Meat Loaf Day

Thursday again at the Ranch. That means around 5 pm tonight I'll be up to my elbows in squishy, cold, bloody, ground beef. Or, as we call it here: Rinds-hackfleisch. Mmmmmm.

Thursday also means that ... It's The Weekend!

I'm heading up to Delemont for the first time in Ages. I've missed my bike so. It's a good thing I'll be getting back on the bike...

(provided that Mrs. Beauchat has released it. She's been holding it hostage in the attic of her house, and since she speaks as much english as Laura speaks french, the situation has been at a standstill for the better part of the last month. I guess what happened is: Laura put the bike into an unlocked room. Mrs. Beauchat locked the room and took the key. And there it stayed. Laura had a friend at work help her write a note, saying something like "Please release my bike! Love and Kisses, your tennant Laura", so hopefully that helped. But really? Mrs. Beauchat is a mysterious woman and I'm sure she doesn't always have good intentions. She unlocks and locks rooms seemingly at random. She goes in and out of Laura's room at will. She sometimes strips Laura's sheets and does other passive aggressive type things like leave a vaccum right in the middle of the floor. I'm not going to lie: I'm afraid of her. But I digress.)

I'm not sure where we'll be biking to this weekend, but it's good that I'll be biking again because Laura and I plan to spend 3 days biking from Delemont to Nyon as my birthday extravaganza next weekend. If you look at a map, that's nearly the entire western border of Switzerland.

We're still in the planning stages but we've got a map, and a list of cheapish hotels along the way. Right now, we're trying to decide how much we can fit in our camelbaks. I think I'm more concerned with the number of candy bars I can reasonably carry while Laura is calculating the net weight of every item of clothing she owns.

It'll be interesting to see how we pull this trip off. The plan is to hop on our bikes on Saturday morning and head south. We should end up in Nyon by Monday afternoon. We can't carry hardly anything on our backs and neither of us have panniers, so we'll be relying on finding stores and decent hotels along the way to refresh and refuel. I'm looking forward to this trip, it seems to have the possibility of being horribly miserable for at least 30 to 40% of the time--which, as you all know is a requirement for any good trip.

Oh boy, the meat is here!!