Matthew Supert

Megan and I had been talking about going to Europe for several years now and we decided to just "pull the trigger" and get it done. German was the destination and I bought airline tickets last fall and assumed we would just figure out our itinerary over the next several months. Our trip this year was to visit Munich, Nuremberg, and Berlin. 

The flight into Germany went fine, although Megan didn't get much sleep on the plane. We knew we were going to arrive around mid-morning so we had to check into our Air BnB apartment and then figure out something for the afternoon. Our apartment was located abut two blocks from the main train station. One of the tenants of the apartment, Marina, met us there to let us in. The apartment was gorgeous. You'll see some more photos of the apartment later. 

For our first afternoon we were planning on hitting up a couple of art museums, namely the Pinakothek der Moderne. Unfortunately it was closed because it was a Monday. Our afternoon was starting off poorly, but we then decided to head of to the Englisher Garten, which is Munich's "Central Park".

The highlights of this garden were the manmade river that ran through the center of it and the beer garden. On many days in the summer residents would swim in the river. It was sitting unusually high on this day though due to recent rains. They have a small section near the south side of the park where surfers ride the waves. 

Look at the size of that beer. 

After lunch in the garden we went and walked around the grounds of the Residenz, which was the royal palace. 

We then just sort of wandered around the "old town" area, and walked into a beautiful church and got luck by walking up to see the Glockenspiel right when it was going off. 

The day finished off by hitting up another church and also walking through the main market square. 

Last weekend Megan and I had the pleasure of riding up to Appleton Wisconsin with a group of friends. Their son goes to the Lawrence University music conservatory and they were on their way up to to see his final performance of the year. There was a total of nine of us in the group heading on up for the weekend. Leaving Park Ridge we went on up through Wisconsin though its always enjoyable country roads. We eventually found our way onto the Kettle Moraine Scenic Drive. It is a nice collection of scenic country roads.

We stopped for lunch on the first day for a burger before continuing on north. When we finally got to Appleton I was impressed at how cool the town actually was. A nice looking college campus overlooked the river, which appeared to be dominated by an abandoned mill. As as result of the mill there looked like there were at least two locks or damns on the river. The mill has since been converted into apartments or condos, but much of the aging infrastructure around the mill, including old bridge pylons in the river remain. 

Our hotel was the fantastic looking Franklin Street Inn Bed and Breakfast. It was an adorable converted victorian house with very vintage looking furniture. Megan and I waffled on our room choice and ended up with the very cool looking, but also very hot third floor attic room, with a seashell theme.  The proprietor had the most northern accent I had ever heard in my life. What's more is that our group had the entire house to ourselves, which made for a great evening. 

Dinner that evening was at the Stone Cellar Brewpub, just across the river. Again, I was completely surprised at how great the place was. Great food with all of the Wisconsin standards like beer, cheese and sausage. It really was fantastic. Later that evening we went to the recital which was performed in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel. After the concert we went to the Viking Room, which is a bar located inside the university's union. Take that in for a moment. A bar, located inside the university. It was a strange sight, but it was a cool little basement hangout. Surprisingly it wasn't too crowded and drinks were apparently cheap.

The next day we began out trip back down to Illinois. We probably got started a bit later than most anticipated, but we went to go see the Horicon Marsh, which is a wildlife sanctuary. Part federal and part state land, it is home to migrating birds. It was well worth the side trip as it was a very pretty location. We only stayed for an hour or so. 

Finally, before heading home we made one last stop at a taco stand near Delvin Wisconsin called Lopez's Anchor In. At first glance it appears to be your standard hamburger and hotdog drive up stop, and it does have that food, but what it also has is some delicious  tacos and horchata. Megan got a horchata "smoothie", which was amazing. 

Finally push put us back down to Illinois and home around 5:30 or so. It was a long weekend, but some great riding and some great sights. 

This past Friday, May 20th was national ride your bike to work day. I have been wanting to do this for the past several years, but rain and other factors at work have prevented that. This year however the weather promised to be nearly perfect and I had nothing conflicting with work that would prevent me from participating. So I went off this past Friday with my bike and some research from Google Maps to find the best bike route to get to work. The ride in for me is 17 miles each way, which makes for a pretty robust bike ride. It is doable, but not exactly something that is easy or one would do on a daily basis. 

