I sleep in a teepee in the French Alps. There is a totem pole not too far away. Lying awake, sometime near 7 AM, I listen to the ring of cowbells, eight cowbells, and the snorting of three hungry pigs who await their winter slaughter. The cheese ages in silence. Thirteen hungry cats meow. If I lay here long enough, I will be reawaken by the bellow of the bull as someone separates him from his harem. It is an angry cry, but it echoes down the valley and returns with despair. A frightening sadness. I no longer fear the bull, [View Full Entry]

---

---

Hmmmm, The sheep had been moved and the seats and seatbelts reinstalled in the van. The blueberrys were ripening in the sun. Family vacation ensued. We wound into the mountains. Night fell. The van found its way up a steep mountainside in the darkness and tents were erected in a field. The following morning the family was awakened by the sun and the cold glacier wind. With the van repacked and breakfast eaten, a mountain pass was summited and a botanical garden visited. Crazy uncle-cousin-brother was left at the side of the rode like so much salami skin or pistachio shells. [View Full Entry]

---

---

I have found a computer. I arrive at the next farm this afternoon. Well It seems my last two blog entries were lost in a server crash. Maybe its for the best? I have readded some of the pictures.... and a summary: Crazy, long lost brother-uncle-cousin Steve lands in Geneva, Switzerland in an intense delerium, returns to his french family, drools into his fondu and mumbles unintelligibly. He is forced into slave labor picking fruit in the Alps. thats about it, steve [View Full Entry]

---

---

Smudged colored pencil sunrise over the atlantic in a metal humming tube. Insomnia from Newark, New Jersey to Geneva, Switzerland, Eight hours on Qatar Airlines (complimentary socks) flight. Pre-sleep Breakfast ($10 cheese) at 2 AM, I stumbled around in the night sun in the ridiculously expensive city ($3 coffees and $8 Kebabs) for 2 day-nights and a night-day, throwing my money away and drinking my self to sleep, legally (for once), in the park. A train to Grenoble... ...a ride from the station into the mountains to La Mure Pouring my morning coffee into my uncultured liquid cont [View Full Entry]

---

---

Who needs a Pooper Scooper? Well surely not our good friends in France. Dog shit on a paris sidewalk(every sidewalk) is like a star in the sky, untrampled, untouched, and perfectly formed. Like the rest of Paris, even the dog shit is romantic and ornate as if it were placed with great care by the "hand" of god, yet you know it was not. I formed constellations in my mind as I watched my step, though it was difficult with my eyes constantly distracted by some gargantuan piece of architecture at every turn. After Pamplona, I met up with a friend [View Full Entry]

---

---

THis is Part two of my entry(see Cinque Terre, Not wheelchair accessable, sept. 1st 2006)...... Goats More Goats and Goat Herders, How we love their mustaches. How we like their cloaks and their canes. And the goat bells ring through the mountains.... The pyrenees ate my bottom bracket, the last bite that broke it. Rockies, Alps, Alpenines, all were crossed and left behind. The Pyrenees and I, we stuck together, east to west, along their southern realm. At times I was high upon their heads and then they pulled away as I slid down their rocky thighs to the bottom of [View Full Entry]

---

---

Well, I guess this is my catchup entry, for I have not written anything in almost a month. I will do my best to give a synopsis of the whirlwind that has been the last twenty-plus overstimulating days. I left the flat and happy Po River valley in Italy, which seems to be the only flat place in the country, and embarked on my largest climb by bicycle to date. Picking a backroad off of my map, I chose my path over the Alpenines to the Mediterranean. From about sea level, I climbed 8,500 feet in 40 miles to the summit [View Full Entry]

---

---

The days passed, cycling through the long jaw, rolling along a long tongue of grape vineyards. Nights after entering the valley in the alps, which rose on both sides of me like fangs to bite the sky, I Passed into the Dolomites, where the teeth dulled into molars. The mountains ended at the throat of Italy, where the long esophagus begins its span into the Meditterranean, the stomach of Europe. At first the lingering juices of Austria were prominnent, but they were soon absorbed into oblivion with the thick saliva and partially masticated cud of the heartland. Alps big. Italy Beautiful. [View Full Entry]

---

---

Part One Doing circles through the Black Forest of Bavaria on nameless slug covered roads. Drops of water continually fall under the thick and leafy evergreen canopy, though I´m almost positive its not raining. The trees obscure the sky and behind what I cannot see, the clouds hide the sun. East, North, West , South; the Black Forest has no direction. My clock ticks slower here, moving as if it measured time by the change in light, here where day and night are as different as mist and drizzle. Eventually I find the strength to resist turning, passing every fork. Turning, [View Full Entry]

---

---

Yesterday morning I was awakened by drops of water hitting my face. I was not locked in a dungeon having chinese water torture, but rather laying in my sleeping bag, on a tarp, behind some trees, near a farmfield in rural eastern France. It was about three o'clock in the morning. I delayed in setting up my tent in the dark until the rain picked up more. I was forced to use rope and rocks rocks because my stakes could not penetrate the extrememy rocky ground. I woke up again to the pouring rain and whipping wind at about 9. I [View Full Entry]

---

---