Standing on the platform of a small-town train station, the wind rips through our hair and the ground rumbles as a sleek white ICE train shoots past at several hundred kilometers an hour (they are capable of 300 km/hour), that is, as far as I know, faster than a speeding bullet.  On an ICE you can get from Frankfurt to Paris (600 kilometers!) in under four hours.  They could get you to the moon in 55 days, if they went that far.

On the sections of the autobahn without speed limits fancy cars whip past older, slower models in a frenzy of speedometer limit pushing.  Nothing is far away anymore.  The world is shrinking and travel is speeding up.  For some, this is a boon, a joy, progress!  But those who’d rather “stop and smell the roses” have slowly set a new trend into motion: slow travel.  Travel done by foot or by bike, towns explored over weeks and months.  No “30 countries in ten days!” tours or 300 km/hour rocketing between destinations.

The slower you go, the more you see.  Whether what you see is “better,” “more important,” than what you can cram into your eyes and your ears and your nose and your camera lens on a tighter, faster schedule is debatable, but I can vouch for the fact that it leaves you more relaxed, that “slow travel” outings don’t leave you with the well-known feeling of coming home and “needing a vacation from the vacation.”

So, on a sunny April day, three ambitious and slightly hung over people set out with three bicycles to bike from Mainz to Frankfurt for Frankfurt’s monthly Critical Mass.

For those unfamiliar with the rite, Critical Mass is a meeting of bicyclists, the tradition of which was born in San Francisco back in the good old days.  The law says that once there are 15 bicycles caravanning together, they are legally allowed to occupy a lane of traffic.  Today bicyclists still meet worldwide–some the last Friday of every month, in Frankfurt the first Sunday of every month–to ride together through the streets of their cities.  Intentions–some to remind car driver’s that they are a part of traffic too, to meet other cyclists, to celebrate, to parade around on newly Frankensteined tall bikes or choppers, to protest car culture—are as diverse and multifaceted as the bikes and their drivers.  Best of all, there is no leader, the event “is organized by everyone and for everyone,” so on the days when the police get a little too curious (or don’t know the law well enough themselves), there is no one leader for them to haul off in the back of their patrol car.

Leisurely biking

In Frankfurt am Main, Critical Mass has been going on for some five, maybe even ten years, depending on who you ask.  In the last four it’s become a staple of the bicycle “scene” there, drawing, in the sunny summer months, several hundred cyclists to take a slow ride through the city together each first Sunday afternoon.
We made it to Frankfurt in a little under three hours—almost triple what the train ride home would take—and rode through the city with a bright collection of bicycle messengers, families, collectors, athletes and environmentalists for four hours that sunny Sunday afternoon.

On the way there we had biked slowly through small towns—Hochheim, Florsheim, Sindlingen , Eddersheim, Hattersheim, Sindlingen—cities that, until then, I had only known as stops on the S1 train line.  But now they were quaint little orange-roofed villages.   Places to pause and drink water.  Places with a pleasant downhill stretch or an annoying uphill slant.  Names that had previously existed only as text on an abstract dark blue line on the local Frankfurt train plan now had faces, bodies.  Because we’d gone the slow route, we’d finally gotten the chance to meet them.

Critical Mass is alive and well in Germany’s thriving bike culture.  For more information on German cities with their own Critical Masses, check out the Critical Mass wiki, which also lists offers more information on the concept, as well as a list of Critical Masses world-wide.

http://criticalmass.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page  (click on “list of rides”)