Busy Summertime

The weather could have been a bit better (as in warmer), but we made due with what we got. And we were out riding (be it bicycling, scootering or motorcycling) a lot. Related posts can be found on Sonja's blog.

Alpine Roads in Switzerland

Somewhere in France

We had another visitor, too. Andrea, who swapped the draught in California against the occasional torrential rainfalls in Germany.

Castle Hohengeroldseck, Blackforest, Germany

And now Roland is about to embark on a trip to Southern England with his buddies, while Sonja is mentally preparing for another exciting trip towards Italy. We are really getting good at life, aren't we?

World Cup Statistics

Source: Finanz und Wirtschaft

Roland: I totally love useless statistics, and right now I am really having a lot of fun: the 2014 World Cup in Brazil is a few days old now, but we can already find many entirely fascinating and utterly useless statistics out there in the intersphere. So here is a collection of my favorites!

1. If you want to win a game you better concede the first goal. At the time of writing this nine games were finished, and five of them were won by the team that went behind 0:1.

2. Within the people of the 32 countries that play the World Cup there are two obvious correlations:
a) the less religious the people are the richer they are!
b) the more beer they drink the more uniformly distributed their income is!
Undeniable proof can be found here (sorry it's in German).

3. Brazil is the country where the most butt lifting jobs are executed, while in no other country more people are killed by their lawnmowers than in the United States (proof here: sorry, German again).

4. Brazil will win the World Cup: using a complex statistical forecasting method the website FiveThirtyEight predicts that Brazil will win the World Cup with a probability of 43% (followed by Argentina 13%, Germany 11%, Netherlands 7%). At the moment of writing this Holland already beat Spain 5:1, and now Spain's chance of winning the Cup is at 0%. I would not bet my fortune on that!

5. Brazil will win the World Cup: YouGov provides an analysis of polls in 19 World Cup countries asking who will win the cup. The result: 16 countries believe in Brazil, the Gauchos believe in Argentina, the Spanish in Spain and the Americans... in the United States! Unfortunately there was no poll done where the most clueless fans can be found...

6. Germany will win the World Cup: The most convincing of all statistics has been developed by a highly regarded scientific company called Electronic Arts. They found an extremely difficult, but unbeatable algorithm under the name of "Fifa World Cup Soccer 2014" that undeniably predicts Germany to win the final against Brazil with 2:1 after conceding the first goal (reference to statistics 1). Miroslav Klose will score the match winner with his 16th WC goal and becomes the player with most scores in the history of World Cup. Now this is proof that cannot be argued with!

Italian (and other) Landscapes

We had planned it for quite a while, and now we finally were ready for our Vespa-Tour to the land of sun and good food, and of course the birthplace of our two donkeys, Bella and Alonzo. Obviously this was quite some undertaking, not so much for us, but for our scooters who dutifully moved us through Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia and Austria for a total distance of 3.300 kilometers without even complaining once (okay, there was the occasional slight hint of a grumbling, but that was soon forgotten).

The 13 days went by much too fast, and we could easily start the whole tour again right away, but I guess the sorrow at the end of a fantastic trip is as much part of it as the joy of planning the next one.

As Sonja will tell all the stories in detail on her motorcycle blog, here are some of the less scooter-related pictures (although they will make their appearances, of course). This time we will focus on the landscapes we rode through…

Switzerland: Lake Lucerne

 Cannero Riviera at Lago Maggiore

Lago Maggiore at Sunset

 In the rice fields of the Novara area

 Lucca

 Northern Tuscany

 Colle di Val d'Elsa

 Southern Tuscany

 More Southern Tuscany

 Volterra (with David and Sonja on the right)

 View from San Gimignano

 Pisa (quite obviously...)

 A typical Italian cemetery (in the Po Valley)

 Po Valley

 San Benedetto

 Concordia Sagittaria (Venetia)

 Pordenone

 Slovenia: Triglav National Park

 Slovenia: Vršič-Pass

Austria: Attersee

Germany: Neuburg an der Donau

Five Countries in Four Days

We had one of those long weekends where you take one day off and can enjoy four days of vacation (many holidays in Germany fall on a Thursday). So, in preparation of a soon-to-be-happening Vespa-Tour to Tuscany we decided to test our gear and our stamina by traveling through five countries in four days (and counting Liechtenstein as a country which it technically is indeed). Weather forecast was so-so, but that was ok for us as we wanted to find out how we would cope with not-so-beautiful skies.

