I made use of my arrival at the Freiburg Bahnhof to purchase my tickets to Passau from there - I'd originally planned to make the ride to Vienna all the way from Freiburg, but during my first pass through Freiburg this trip, I'd discovered that there was a pipe organ concert at the Munster on the day after I had been planning to leave for Vienna, so I changed my mind and decided to take the train halfway. 205 DM wasn't too bad a price, though, certainly - local trains, and slower than the fastest possible routing, but that was ok. Yacc was in Freiburg already, and a few others as well - Cyclassix II was looking to be a small, casual event, which is exactly what the locals had had in mind.
Second night in town, we all headed over to the Zelt Musik festival, which is notorious for getting rained on, and of course, we got rained on. It was pretty cool, but not incredibly interesting to me. We got a break in the rain, and took advantage of this to head over to a parking garage to do the fixie stuff, and that was it for the day, really....
The next morning, the 4 of us who had planned to watch that day's Tour de France stage, which was ending across the border in Colmar, hooked up at Per Velo, and started out on our way. We hooked up with some random other riders for various parts of our route, spending part of it hauling ass at Yac's frantic pace, until at least I just wasn't willing to go like that anymore. Just not that good at doing 40+ km/h for that long on my work bike... After running the route backwards through Colmar, we headed up into the mountains for the Collet du Ligne, where we were planning to catch the last climb of the day. The four of us ended up just below the col, at around the 25km mark. I rolled down the hill, up the course, to see what things were like on the climb, and ran into El Diablo about 2km down the road. I'd had a feeling I'd see him if I just rolled far enough down the climb...
A little later, Basso, Voight, JaJa and a few others went through, 4m42s ahead of the peloton - the first round of this year's silly lead extensions early in the race. Funny bit for the day was the teenage girls who were standing next to us holding homemade posters of all their favorite cyclists - totally teen beat or something. I guess there's hope for the world when teenyboppers are crazy about cyclists rather than boy bands or something.
The ride back to Freiburg got us completely drenched. I bonked completely and utterly just before crossing the Rhine, and had to stop at a gas station for a random selection of food items, which got me going well enough to make it all the way back home. Despite that, it was a great day - good ride, and kudos to JaJa for pulling off the win on Bastille Day. The rest of the evening was spent at the Per Velo office, pretending that we were running an alleycat - which none of the out-of-towners actually rode in, I think. At this point, I think I started cracking jokes about this actually being the Cylassig (lassig being German for lazy...), cause we just weren't doing any of the "events". Did, however, head over the to lake to the hippe party tent, legendary after ECMC 2000, and had a good time hanging out there.
Slept in the next morning, and headed over to Mischa's to watch the day's TdF stage, which Dekker won. After another lazy day of deciding not to race alleycats, we all ended up heading over to the restaurant Laubfrosch to have pizza and pasta. Jason and Yac decided that night at dinner to leave immediately for Zurich, without telling anyone they were coming... They made it ok, but I think I would've called ahead... Tibor from Hamburg showed up on his way to l'Alpe d'Huez - I guess there's already some of the Hamburg contingent down there for the climb. Yac and Jason were saying they might do that as well, but weren't sure.
The next day, all the foreigners save myself had left. I took the opportunity to wander the morning market around the Munster, and tour the chapels of the cathedral itself - there's some fantastic gothic woodcarving in there. One, the Locherer-Kapelle, has a fantastic carved altar that just blows me away - the painted altars are great, btu this particular one is bare wood, and my absolute favorite of the chapels. Did laundry at Per Velo, and snacked on the kase-speck-bretzeln, which I think are the Freiburg equivalent of stroopwafels. Dropped by Phillip's work at Extratour, and grabbed some new gloves, and one of those nice 1 liter Sigg bottles.
At this point, a serious change of plans was effected - Phillip decided he was gonna go with Tibor to Vienna, as Tibor had decided against going to l'Alpe d'Huez, and there was now room in Mischa's van if I wanted it... One quick trip to the train station, and a full ticket price refund later, that was set up. I was surprised how easy it was to just return my ticket for the full cost. I don't think Amtrak would've done that. Means a net gain for me in terms of $ for the trip to Vienna, that's for sure. That night, it was off to my first organ concert of the trip - the Freiburg Munster is unique in that it has four organs, which, while the quantity isn't all that unusual, can all be played together, from one console - which is virtually unheard of. It's an amazing place to hear a concert - the reverb in the structure is just amazing.
The next day, my last in Freiburg, started out interesting indeed - we hadn't even gotten out of Frebiurg when some idiot in a VW tried to pass us while merging too late, and clipped our front left corner. Completely his fault, but he wouldn't cop to it, so we had to wait for the police for a report, which delayed us for an hour or so. What a way to start. Soon enough, though, we were back on the road, on our way to Vienna...
On to Vienna and bix trax + resistance