He has been owed this one for a while now. Two pieces about riding a bike into the desert and back, and both of them end the same way — home, hungry, and across the street to Bavarian World, where if I was lucky Hans would be behind the bar.
This is that story. Not a ride. A room, and a man in the back of it, and what it meant to have somewhere to bring the rides home to.
He was about the only one who would understand it.
A place that looked like it had been there for decades
Bavarian World was directly across from the house at East 6th and Valley. Ten seconds, if that. Which is most of why I ended up there several times a week — it was simply the closest place that had beer and food, and it happened to be extraordinary.
It was a full operation. A grocery and deli up front, genuinely German, stocked with things I had never seen anywhere else — head cheese, and other cold cuts I did not investigate too closely then and still do not want to know about now. Magazines and gifts, all in German. Der Spiegel on the rack. Deutsche Welle playing quietly somewhere in the store. Cuckoo clocks on the wall along with the maps and the souvenirs, and a poster for the 1972 Munich Olympics that looked like it had been up since 1972.
The deli case was run by a stern-looking German woman who gave every twenty-year-old who walked in a real once-over. She was actually perfectly friendly, and made an excellent sandwich. Her husband ran the beer side of things and could not have cared less how old we were, as long as we had money for it — which, for beer, we always somehow did. We were all about twenty. Close enough, apparently, to a grocery store in Reno in the early nineties.
Behind the deli was a full German restaurant, dark and enormous, with a dance floor built for actual German dancing — foot-slapping, the whole thing, which I did exactly once and will not be doing again. Mostly the restaurant sat closed and unlit, which somehow made it more interesting to look into on the way past.
And past all of that, at the very back, there was a bar.
Two ways in
You could reach it through the restaurant, past the dark dance floor, all the way to the back of the building — a bar that felt hidden precisely because you had to walk through everything else to find it.
Or there was a second way, from a side alley. From outside, that door looked like it opened onto storage — lawnmowers, extra chairs, whatever a restaurant keeps out back. It did not look like it went anywhere a person would want to be.
Through that door was the same bar. Dark, low-ceilinged, like it did not officially exist. And yet it did, every single night, and some of the best conversations of my early twenties happened inside it.
The first time we found it, it was genuinely unsettling — is this even a real place, is someone going to tell us to leave — and then we were in, and it was exactly as dark and dank and German as the outside had promised, and that is when we met Hans.
Straight out of Soviet Life
Hans looked like he had stepped directly out of a magazine — tall, blond, built with the kind of symmetry you do not get by accident. We found out inside of about ten minutes that he was from Czechoslovakia.
He asked what we wanted. We looked around at what everyone else in the place was drinking — full liter steins, enormous things — and decided that looked correct. We got them and took the stools.
The television behind the bar had the Tour de France on. Which was not a thing you saw anywhere in Reno at the time, possibly excepting Deux Gros Nez down the street, and that place was mostly a coffee shop and would not have had it on either. Here we were in the back of a hidden German bar, with a stranger from behind the Iron Curtain, watching bike racing.
Somewhere between LeMond and Armstrong
I cannot pin the exact year, but the television tells you the window. This was after Greg LeMond’s era and before Lance Armstrong’s, which puts it somewhere in the early-to-mid nineties — LeMond rode his last competitive Tour in 1994.
There is a strange local symmetry to it. LeMond grew up twenty minutes from that bar, in Washoe Valley, and went to Wooster High School in Reno. His father bought him his first racing bike at a shop on South Virginia Street — the same street College Cyclery sold me the Paragon on, a few blocks the other direction.
Two Reno bikes, two very different careers. But the same street put both of them in motion.
He told us where he was from, and that he had dreams once of doing exactly what was on the screen. And then he told us what he had done that morning, before opening the bar: a century on the bike, then a weight session, then his shift. He was training for the California Death Ride.
We had never heard of it. He told us everything — a hundred miles or so through the high Sierra, five mountain passes, something like fourteen thousand feet of climbing in a day. We sat there with our liter beers, genuinely impressed, and Hans just shrugged like it was Tuesday. Which, evidently, it was.
The California Death Ride has run in Alpine County since the late seventies — roughly a hundred miles, five or six passes through the high Sierra, upwards of fourteen thousand feet of climbing in a single day. Riders train for months to survive it.
So a century, then a weight session, then a full bar shift, on one ordinary morning of training for it, is not an exaggeration on Hans’s part. That is roughly what the training actually requires.
An all-around athlete, and the professors
Hans turned out to be a serious triathlete on top of the cycling, and a big-time skier come winter — genuinely an all-around athlete, the kind of person who made the rest of us reconsider what a normal amount of exercise looked like. He introduced us to sports we barely knew existed as actual sports at the time. Triathlon, which none of us had done. Western States, the hundred-mile trail run, which back then was still a fairly fringe thing rather than the institution it is now.
I was a lifeguard, so swimming was already mine. I had the Paragon, so the bike was covered. Hans made the case for adding running, which I eventually did and loved just as much as the other two. Looking back, most of what became a fairly athletic decade of my life traces to conversations at that bar.