My ride was going great until I was about 2/3's of the way done, whereI ended up in the bicyclists worst nightmare. A car driver turned the corner off of the road heading into the entrance of a Mcdonald's and cut me off. I was just feet from the car. Thankfully, I didn't hit the car, but I did end up locking up my breaks and "high siding" the bike. I basically did a front flip on the bike, over the handlebars and onto the pavement. I hit the pavement pretty hard and my Strava map actually seemed to capture my crash, which you can see below. 

It took me a few seconds to realize what just happened. The woman who pulled in front of me did ask if I was "OK", but she did not get out of the car nor did she actually apologize. Several other motorists asked if I was "OK" as well. Thankfully, I wasn't badly hurt. I had a nasty raspberry on my knee which was bloody, but really not that bad. I also landed hard on my shoulder and my back, which later in that day ended up hurting a lot. As of a couple of days later, they still hurt, but they are feeling much better, so I think I just bruised some ribs and my shoulder. The only other major casualty was the strap on my bag which tore off from the impact. 

So of course I had to ride home from work at the end of the day. Thankfully, the ride home was without incident. It was however pretty tiring though. Overall and interesting experience to say the least. Perhaps I'll do it next year, or perhaps not. Can't quite say at this point. 

I have been in-between a solid video game for the past few weeks. The Division has lost my interest and I am hoping that a future update may bring me back to it. I have been dabbling here and there with a few different games. 

I played quite a bit of the Overwatch Beta that occurred a couple of weeks ago.That game is a ton of fun and has a lot of the same sort of hooks that TF2 had when it came out. While gorgeous and a ton of fund to play, I don't see myself necessarily picking it up right away. For some reason I never came away from the game "craving" for the next time to play. 

This past weekend had another Splatfest for Splatoon and I I ended up playing a lot of that this weekend. I had forgotten how good that game really was, and they have continued to add more maps and more weapons to the game. There has to be over thirty different load outs now for the maps. Tons of fun and it actually scratched my area shooter itch that Overwatch was going for. 

My biggest thing though was that I have been playing some indie games as of late. I finally finished The Fall, which was from the last Humble Nindie Bundle from last fall. The Fall is a cool adventure game where you are an AI in an environment suit trying to save the life of the body inside. You are stuck in a recycling facility that is trying to tear you apart. The game has some great atmospherics and the puzzles are decent, but there were several occasions where I had to basically "try everything" in my inventory to see what would solve a puzzle. Solutions were not always intuitive, but the game was probably 6-8 hours in length total, so it was a good time while it lasted. 

I briefly also played "Affordable Space Adventure" this weekend two for an hour or so. This was in the most recent Humble Nintendo Bundle and a game that has received a lot of praise when it came out. It is a Wii U exclusive and makes fantastic use of the touchpad for having controls and even sounds just on the pad to supplement the game. I am just pas the tutorial section, so I'll have to see how that one plays out over the next few days.

I picked this album up from the library a couple of months ago. Most people know Max Richter's name probably from his song "On the Nature of Daylight". Richter is in all respects a contemporary composer of "classical" music. I put the word classical in quotes because while the music does use orchestral instruments the compositions are really anything but classical. Almost all of Richter's albums could be called concept albums and the music in some instances features elementals of ambient or electronic/synthesizer components. It is all very subtly done though and at first glance most of the music could be thought of as a traditional orchestral arrangement. 

The latest album from Richter follows in much of his previous work, in being a conceptual album. From Sleep is the shortened version of a larger composition which is approximately eight hours long. The music was/is designed to be listened to while one is sleeping and is said to guide you through the sleep process. This album itself is only about an hour long, but it features thematic elements of that larger eight hour composition. 

From a listening perspective, it is a nearly perfect ambient or background music piece. One could easily listen to this before going to bed, while reading or while just trying to wind down after a long day. You aren't going to hear anything here that is on the radio, but this is quite a good album overall for listening. 

What do you get when you combine 45 degree weather, Wisconsin roads, and a missed motorcycle meet up? Well you (sort of ) get the 2016 spring Slimey Crud Run.

As appears to be a tradition with me, I lead a motorcycle ride in cold weather. Yesterday was supposed to be the annual slimey crud run up to LeLand Wisconsin. The day started out pretty rough. Temperatures in the morning were about 45 degrees with a light rain. It was cold and those who signed up dwindled from twelve to a hardy six when the day started. 

