Although the weather has been fantastic for the whole time, it's been gone-severe clear and in the 70's, the nights have been pretty chilly. Sunday night the low was in the mid 30's. So I figured I would hang around until the temperature warmed up a bit. Easy to do when you're comfortable, drinking coffee and eating sausage rolls. Jim had a conference call for work, but he decided to ride with me for a ways when it was time to go. We rode back to the Rogers airport. As I was riding there, following Jim, I was thinking how great it would be to just keep on riding with him. It would be great to be able to just head west with no particular destination or time frame. Maybe we'll be able to do that ... read more

(My apologies to Jim H. I should have called you about ths trip a long time ago, but I wasn't too sure if I would go here until I got back from Europe and I thought that would have been too short of notice.) I knew that if I took all two lane roads on this leg to Fayetteville, Arkansas, it would take me forever to get there so I took Interstate 44 for about 175 miles to Springfield, Missouri. At least Interstate 44 is pretty scenic with hills and curves. After getting off the interstate I would have about 175 more miles of riding two-lane highways through the Ozarks. Once again the weather was wonderful and the riding was a lot of fun. As I was riding the curves and hills of the Ozarks, I ... read more

When we ordered our very first beers in Frankfurt along the Main River, we noticed how the beer glass was rather unique. It turned out that almost everywhere we went the beer and beer glasses were different. There seem to be few, if any, beers that are sold across the nation, like in the USA. The breweries seem to be peculiar to cities and areas. Big Cities, like Munich or Stuttgart will have several brands. It was really interesting to try so many different biers-----Tough Assignment! Dan, Marilyn and Jan-Your assignment is to remember where we were when each of these beer pictures were taken. The prize???? How about a trip to Australia?!?! Postscript-10/6/10 News Headline & story from October 5th: Oktoberfest Sets Record for Beer Consumption Visitors to the Munich Oktoberfest this year drank their ... read more

The Weisse Taube Hotel, in English The White Dove, is a very charming, old hotel. The building itself was built in 1365! It has been a hotel for over 200 years and has been operated by 4 generations of the same family; Bernhardt, our hardworking front desk man being the fourth. It was even bombed during WWII. We have had a variety of hotels, but this one was so charming. It has been renovated and is quite comfortable. It even has a lift. It may not have had all the amenities of our modern hotels, but we loved the history and charm of the place and staying in the middle of the Altstadt. After Dan & I walked back to the hotel, Jan & Marilyn were in the street waiting for us. It was time to ... read more

A few weeks before we left on this trip we watched a couple travel videos by Rick Steves of PBS on Bavaria and Austria. In them he talked about summer luge rides in the Alps. We all were real interested in trying it if we could fit it in our travel. In Innsbruck, we searched the internet and asked the front desk person at our hotel about them to no avail. Nothing was coming up under luge, which is what Rick Steves called them. I finally found an article on the internet that referred to "sommerrodelbahn." Ahha! I searched under sommerrodelbahn and a bunch of sites jumped up on the computer screen. There were probably 15 of them all over the Alps. Sommerrodelbahns or summer toboggans are chutes or tracks on ski mountains that you ride ... read more