Before you come with me on the journey, I want to briefly introduce myself a little closer to you, so you know roughly with whom you are dealing. Although I must admit that I am sometimes many and my personality can also depend on my hunger and stress levels.  But let's start slowly! Hey I'm Ralph, sometimes bike travel blogger, my last profession was natural scientist (graduate/promoted chemist) in cancer research (publication list). One big negative in research is certainly that permanent positions in academia are rare. A former employer of mine tried to explain it to me as follows: "You want to keep people intrinsically motivated. Employees wouldn't work 60-80 hours a week if they were on a permanent contract." While he (with a permanent position), knew every Spiegel article, but rarely the articles on which one had to write him as a co-author. Actually that's not true, in academia you are responsible for almost everything yourself, from researcher to janitor, if you don't do above average work there you just don't get anywhere. Output is what you call it and that's what I have. From time to time "funny" incidents from the academic and other life situations may appear in my blogs, which probably still gnaw at me to this day, mostly simple injustices. That's why I want to warn right away about traces of sarcasm and sometimes pure misanthropy. Anyway, I SWEW OFF, the good thing about the situation with temporary contracts was, they also expired sometimes and then? Either goose-stepping and genuflecting (because the service rendered didn't count) or......man swings on the bike and looks at the world while applying now and then to interesting jobs at a new university (city) and subject. Writing samples (scientific articles) I have linked with the portraits. The public diary here is also a form of trauma management (no one reads anyway ;-) or only people who want to use it against you. 

Oh yes, I have a spelling weakness! These are not only typos. For hints and corrections of spelling and grammatical errors I am generally not grateful, please overcome their inner obsessive-compulsive (New German Monk) and read on.

Where was I? Money? Well, cycling doesn't cost that much money per se, as a Swabian I live frugally, have neither children (nor the desire for offspring #difficult childhood), nor the need to leave anything other than traces in the sand (and a balanced to negative CO2 balance). You jump into the box naked anyway. In principle, the more often I sleep in a tent under a tree and eat spaghetti aglio e olio cooked with a spirit burner, the longer I could be on the road. The spartan food also always reminds me of a very, very happy time in my life, still now and then ne slice of dry toast with mustard in addition, and I am again the irresponsible chemistry student from before, who had on the 15th of a month still not quite the monthly rent of the current month together. "Wonderful!" But as I was allowed to hear more often. "A full belly does not like to study". Oh such and other wise wisdoms, I was allowed to listen to me, as a graduate of the 2nd education way, yes often. The fact that the quotation of H. Glaßl ends with "An empty still less", disturbed nobody. Trivialities! One had given something "clever" of itself and could be self-satisfied. So before I lose myself now finally in the romantic depths of my life, interested at this point most inclined readers nevertheless probably rather, how and why one comes on the idea to simply leave everything and simply times so with the bicycle for ne weile losmacht and to expose itself daily to these strains.