrow and do some hiking. Hopefully we will find some wildlife…so far, only slugs.

I want to close by saying that based on our experience so far, the people of Munich have kind of been dicks to us. It’s been difficult getting by with English, and even when I try to order in German, I can’t handle the inevitable followup questions and have to say I don’t speak german. Then they get all sourkraut on me. I’m always like dude…I am trying to give you money here…not my fault I can only speak American and Mandarin Chinese.

The people we interacted with in Herrsching were very pleasant, and the people in Garmisch have just been down-right nice to us! Hopefully this will continue tomorrow whilst we do poppa wheelies all the way up the mountain.

-Babe

P.S., I hope you saw my boy Peter Sagan take the yellow jersey today. What a G. We can’t wait to see him in real life!