After Zell am See I decided to travel north into Germany. I have been interning with the product management division of SRAM and I was curious to see the Schweinfurt office to get an idea of how things were done differently in Europe and meet some of the people that are on our weekly conference calls.
I fell in love with Bavaria on my first ride. The roads are perfect. There traffic is sparse, the towns are cute and the scenery is dramatic. With the fields harvested I felt like I was riding through a Rembrandt painting, where aside from asphalt and wind mills the backdrop of my cycling adventures looked like it hadn’t changed in 500 years.
I went for a mountain bike with some other SRAM employees, though I’m still not great on a mountain bike. I only fell once, and luckily a tree stopped me from falling all the way down the cliff.
Schweinfurt also has a brand new aquatic center with a 50m outdoor lap pool. That along with endless hiking trails means a really nice place for a triathlete to spend a week. Like I said, I didn’t end up spending much time in the office.
At the end of the week I was delightfully exhausted, and actually looking forward to the long flights to South Africa for the UCI Paracycling World Cup in Pietermaritzburg where I would race with Aaron Scheidies at my first international tandem race.