Our ride up to Wisconsin went pretty smoothly. It remained cold, but it did stop raining and we had a nice ride through the Wisconsin country roads. As a group leader though I ended up missing one my my turns, and as you an see from the map that Tim had on the ride, we ended up backtracking most of our way. I made a turn onto County Road KK instead of HH. In the end we missed the actual crud run meet up (we were really close before my wrong turn too), but we did have some great riding though. The roads were a bit hairy since there was a bit of mud and gravel on them, but they were largely deserted. 

We ended our day by heading over to the Grumpy Troll in Mt. Horeb for lunch before calling it a day for the long trek back to Illinois. We hit some rain and cold on the way back so the hot shower when I finally got home was welcome. 

Special thanks to Toni and Tim for capturing these photos you see posted here. 

This past Christmas I received the "Road Biking Illinois" book and two weeks ago Megan and I got out to do our first route in the book. We did the Salt Creek Bramble which was a nice ~35 mile bike ride around the western suburbs. The weather could not have been nicer and the ride was pretty great, hitting up some nice trails through the forest preserve and hitting up some nice neighborhoods. I didn't realize when we firsts out from it that we would be going as far north as Oak Park.

The only major complaint in the book is that the street names changed often from town to town, even while staying "straight" on the road, so there was a lot of stopping and referring back to the book to try and get our bearings. We made a nice stop at the "Brown Cow" ice-cream shop in Forest Park to recharge our batteries a little bit. 

The western side of the ride had a nice detour through Fullersburg Woods, which I would like to go back and walk at some point while also hitting up Graue Mill. We tried to find it in the area, but we couldn't and the woods there has a nice crushed gravel path that I think would be great for an afternoon walk. Great ride for anyone in the western suburbs. Hit up my Strava link to get the route and do it yourself. 

So, if you have been following me at all on social media for the past week, you would have known that I was attempting to do the Grumpy Grind this weekend. This was an 82 mile gravel grinder. A gravel grinder is a very midwest sort of bike ride that is focused on riding on gravel roads. 

So for the past month or so leading up to this ride I was preparing myself for some pretty terrible weather. Cold, perhaps raining conditions. What we got instead was a beautiful day. Perhaps a too beautiful one. People were initially joking about how this was the least grumpy of the Grumpy Grinds, but after about 20 miles in I think every found out that the sun and the heat combined with the nearly sand like road conditions made this a very grumpy grind. 

Road conditions, as I mentioned were brutal. The gravel roads were so dry that they were basically powdered sand with rocks in them. It was extremely difficult to find a path on some of the roads. The most brutal section of the route was on Hershey Road, around the 25 mile mark. This area, as I found out, was a killer for many people on the ride. Both my dad and I decided that we weren't going to be able to finish by here and instead we were going to bail out at the midway point. I wanted to make an effort to try and finish the full first half of the ride and tried to get the last ten miles or so. That ended up being a mistake that was more than I could handle. As soon as I started around that 35th mile I was already beginning to cramp up in my legs. What I didn't know is that what lay in front of me were some of the hardest vertical changes that were to be shown on the ride thus far. As you look at the back half of my graph above, you can see that I hit several elevation changes of over two hundred feet. Well that finally killed me. After stalling out on several hills my legs decided to call it quits. I seized up and literally couldn't walk. I had to then call in Megan to act as my SAG to bail me out. 

Overall though, this was a great ride. It was brutal, but you don't know if you can't do it until you try. Great people and a great setup overall though. 

So what have I been playing recently? Well, the Division has been the biggest game that has probably launched and I have spent a lot of time working my way through that game. The Division has perhaps one of the most detailed and intricate world maps I have ever come across. A ravaged New York City has just tons of detail on each and every street in the game. 

The game is a sort of loot based shooter, similar to Destiny in some ways. The story in the game is convoluted and mostly wrapped up into various audio files you find throughout the world. They are remarkably well put together, it is too bad though that so much of the story is hidden behind those and not tied more closely into the actual "story" missions. 

The shooting is fun, but things do begin to get a bit repetitive towards the upper levels. I have no hit the upper level cap in the game and apart from cleaning up the side missions I still need to do there isn't a ton left to play for unless you just want to grind and get better gear. That isn't something I really want to do at this point. 

I have also been playing a lot of Miitomo from Nintendo this past week. I don't even know if I would truly call this one a game, but it is a sort of social app where you answer questions with your friend's and get cute clothes. It seems to be a perfect iPhone type of game to share with friends.