Diary written by: Bernt Pölling-Vocke ( bernty@gmx.com )

The first day started off as a good reminder of good old times during our last tour in the summer of 2000. When I woke up at 09:00 and asked Frank wether it was raining or not he just answered "no, it already rained cats and dogs....". Great, according to wetter.de (online weather-report) rain was in store from Saturday (today) until at least Wednesday and why shouldn´t the tour start just as wet as last year?

Suprisingly the rain eased of and eventually disappeared as soon as we got close to downtown Cologne. At the football-arena of the FC Cologne we stopped for some last Cologne-pictures which were taken by two fans who had arrived just in time for today´s first dision-match vs 1860 Munich. It was bad weather, 11 am and the game wouldn´t begin until 3:30 pm but both guys claimed that they liked to be at the arena early. I think they will still celebrate the game when we are in Barcelona, as a real fan you´re supposed to be at a game on time and to invest some time into celebrations afterwards and if you´re there more than 4 hours in advance you shouldn´t leave until 2 months after I guess...

The rest of the day went along rather fine. A first longer break in Bonn, the former capital of Germany, first problems with my bike after 75 kilometers (the chain had decided to jump off and it was time to get the hands dirty...) and another break after 90 kilometers in which a little child did an excellent job of entertaining us are the events worthy to be mentioned so far. The child was playing catch with his brother and had made up some pretty good rules, at least if you weren´t his brother who had to catch him due to the fact that he was on a bike and his brother on his feet. Unless his brother can sprint faster than Michael Johnson there is something very wrong with the setup here and not very suprisingly there was no brother in sight during our whole break. One could also come to the conclusion that living in the country affects the IQ after a while and people start inventing games that can´t work out at all and still consider it entertainment, I don´t know...

Our first stop was scheduled in Koblenz which we reached after a short photo-session at the bridge of Remagen (of which you can also watch a movie, it was kind of important in the second world war and due to it´s importance it eventually got blown up by ther germans in order to stop their enemies; in the end it just resulted in a touristical highlight and a river with two end-parts of a bridge without the bridge between...). Most visitors of this page have probably never heard of the german music-group "Pur" and most of those most visitors probably never want to harm their ears with their art but they are kind of famous in Germany. Due to the fact that Koblenz is in Germany and was the location of a huge Pur-concert on the evening of our arrival all hotels were absolutly booked out and after more than 100 kilometers on the bike there was absolutly nothing we could do besides cycling a bit more to the next free hotel. The ears were very glad that we needed quiet a while to find something (you really don´t want to be too close to anything that can be associated with Pur), the legs had different thoughts but in the end Rhens turned out to be our first overnight-stop, just short of the 130 kilometers-mark.

Rhens was also a very interesting town, probably also a town where everybody would attend a Pur concert and where it would still be a sorry crowd due to the fact that there are just not enough everybodies around. Our hotel was a mirror of the whole town with a very traditional interior, german cooking in the restaurant and an atmosphere that I personally don´t really like all that much. The rest of the town wasn´t a lot better. The only bigger bar/restaurant in town entertained the whole street with some traditional german live-music and I imagined a busload of japanese or american tourists inside. At a fast-food restaurant just accross the street I tried to find out if there is any place to eat in town where something different than traditional german food ends up on the plate but instead of something like "yea, Dino´s pizza is just around the corner and Little Hong Kong two streets behind that" I only earned a smile. Guess there would´t be any customers around, I just hope it gets better in this department tomorrow when we should end up in a bigger town again.

Overall the stage was more or less easy today (and very flat). Tomorrow the first hills will start to show up in front of us and it remains interesting to see how we will cope with that with all the luggage on the bikes and some kilometers in the legs. The stage should be around 110 kilometers again so chances are that we will learn something about our level of fitness very soon. I still remember someone working at a bike-shop in Osnabrueck when I was there two days ago. He told me that such a tour isn´t really that tough, only the first three days are a bit differnt. Tomorrow is sunday and not tuesday so I guess I will have to wait some more in order to find out if there is some truth to that.

Chess statistics:        Bernt vs Frank         0:1

Has anybody seen Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk around?