[written by Paul, edited by Kathy]

Voila! Here is the third one of these. We have been here for almost two months, so it is time to say that Europe is officially a good place to be most of the time! The biking is really fun, the beer is great, and the weather has been awesome recently. We just miss our friends and our puppy.

We have to start out by finishing the story of Dave and Dave. We had to resort to just calling them #1 (Kausch) and #2 (Holland), for it was much less confusing. I believe when we last left off, #1 and #2 were in Amsterdam, exploring the Dark Side of the Force. When they returned, the four musketeers departed for Hornberg, Germany for a three-day weekend. (Belgium has sooo many holidays in May!) We stopped off in Metz, France, because that is my brother-in-law’s last name. This city was one of two unexpected gems of our weekend, and quite possibly Europe. We stopped in for lunch, but (Voila!) fell in love with Metz before our second beer. It is a gorgeous town – clean, old and beautiful. It thankfully lacks the soft-coal-burning-black-soot-covered stone facades (I’ll bet there is a Dutch word for this that is equally long) associated with the buildings in many other cities in Europe. The people were also very pleasant.

In fact, for the whole weekend, everyone was nice to us and really went out of their way to please us. We decided this was because our itinerary took us to towns where few out-of-country tourists go – Metz, Hornberg, and Baden-Baden. These are less touristy towns, except Hornberg, which is a tourist town for Germans. We rarely ran into someone who spoke English. Anyway, I would recommend stopping in Metz if you are ever near it.

After a long drive, we arrived in Hornberg late in the day Saturday. Because of the length of the drive, the car was abuzz with disparaging comments about Kathy’s choice for the weekend…until we entered the valley. Hornberg is exactly that, a valley town nestled between two steep mountain ridges on the edge of the Schwartzvald – the Black Forest of Germany. As you enter the town, you first catch a glimpse of the Hotel Schloss Hornberg – a four-story yellow house halfway up the mountain and perched precariously overlooking the valley. It is adjacent to a stone wall, the remaining portion of a castle.

The hotel was immaculate – nice rooms, and a dining room overlooking the valley. But the service took the kirschtort! (that pun was for Roger and #1). Kirschtort is Black Forest Cherry cake, for those of you who haven’t seen “Young Frankenstein”. We asked if it would be possible to rent some bikes for #1/2 so that we could go mountain bike riding. The receptionist said she would take care of it; she just needed to know what time we would ride in the morning. OK, 9? The bikes were ready to go and pretty nice, too – Raleigh USAs with STX components. Oh, and here are your helmuts. All the way to Germany, and yes, the U.S. bikes are the best. Good sign. Patrick wants to know if we know where to go? (map and trail guide provided) It’s pouring rain, do we require ponchos? (Here you go, #2). The ride was awesome. The rain did not deter us. #1, #2 and I took off into the Schwartzvald. We started out on a fire road and did a lot of climbing. Fortunately, it was not too steep, since it was the first mountain that I had ridden in two months, and the first time that #1 had ever been mountain biking. This is worthy of further comment, since #1 lives in Portland which has excellent trails – and he rides the exercise bike at the gym? Tsk, Tsk. I predict he will buy a bike this summer and begin riding more – he is a natural… Eventually we came across a single-track trail off the fire road. Yes, we took it, and climbed even more. The vistas were stunning and we felt as though we were the first ones to reach this remote area in years, until we saw the German Boy Scout camp at the top of our climb!

We took some solace in the fact that none of the boy scouts passed us up the hill, and after a couple of s’mores, we headed back down. The wet trails were challenging because there are quite a few flat rocks and lots of tree roots crossing the trail. But we pointed our front tires downhill and had a good time letting our rear tires do what they had to do. We returned to the hotel muddied from head to toe and all testosteroned out. A good time was had by all. Special thanks to Patrick, who disappeared with our bikes to clean them and prepare them for the next day’s ride. “Tomorrow, I will school you California boys!” he exclaimed as he turned away.

After showers, a beer, and surviving lunch in a local German restaurant (thank God #1 brought a German translation book), we headed off to Baden-Baden. It was a 1.5-hour drive in the rain that #1 and #2 conveniently slept through. B-B is the second gem of Europe. It is another immaculate town, but is even cleaner than Metz. There is much more money in B-B, and it appears cleaner because more buildings are painted in pastel colors, which we Californians dig. The biggest attraction for us was the natural mineral spas. B-B is famous for them. We had two options – either buy bathing suits and enjoy the fairly new bathhouse with 100 people milling around the front lobby, or, go ‘au naturelle’ at the Roman-Irish baths next door.

The choice for us cheapo, art lovers was easy when we checked out the price of bathing suits in the lobby and saw the naked women in the brochure for the co-ed Roman baths. The baths were built in the 1800’s – very old and very grand. It seemed very odd to us that there should be separate mens’ and womens’ showers in a clothing un-optional co-ed bathhouse, but we went along with it. ‘The boys’ traded our Tevas and shorts for sheets and entered the baths. It is actually a circuit, where you start out with a shower and move into a series of progressively warmer saunas, prior to losing your sheet for another shower and a cold plunge. Up to this point, it has been all men.

