"Wo ist die Uni?"

beware. its a long post..
Well...the ride with the Germans today never happened. I talked to the "leader" this morning and he was going to call around and see if others wanted to go, then call me back. He never called back. So after way to much waiting I said screw it, ill figure out where i am.
Off i went, since i know how to get to the one guys house, and from there i though i knew how to get to the good biking area i did so, but i did not make it right to the good biking area...at first. The weather was nice (except wind) at this point. I ended up on a fairly busy road, which i took for about 20 minutes, then say a sign for Schloß Neuhaus. thinking hmm..a castle (Schloß) would be very fun to see i went that way. eventually i discovered that it is a city. im sure there is a castle somewhere in it, but no idea where. so i went back the same road. the way back to the main road was with the wind (which was pretty strong today! i did not know it was ever this way in Europe, i shoulda known there is a reason for the windmill farm a few miles away), so i rode quite quickly. a nice hard 4 or 5 km. Then i went back on the main road i took, and took the next promising looking way away from paderborn. It just so happened that this is the road i did that first ride on! YES! I took this rode for quite some time, passing by this sign i saw earlier...

no "former site of.." here. once its established it is here to stay. the number 1283 refers to the founding i believe.

after i took this picture i continued on this road cause i knew there was a fun, but short, downhill nearby. the next city was where it was.

this was actually taken on the way home, the light kinda sucked. on the way out it was quite nice.

After this i went straight thru that gap in the hills you can see. i am not exactly sure how far it was but a ways. There were some cool, really big stone train bridges that i saw, but the vantage point was not very good in terms of taking a picture. would not have been able to see much.
I got to the town of Altenbeck, and turned around. things started to go downhill from here...the wind, i had been going with it the whole time out, was now against me. lucky i think that it was slightly downhill the way back due to coming out of the hills. but still strong wind. I stoped to take the picture and looked where i had to go. the sky was really dark grey, not good when your on a bike at 4 30 in a forgien country, and you dont really know where you are...
after awhile i got back to the little town with the welcome sign from above. Then it started to hail, and hail hurts. a lot. without glasses i would have not been able to see at all and then forced to stop, yay for ebay! The head wind and forward movement i had really made the hail sting.
Eventually i got back to the main road, i noticed a bike path this time. i thought it would be good to take it....Big mistake.
It led me into some massive maze of apartment complexes that i still cant figure out where it is. Luckily the hail was done, but it was snowing. so i rode through it for about 10 or 15 minutes and finally gave up guessing where to go and asked "wo ist die Uni" the first people i asked had to think for a bit. but told me at least the proper direction to go. Then it REALLY started to snow. huge really wet flakes, so wet that they stuck to my glasses lenes. and the roads quickly got wet and a bit slippery. Not only was this bad, but now i could not see more than 100 meters. I was trying to find the uni by looking for it in the distance. did not work. at all. so i stopped and asked again, and little did i know i had blindly taken the right turns and ended up about 500 meters from the uni. talk about luck.

a snowy bike and i.
so thus my ride came to a close. it ended up being only 2 hours, but felt like much more. 44.79 Km. Oh i forgot to mention. I had only one water bottle and got really hungry due to my early lunching. nearly bonked. I think that even sean might consider this an epic ride...( http://snoonan.blogspot.com/2006_01_01_snoonan_archive.html ) "what is epic"
thats my day...