Guten Morgan

    Things are returning to normal for our bike tours. Laura has been wondering why I don't eat or drink all day, why I like to walk around looking at old walls, and correcting my poor pronunciation of foreign sounds. 

    We spent last night at a Gasthaus outside of Schalding, Germany. Rode about 60 kilometers, luckily couldn't find a room in one unattractive town, and so rode on a while to a great with place along the river with a seven foot catfish fresh out of the Danube wallowing in a water tank outside the restaurant. It was starting to rain so we just made it, around six pm.

    The food has been really great. Fleisch, schwine, schnitzel, strudel, eis, kaffe, wurst, suppen, speck, brot from the bakeri,  plenty of bier and wein, and then more bier, usually dunkel for me. Next time we come here we should study up a bit because it is more fun if you can try the local language even a little. And I think the locals appreciate a try, even if it is butchered. Czech would take about a million lessons from Jana or Renata.

    Today we made it to Passau, which is a really neat old town at the junction of the Danube, the Inn, and the Ilz Rivers. A high hill overlooking the confluence is topped by a castle built in the 12th century. Things around here are old, older, and oldest. Some of the walls and buildings have been built by the Romans! Enough about rocks, even if I am amazed at what the old guys could do with thousand pound blocks of granite.

    We haven't had time to deal with the picture issue, barely enough Internet time to check email. Service is spotty at best, and with sightseeing and riding, drinking Bavarian beer and showering and sleeping, looking all over town for a connection gets put off. But we got an app that uploads to Facebook, so we will try our best to put some on there.

    Route finding has been a no brainer since we started on the Danauradweg. If I lived in Europe I would make it an annual trip. Maybe camp some to save some cash. If riding a bike is fun, this is just the best. No hills at all, scenery from a movie set, and history and good food and beer in the towns. Wish you all could be here with us. Some way or another I am trying to figure out a way to keep the bikes in Europe so we can come back. I will post this in the morning, but after that who knows when the next post will be. We enter Austria tomorrow.