Conveniently, after the cold plunge, we entered the same warm shower we first had, only to encounter our first female – Voila! Face-to-face with a 17 year-old babe with her head thrown back while washing her hair. She got quite a kick out of our response – utter confusion coupled with open mouths and wide eyes! After stammering around for a minute or two cursing the effects of the cold plunge, we headed over to the steam and communal bath sections.

Here we mostly found old folks – 50 and up, and silently vowed never to eat raisins again. The unofficial poll of attendees suggests that circumcision and aerobics are less common in Europe than the U.S. But the bath section itself was stunningly beautiful – a Romanesque rotunda filled with statues (of naked people, of course). In addition, we were reunited with Kathy, all 9 months pregnant of her. She looked (and still does) awesome. Predictably, she and her brother tried to avoid each other most of the time, until Dave’s dolphin kicking, double-cheeked Moon under the Dome broke the ice! Surprisingly, we were fairly adult about the whole adventure; the towel guard only scolded Kathy once for sporting a towel in front of her brother, me once for the splash fight in the cold plunge, and #1/2 once for not staying the requisite four minutes at the warm towel station! Aside from those events and the weenie jokes over bratwurst and beer, we were fine…until we started running into people around town that we had seen much more of in the spa!

I thought that MB rides did not get better than the ride on Sunday, but Monday’s mountain bike ride with Patrick was better than the first. He took us on a different mountain, and it was sunny and beautifully warm. The ride was longer, more difficult, and with a more aggressive pace, but the traction was excellent. It was one of the best rides I have ever been on, despite the fact that #2 rode his brakes down every hill, heating up his rims so much that he got flat after flat after flat (was it 3 or 4, Dave?). No matter, for it allowed the nerves in our forearms to cool off between downhill sections! Eventually, we realized that the rim tape was slipping and the spokes were piercing the tube. We made it home to the hotel, gave each other high-fives, and then sadly had to depart from our home away from home, the Hotel Schloss Hornberg. After a quick stop in Newark, NJ’s European sister city (Strasbourg, the armpit of Europe), #1 and #2 were off for Prague, and Kathy and I returned home.

My sister, Ruth, and her husband, Neil, also visited recently. We had a wonderful time together. We checked out Brugge one day and Waterloo another. Waterloo is slightly uneventful, as the only attraction is the Butte de Lion, a statue of a huge lion at the crest of a small, man-made hill. Ruth and Neil treated us to dinner at de Kleine Zinke (traditional Belgian food) one evening, and we cooked dinner together the other night.

We also got to see my other sister, Colette, and her husband, John, and son, Anthony. They live in Kaiserslautern (refer to Update #1). We met them in Trier for the day. There are some Roman ruins in Trier and a very beautiful church that claims to have the robe that Christ wore on the way to being crucified.

No other major scandals in the Besser’s Belgian Life. We went to the Brussels Jazz Marathon last weekend with our friends Laura and Joe (Kathy met Laura through the American Women’s Club). The Jazz festival was held throughout Brussels, but we went to the Grand Place where we saw Fabrien DeGryse and his (boring) band de Guitares, and the Phillip Catherine Quartet. At Iban, The Minstrel’s put on a great sound of New Orleans Dixieland jazz. We also had some rip-roaring Indian/ Indonesian food. We have been to this restaurant three weekends in a row – it is sooooo tasty. They make a coconut milk-based curry called Chicken Sri Lanka and an excellent Chicken Biriyani. Oh yeah, and I had another “rendezvous avec Nathalie” (the real term for appointment used by the French). They call it a coiffure, but it is sooo much more! Joe has started “rendezvous-ing” with Nathalie, too. I can’t wait to find out what the referral fee is – maybe an extra long massage!

I also went biking after work on Wednesday. Luc and I did a serious 60 km off-road ride! There are these trails called the “Mountainbiketrails” (the Dutch love to make long words out of short word combos of English words). It was a very long ride, and some sections were really hard, but the ride was fun. Belgians like to ride really fast.

Well, there is only one thing to talk about yet…. Dane. Funny that the most important thing in our lives is last in the letter. He is due in less than 2 weeks, and Kathy is ready for him to arrive. It is probably more accurate to say that she is ready for him is depart her body! She has taken to drinking Raspberry Tea and using the trampoline in the backyard in an effort to induce labor. I will let you know if she starts drinking Castor Oil and going on mountain bike rides with me or as soon as I know something more. Since the best way to communicate is email, expect a very brief note soon after the birth. Kathy’s parents arrive June 6th. They will be here (off and on) for 2 weeks to help us out with the transition to parenthood, and to cook and clean, so they say. We are looking forward to their arrival – our fridge is empty and the apartment is filthy and way overdue for a cleaning!