Next up was the hill climb. Riders departed at intervals, and their
time was taken. The route involved a few kilometers with a few hundred feet
elevation gain, but the real killer was the sun. Lots of the hill, particularily
the really steep parts towards the end, were pounded by sun, making climbing the
hill secondary to not getting fried.
The real thrill for me was that I was number
35, and my goal in the race was to place 35th, and by some quirk of luck, I did.
As you well know, every uphill involves a downhill, and is usually the most fun
part of the trip. This hill was no exception. The downhill was a long, winding
set of gentle switchbacks, one of which caught a number of riders by surprise. I
found it difficult to not end up in the woods with the half-dozen or so cyclists who
were ahead of me, and going a little bit too fast.
After another one of UberChiks outrageous feasts, it was time for the big
race.
This course was designed to be confusing. The first thing we had
to do was to lock up our bikes on the tram platform at the train station, and
walk up the street to the first tram stop. We were all to get on the tram,
ride it back into the station, and when the doors opened, it was GO!!
First we were off to some spot way
south of town for our first manifest, I followed the locals and eventually
got there. Bike Ranch Queen and I set off back to town together, only to find
ourselves quite at a loss.
Fortunately, we encountered a group of naked
cyclists not moments later.
What to do, what to do? The naked cyclists were
nice enough to give us a beer and ask us along with their group, and so we
proceeded to town with but a vague idea of why.
Bike Ranch Queen and I
agreed that the best dressed prize should go to
the wonderful fella from NY,NY, wearing nothing but a bag and a 30-pound NY-style chain
around his hips.
The manifest we had was to be completed and taken to a local bike shop and
exchanged for the second manifest. We decided to just go get the second
manifest. But someone remembered that we had heard that one of the things
we were supposed to get was a photo-booth photo of ourselves. So we
stopped in at some mall where we had been advised that such a booth exists,
and about 7 of us piled into the booth. Developing was the longest 4 minutes
in all of history, so we drank beer and had a smoke, and planned our strategy.
Our strategy was to be first to get the second manifest, even though we hadn't
completed any of the clues for the first. Hey, we had picures, we had naked
people, we had beer.
The gentleman at the checkpoint
had a hard time understanding our strategy.
He seemed to want to explain to us that we had to get all the items on the first
manifest before he could give us the second. We tried to explain to him that
we didn't care, we were just happy to be here first, and HEY! We have pictures.
At this point he started being a bit amused by our enthusiasm, and to drive
the point home, Ms. Topless from NY plunked her breasts down on the counter.
We got our second manifest, had a beer, and set out in search of some checkpoints.
Singing "We Are The Champions",
as we were the first group out of the
manifest exchange, we rode up and down the main street of town, with naked pepole,
drinking beer, back and forth in front of some nice police officers who seemed
to have more important things to do.
One of the clues was to find a funny expression about the mayor of Freiburg
scrawled on a wall, on a street in the middle of downtown, so we thought
we'd go try to find that. We guessed that the German word for "mayor" was
'burgermeister', so we went to the address, had a beer, and tried to find
some mention of the burgermeister.
Some laterally thinking (and maybe naked)
individual decided to ask someone what the burgermeister's name was, and
they told us it was Boom. After another few minutes of searching, we found
the slogan "Don't legalize bohme" scrawled on the wall accross the road,
and figured we had the right answer.
Another basic checkpoint in town, and we decided we'd better go to the
checkpoint that had beer, in case they closed and we didn't make it.
It involved walking around on an industrial scale jungle gym for a while,
getting the beer, and riding away, to take the beer somewhere else. None
of our beers ever arrived anywhere else.
Well, by this time we had to stop singing, as we knew we weren't actually
going to win. So we went to the party at the finish, and partied until
we didn't want to anymore.
I was suffering
from a bad case of a fender that did not want to stay attached, but wanted
to get its stays caught in my spokes. Bike Ranch Queen laid some tape on
me and it held for a while. We rode up a
big hill to a beautiful site overlooking the city and the black forest, and
stood in a group while our picture was taken with all 50 cameras at the site.
My fender came untaped again soon.