The beer was cheap and enormous — liters for around four dollars, which meant we brought the whole crew whenever we could talk anyone into it. Hans introduced us to Jägermeister shots, including one he called a bee sting, which lived up to the name.
A claim I never confirmed
Hans told us, more than once, that Northern Nevada drank more Jägermeister per capita than anywhere else in the country — something about the ski culture and all the resorts nearby. I have never found any actual data on this, and I suspect none exists in any citable form. It is bar folklore, the kind that gets repeated because it sounds exactly true.
Whether it was or not, we did our part for the cause.
And we were not the only regulars. Our professors from UNR turned up back there too — not, as far as I recall, anyone from the math department, but the ones who actually wanted to argue about things. History. Philosophy. I am fairly sure my economics professor was in there some nights. Overhearing, and occasionally getting pulled into, an actual argument between two professors over beers was a considerably better education than most of what happened in the actual classroom.
A country coming apart, on the television behind him
He had gotten out from behind the Iron Curtain some years before we ever met him — already well settled in Reno by the time we walked into that bar, not someone freshly arrived. He did not say much about how, and at twenty I did not think to ask. I still do not know the specifics, and I am not going to invent them here.
What I do know is the backdrop, because it was simply what was happening in the world that year. Czechoslovakia had opened up in 1989, and by the time we were drinking Hans’s liter beers the country he had left was in the process of splitting into two entirely new ones. We knew it was happening. He was, understandably, following it closely — a man watching his home country come apart on the news, from the back of a bar in Northern Nevada, while pouring us beer and telling us about the Death Ride.
Czechoslovakia formally split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia on 1 January 1993, after several years of negotiation that followed the fall of communism in 1989. So a conversation with Hans anywhere in that window would have landed during, or just before, his home country becoming two different places on the map.
None of that is inference. It is simply the calendar. What Hans made of it personally is his own, and beyond a general sense that he was glad, and hopeful, and watching closely, I could not honestly tell you more than that.
Good workout!!
Here is the thing that mattered, and it took me thirty years to understand why.
I would come back from something — a full day up and over Peavine, or that morning I rode into the desert east of Sparks and found the petroglyphs and the rattlesnake den, or any of the other rides — and I would land back at that bar, tired and full of adrenaline and completely unable to explain it to anyone else.
Nobody I knew had a category for what I had just done. It was not a sport. It was not a workout, exactly, not in any sense my other friends would have recognized. It was a twenty-something on a mountain bike, alone, for six or eight hours, in country most people would not go into with a truck.
I would tell Hans. All of it — the climb, the towers, the snakes, whatever it was that day. And Hans would just nod, completely unfazed, and say:
Good workout!!
And it was. That was the whole response, and it was exactly the right one. He was not impressed in the performative way people are impressed when they do not really understand what you are describing. He understood it precisely, because he lived by the same math — go further than seems reasonable, on purpose, to find out what is actually in you.
Nobody else in my life at the time had that framework. Not my roommates, not my coworkers at Harrah’s, not really anyone. Hans did, because he was quietly doing his own version of it every single morning before his shift even started.
What happened to him
I genuinely do not know. I left Reno in 1996, and I could not tell you now whether I said a proper goodbye at that bar or just assumed I would be back through before too long, the way you do at twenty-four.
I have been back to Reno more than a few times since. And more than once, I have found a reason to walk into Bavarian World — a sandwich, some pretzel rolls, an excuse, really — and take the long way past the deli and the dark dance floor to see if the back bar still looked the way I remembered it. It always did. Same posters. Same clocks. I would look toward the back, half-hoping to see Hans there polishing a liter glass, ready to tell me how his week of training had gone, or to hear about mine.
He was never there. I do not know if he had moved on, or moved home, or simply stopped tending that bar years before I ever came looking. I never found out.
It was only very recently that I learned the rest of it. The original owner sold the whole fifteen-thousand-square-foot operation to retire. Bavarian World, as I knew it, is gone. Something else occupies the building now.
What's there now
Bavarian World ran at 595 Valley Road under the same family for roughly forty-seven years. It closed in the early 2020s when the owner retired. The space reopened in 2023 as Nourish & Flourish Kitchen and Market — a different business entirely, in the same building I used to walk past on the way to the bar in back.
I have noticed this now, writing enough of these down. The places do not last. Peavine burned. Bavarian World was sold and became something else. The setting always seems to go, eventually — fire, or a building code, or just a man deciding it was time to retire after nearly five decades of running the same deli counter.
The thing that does not go is the race. I am finishing this on 27 August 2026, with Stage 6 of the Vuelta a España live in the other window — Pogačar tearing it up in Castellón, on a gravel sector up toward El Bartolo that has never been raced before in the sport’s history. Thirty-some years ago it was the Tour de France on a small television bolted above the bar, and a Czech bartender who had dreams once of doing exactly that. Today it is a laptop in Washington State. Different decade, different race, same thing happening on a screen while I think about a man who would have known exactly what that gravel pitch was doing to everyone’s legs.
But for a moment, while I am writing this and you are reading it, he is there, and I am there, and it is exactly as it should be — in that bar at the back of Bavarian World, with a liter of something German in front of each of us, and the Tour de France on, and a good workout behind me.
Good Workout
Bavarian World · Reno, Nevada