Screw Covid! Ride bikes!

About the simple pleasure of riding for 7 hours for some Kaiserschmarrn

During the relative calm of July I went to Austria for some mountaineering and alpine climbing. Torben and I had blocked my final weekend of that trip for some joint activity as we had not seen each other in a year or so and our plans for 2020 were canceled as well. As the weather in the mountains started to turn bad the idea was to borrow a bike for me from somebody and just get out riding.

Luckily when I arrived in Munich Torben had arranged that I could use a buddies bike for the weekend (Thanks to Raimund at this point! You can use one of my bikes anytime you are here on the island.). We picked up the bike on Friday evening and Torben suggested a big ride from Munich to the Alps and back for the next day. He promised great roads and Kaiserschmarrn so I was all for it.

We set off out of Munich in a generally southern direction on Saturday on backcountry roads. As the peaks of the Alps creeped ever closer we did get lost a bit but that did not worry us in the slightest - I had missed simple bliss of riding with a good friend quite a bit and getting somewhere was not the goal anyways.

After we rediscovered our route alongside the Tegernsee and rode into the mountains towards the promised Kaiserschmarrn. Being close to bonking I devoured the sweet treat in minutes and with the temperatures dropping significantly we set off again for the rest of the ride back to Munich. In the end we rode almost seven hours and 180 km.

On Sunday I had to correct a great injustice: Raimund (who so generously donated his bike to me for the weekend) had bested my time on a small local climb south of Munich some months earlier. As such blasphemy cannot stand Torben and I headed out there and I hammered up the 1.5km - Rest assured that balance in the world has been restored and my time is now some odd seconds better than Raimunds.

So this weekend was just two friends riding their bikes in the countryside and talking? Yes, you might say that´s nothing special - Maybe but great nonetheless and gravely missed.