bavarian blast

Today’s rest day is in New Ulm, Minnesota, a German community of 13,000, named after the city of Ulm in southern Germany. Today we attended the Bavarian Blast festival, and I can emphatically state that the festival is appropriately named – we seriously had a blast. It was the most fun I’ve had on the trip so far. It was held on the fairgrounds and huge tents were set up for shelter. Highlights were the traditional German singers, clad to a tee in leiderhosen, who sang traditional songs (even featuring yodelling) throughout the evening.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, I'm sure you can only imagine how many a video is worth. So to save you all from my many words, here are a few videos below that I think do a better job demonstrating the festival atmosphere.

In this first video, we’re doing something comparable to a German version of the 12 days of Christmas (or so we gathered… in truth, we did not especially have a clue what we were doing – but we sure had a fun time doing it! :o))




The second video is of the traditional German singers singing Edelweiss. One of my favourite parts was the little boy from the crowd who stepped up from the crowd and proceeded to appoint himself as choir director. It was beyond precious.




However, it was not the lone precious moment from the festival. Many of the attendees were dressed up in festive costumes from German folklore. After a great debate, we decided that the little fellow below was a morel mushroom (other front runners were a peanut or a pumpkin). This website says that…

German folklore attributes the origin of morels to the Devil. Offended by a very wrinkled old woman, he transformed her into this mushroom. Ever since, calling a woman a morel in Germany has been a major insult.

Anyhow, I thought it was adorable that, despite being attired as a mushroom, he was not going to let this inhibit his activities at all. Here he is breaking it down on the down floor and holding hands with his little buddy.








We met a lot of really nice folks that evening, and I believe that Minnesotans are my favorites so far. I’ve met so many people that have really gone out of the way to be helpful, and everyone at the festival was so generous tonight when we told them about our trip. While we did pay the entrance fee, we didn’t spend very much money otherwise as so many people gave us things. Also, Minnesotans have very distinct accents. Thus far on the trip, I hadn’t seen the distinct regional accents and behaviors I’d been expecting – most of the people I met very much seemed to have spent a good deal of time in the melting pot of America, and had come out as a homogenous American lacking distinct regional peculiarities. I suppose I can’t criticize too much as I’ve been a bit melted myself – I often find myself shrugging my shoulders when people question “Where’s your southern accent?” after I tell them I’m from Georgia.

A few last shots from the festival are Jim and I participating in the polka-while-holding-an-orange-between-your-foreheads contest and Jim and Charlie dancing with some local ladies.







In addition to a great deal of playing on this rest day, there were the standard chores to take care of. In order to add additional shims to the outside of my shoes to better account for my leg length discrepancy, I needed a longer screw to hold it all together. So today, I went shopping at the hardware stores of New Ulm – emphasis on stores -- it wasn’t until the seventh store that I was able to find the screw that I needed! Rich spent some time working on my shoes adding additional shims on the outside and an additional insole on the inside. Hopefully this combination will even things out and help my knees to feel better.

Also, Rich helped me replace my rear tire today as it’s a bit worn out and I’m having a lot of rear flat tires. And what I mean by "Rich helped me replace my tire" is that I helped Rich replace it. And what I mean by "I helped Rich replace my tire" is that Rich replaced my tire while I chattered. :o) Oh well, while I may be generally be bike-mechanically-incompetent, I am learning. :o)

In the evening, we watched the 80’s bicycle movie Breaking Away and ate brownies – it was the perfect end for a rest day. Our rooms were not air conditioned, but the central lobby area was, so most of us just brought our sleeping pads, sleeping bags, and pillows to watch the movie with us and all slept together in the lobby to get some relief from the heat.