"Tour de France winner fails drug test"

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/
more/specials/tour_de_france/2006/
07/27/landis.doping/index.html?cnn=yes

Say it ain't so!

C-130: 52 years later....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-130_Hercules

Well, the C-130 Hercules has made it into the news again -- Jordanian aircraft flying humanitarian relief into Lebanon using the versatile cargo airplane's short takeoff and landing abilities to do it all between the bomb craters....

No bad for an airplane that first flew in 1954 and is still being produced. Think -- that's more than half the existence of powered flight!

Why I like noisy airplanes

Flying over to Germany I was on an Airbus A-330 -- vouged as having extremely low cabin noise.

http://www.airliners.net/discussions/
aviation_polls/read.main/92754/

It was so quiet in fact, that I could hear the jerk two rows back talking about himself the entire flight. I learned how much he paid for his car, the size of wheels, the type of tires, that according to his mountains of wisdom folks from North Carolina are a bunch of hicks....

I could also hear "dueling babies" competing to outscream each other a few rows ahead.

Maybe it's quiet enough to hear a pin drop or something, but it's also quiet enough to hear all the other crap going on and I'd just as soon have a little white noise.

On the flight back it was loud enough I had to lean to someone's ear just to hold a conversation with them.

It was great.

A BEAR!

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe
/07/07/germany.bear.ap/index.html

This was big news in Europe while I was there.

http://www.ncwildlife.org/fs_index_04_hunting.htm

For someone coming from a state that has an estimated 11,000 of these critters it was kind of entertaining to see the reactions of Germans that there was a wild bear in their county -- some folks were cool with it, some thought he was a dangerous, vicious hazard that had to be disposed of.

We actually had a bear walk right through downtown Wake Forest, a few years back. Didn't hurt anyone, didn't break anything, just needed to get from one side of town to the other, just passing through....

Last week's column....

Well, I rode a bike to the Netherlands.

That really hurt.

In total it took about 12 and a half hours on a somewhat creaky borrowed bike. I figure I covered almost 100 miles – maybe not a performance on par with our Tour de France riders, but they use more than one gear.

I got the idea for the ride a few weeks ago looking at a map of Germany. I noticed that my mother’s home town, Muenster, where I’m visiting family, is only about 60 kilometers from the border – a distance I’ve subjected myself to before and I figured I could do so again.

I’ve got a previous history of riding to other countries. While I was studying abroad in Freiburg, Germany, a couple of years ago I tallied up France, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Austria and Liechtenstein. So I got a map of the stretch between here and the Dutch border and started planning.

One of the good things about German geography and public transportation is that there’s a train station in most small towns and the communities are close together. So if you get into trouble, perhaps the bike breaks, or you do, and can’t go on you’re never more than a few kilometers from a train station and a cheap ride home.

I borrowed the bike from family here – a three-speed ladies’ model with a goodly portion of creaks and chattering, but a pretty solid ride. Taking a few rides around town and the surrounding villages, I found I couldn’t actually shift into the lower gear, and using the high gear took a lot of energy, so I settled on sticking with the medium. Which was just right.

Muenster, and plenty of other places over here in Europe, have a well developed bicycle culture.

In the States bikes seem to come in two flavors – sturdy yet slower mountain bikes and faster yet more fragile road bikes. Here there’s a missing link for the masses who just want simple transportation – the city bike: skinnier tires and frame for nice long rides yet strong enough for curbs and cobble stones and cheap enough that it’s no major tragedy when some punk vandalizes it.

I’ll take a gander that here in this university town (around 50,000 students) they’re more bikes than cars on the roads. Taking a car into the city center is just asking for trouble on busy one-way streets looking for non-existent parking, but a bike can get you in and out even faster than the buses sometimes.

My bike on those long treks around Freiburg, named Freddy, was missing a few gears too. In addition, at times the brakes didn’t work, tires had no air, the handlebars were coming loose, the seat was cracked in half with staples coming up through it into me and some parts were literally held together with bailing wire.

So I’m used to making do with what I’ve got. Putting a few minutes and a little oil into the borrowed bike it started to shine up pretty well.

I got my gear together yesterday morning and got started towards the Netherlands.

Well, I'm back....

Thanks for everyone's good wishes! In true spirit, the Germans did up their planes to mark the soccer world championship....

CNN Turk

So I stopped into a Turkish fast food place yesterday in Germany for a doener kebap (makes sense if I explain it, but takes too long to explain it....). Anyway, they had "CNN Turk" going on the TV.

It said a lot about the dominance of CNN as a world news source, and also told me it's hotter here in Germany than in Istanbul....

Wow.

Riding to the Netherlands....

Check back next week to see what happened....

Anti-Americanism in Muenster, Germany....

... I haven't found any. The Germans have been unbelievably kind and friendly. It's quiet... too quiet.... by far.......

I mean, really, aren't they paying attention? We do stuff that ticks me off all the time. Whatever tack you may be on in the States, the other side is bound to be irking you somehow....

Point being that while other nations may be not all that fond of our government's policies, they don't necessarily hate us as people....

Soccer Nationalism....

I've heard the argument that after enough wars, western Europe decided that military nationalism was getting old and started investing their passions in soccer, which is markedly less fatal. I shot this a few days ago here in my Mom's home town in Germany....

Wish you were here....

This was just the bishop's summer residence.... Wow.

wireless at the cathedral....

Well, we're sitting here in my Mum's hometown in Germany that was founded by Charlemagne at this bar across from the cathedral and they have wireless... wow.... Still, my internet access is a bit shaky these days, so please don't worry about any slow responses. Hope all is well,

John