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Or, "Festivals I Have Known and Loved." As my long and detailed series of blogs on Tomorrowland and Untold may have suggested, I am a bit of a music festival veteran. Some of these happened long enough ago that by now, I'm starting to feel just a little bit nostalgic, especially about Euphoria, of which I experienced the last three iterations.

Euphoria, when it was still around, happened the first week of every April at Carson Creek Ranch, which is on the southern fringe of Austin, Texas not too far from Bergstrom Airport. It was also my first introduction to festival culture. Euphoria 2015 may not have been my first festival, since I had already been to a single day of Austin City Limits in 2013, and a one-day affair in Grand Prairie called Meltdown in 2012, but there was something else here that just pulled me into a whole new subculture. I wound up going back to this the next two years, though it pretty much collapsed under its own weight after the 2017 edition.

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One more day of riding left, and nearly all of it would be in Switzerland, on the south shore of the lake, riding west. I decided that since I'd definitely consumed enough beer over the last three days, I would go completely alcohol-free on Monday. I suited up again, this time in a bike jersey from Ride Away Bicycles, the bike shop in San Antonio where I'd always gone for any bike-related needs back when I lived there.

So after we checked out of the Hotel Graf Zeppelin, we rode that morning through downtown Konstanz and to a German-Swiss border checkpoint.

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Sunday began with me donning my Shiner Beers bike jersey, which I had acquired the year before at the Shiner GASP ride at the Spoetzl Brewery in Shiner, Texas. Represent! Another hearty breakfast with a heaping bowl of Müsli and pretty soon we were all back on our bikes and back on the road. Unlike the day before, today I decided to just stay with the group and not be a lone wolf again. Besides, this time the route was going to be a lot shorter.

Sunday's ride, like Saturday's, was eastbound along the lake's north shore. Our starting point was Sipplingen, and we were riding *toward* Meersburg, which had been our starting point Saturday morning. The weather was a lot better on Sunday; the sun was out and it was a lot warmer. No more feet going numb!

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Saturday, May 25, started with a delicious breakfast at our hotel in Meersburg, JUFA. Just like every hotel in this part of the world, that included Müsli. And since I was going to be riding my bike all day, I was more than happy to have a rather large heaping portion of it.

Our large tour group had a plan that day, in which we had a choice between two different distances. Our end point would be Lindau, an island town near the east end of the Bodensee which lay just on the other side of the state line in Bavaria (most of the German shore is in Baden-Württemberg). Halfway between them was Friedrichshafen. Anyone could either ride all the way to Lindau (43km), or if you were a slower rider, just ride 20km to Friedrichshafen and take the tour bus the rest of the way; it would be leaving at 2pm. I bravely announced my own plan: ride all the way to Lindau, and THEN turn around and go back to Friedrichshafen in time to catch the bus! If I could pull that off, I would rack up a total of 66km or about 41.25 miles.

  1. Bodensee Bike Trip - Prologue
  2. Untold day 4 - More Cluj, End of the Fest
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