Day One (Thursday) was a relatively short (but sometimes wet) trip to the German side of the border to Switzerland, where we stayed in the small town of Stühlingen which claims to be famous for starting the spark for the Peasant's War in 1524. We never heard of that so we are not sure of the significance. Anyway the town is quite nice, and the Rebstock Hotel was very welcoming to bikers.

An old barn in Stühlingen

Day Two (Friday) saw us crossing the border to Switzerland, visiting the Rhine Falls in Schaffhausen, avoiding Tourist masses at Constance, traveling eastward on the South side of Lake Constance, fighting rain on entering Austria and finally reaching Bregenz on the far East side of the lake. There we had some good Thai food, and walked it off on the local lake promenade.

Rhine Falls

Lake Constance

Bregenz Lake Promenade

Day Three (Saturday) was cold, misty and rainy, and most of the time all of the above... We traveled the short distance into Liechtenstein (just for the sake of having been there), but returned almost right away into Switzerland as we had to travel westward again. This time we chose a more alpine route further south, and we rode via Wildhaus Pass to Winterthur.

Unfortunately we did not see a thing because the pass was covered entirely in mist and clouds. Indeed we sometimes even had problems following the road due to the thick fog, but this is when GPS navigation comes in handy! Our rain gear did a fantastic job by keeping us more or less dry, but still the humidity managed to creep in every one of our bones. In Winterthur we stopped for a warm and hearty meal, before we continued our journey of almost 300 km to Delémont in the French part of Switzerland which has a very nice historic district.

Day Four (Sunday) saw a sudden but welcome change in weather, and - although starting out quite cold - we were rewarded with beautiful blue skies. So we decided to finish our journey with a small detour into the French Vosges, a biker's paradise on the French side of the river Rhine. Unfortunately we had to cut short this detour a little bit, as we had missed filling our gas tanks before riding into the mountains, so after crossing the peak of Grand Ballon we had to leave the Vosges again in quest for a gas station. Lesson learned... We rode back through the plains of the Rhine area, crossed the Rhine and (for the last time) the border and got back to our place just in time for coffee.

Dans Les Vosges

We are very sad that we cannot simply ride on tomorrow (work is calling!). The donkeys ran fantastic, and all the gear worked very well. It looks like we caught the travel bug again, this time on our Vespas! Looking VERY much forward to our Tuscany trip in a few weeks!

Vitra Design Museum

Roland: The Vitra Design Museum is located in Weil am Rhein, close to the French-Swiss-German border triangle. We actually had never heard of it before when some friends suggested to meet them for a motorcycle trip and have a look at it.

So after we had picked up Sonja's Harley from the shop we - an unlikely trio of one Harley, one Burgman and a Vespa - headed towards France, followed the way upstream along the River Rhine and re-entered Germany just a few miles before the Swiss border. More on this can be found on Sonja's Blog.

Vitra is a Swiss furniture company with emphasis on design with one of their factories being located in Weil just a few miles from Basel. When a fire destroyed most of the factory in 1981, various new factory and exhibition buildings have been constructed by various architects, and this resulted in a huge variety of styles.

Eventually we did not visit the Design Museum itself, but the adjacent (free of charge) 'Vitra House' - with the charm of a giant Lego house built by a madman - where we strolled through the many different living spaces from six decades. Many designs look so familiar, that it is sometimes difficult to imagine that somebody actually had to invent these things. Others still look as strange and weird as they must have been when they first were presented to the public.

Verner Panton 1959

Unfortunately - after we returned home - I realized that my recently revived Nikon camera had a hardware problem (again!), and I had lost all pictures I had taken over the day. Luckily Sonja brought her camera, too, so at least we have a little bit to show for. But the days of my Nikon are undeniably over now!