Saturday, September 28, 2019
As we celebrated our last morning in Passau over a delicious bakery breakfast, we watched out the window as about a dozen people filed by dressed in lederhosen. We have no idea where they were going, and we haven’t seen any preparations for Oktoberfest being done since we passed through the outskirts of Linz, or even any promotional posters, but we assume that something is happening, albeit without us, as we had a date with the open road. As someone from Los Angeles, I am not very good at weather, but then, neither is our weather app, so we watched the sky closely. Mostly the clouds were dense and ominous, and only once all morning did they actually drop rain on us, and only for a few minutes. After that we had a sunny, albeit windy day. The highlight of our day was eating a giant pretzel and finally finding another fresh milk vending machine. Our campsite in Straubing was on an island, on the grounds of a canoeing club that rents out their lawn during the off-season. It was beautiful, but by seven o’clock we had to retreat to our tents because the mosquitoes would not leave us in peace. On a related note, I’m reading Mosquito by Andrew Spielman, which gave me lots of interesting tidbits on the little blighters.
Sunday, September 29
As this was the last Oktoberfest weekend that we were to spend in Germany, we were hoping to see some Oktoberfesting. We were a bit early in the day for proper festivities as we rolled through the center of Straubing, but we did see some bodacious babes in traditional dress, and a stage that had been set up for who knows what shenanigans. Other than that, we didn’t see anything particularly Oktoberfesty, although as we crossed into Regensburg, we saw a walking stick race, which was unique, and conceivably related to Oktoberfest. Today, in fact, we were only barely on the Danube, and we felt like we saw more farmland than we usually do, which is already a fair bit. I’ve always thought farmland was beautiful in its own way, I feel like I’m standing with my back to a gallery wall, looking at a Mondrian painting from the side. Or what a Mondrian painting would look like if he had painted in vivid browns, greens and yellows instead of primary colors. After passing through Bad Abbach, the GPS guided us onto a ferry that would deposit us slightly upriver of our starting point, but we elected to stay on the official path. Now, we don’t know if the trail was under construction when the GPS trail was made, which is possible as the trail was newly graveled, or if the creator of the ferry trail simply wanted to avoid the enormous and ridiculously steep climb to the top of Waldfreihof. It was so steep that even the ebikes couldn’t hack it, and I had to walk about a third of it, mostly because even my wide front tire couldn’t get traction on the gravel, but also because my lungs couldn’t exhale carbon dioxide fast enough. Fortunately, it was mostly downhill the rest of the way to Camping Felbermuhle, which I would say was the fanciest campsite we have stayed at yet.
Monday, September 30,
2019
We thought we knew what headwinds were, but we were sorely mistaken. In the middle of the night, our tent collapsed inward on top of us and a tree branch crashed to the ground nearby, and David had to rush outside to hurriedly gather the few things that we had left out the night before. We fell back asleep to the sound of our rainfly snapping back and forth. In the morning, we learned that we would have 30-40mph headwinds all day. Our only respite came on a couple of occasions when the trail ducked into a forest and the wind was mercifully blocked, although we still had to watch out for falling branches. It was also our hilliest day yet, probably because we’re getting close to Switzerland. We still managed to pull into our campsite at the local canoe club of the lovely Romanesque Donauworth, with enough time to spend a fortune on groceries at Kaufland.
Tuesday, October 1,
2019
The winds were blowing at half the speed that they were yesterday, which was good for morale and progress, although it meant that we were back to picking small gnats off our sunscreened skins like monkeys groom each other for lice. The weather was mostly lovely, and we had the unique experience of biking in the rain and the sun at the same time. Since we left Passau, we noticed that we’ve been on the Danube for less and less time, and all day we only crossed over the river twice and biked along it for a short while. It’s as though the EV6 is weaning us off the Danube before it switches us over to the Rhine. Ulm was a revelation, although we only saw the old city and its enormous church because we ran out of stove fuel. It is our second night in a canoe camp, and we are loving them. The showers are free, the facilities are spotless, there’s usually an associated biergarten, and we just found out that they do a yearly two-month kayak trip down the Danube, which has inspired our next vacation. As if that weren’t amazing enough, the bartender from the canoe club bar actually came out to our tent with a couple of beers on the house, either because he felt sorry for us, or it was Oktoberfest, or because he’s the nicest person in the whole wide world.
Wednesday, October 2,
2019
For two kids from California, we are getting to be excellent meteorologists. The weather channel said 0.5mm of rain in the afternoon, but as our dappled sunshine turned into universally grey skies, we decided it was a good time to call a hotel. Sure enough, just after Kaffee und Kuchen, the skies opened up, to the point that David put on his poncho, even though it effectively turned him into a parachute for the 23kph headwinds. Knowing that there was a warm dry bed at the end of the day made the afternoons torrents bearable, and we rolled into Singmaringen with no little relief. Of course, as soon as we were comfortably installed in our beautiful room, the rain stopped, but that just meant that we had a lovely view of the impressive castle on our way to dinner at a Serbian restaurant.
Thursday, October 3,
2019
Happy United Germany Day! To celebrate the reunification of East and West Germany in 1999, everyone was on the bike path enjoying the gloriously sunny start of a four-day weekend. We said goodbye to our slowly dwindling Danube forever in Tuttlingen. I don’t know if it was the proteinaceous breakfast with three cups of coffee, endorphins from the hills, the lack of a headwind or the thrill of historic reunification, but I had a runner’s high that did not quit, even when we climbed an enormous hill out of Tuttlingen. The pain of the hill was offset by Kaffee und Kuchen in the only café in Germany that was open today, and by almost 20km of downhill. We camped at Markelfingen, on the edge of Obersee.
Friday, October 4, 2019
Winter is coming. It was a frigid four degrees this morning and after two gloomy hours on the road, the rain started and didn’t stop all day. We performed a mad 110km dash to our hostel, interrupted by a lunch that was just long enough to warm our toes up. It was a little bit miserable, and our weather channel predicted nine more days of this kind of weather. On the bright side, we got to see Stein am Rhein, the official mouth of the Rhine, and Rheinfallen, the largest and flattest waterfalls on the Rhine, without any downpour to block our view. And the hostel in Albbruck, is absolutely luxurious.
Saturday, October 5,
2019
We stayed dry along the Rhine all morning until we got to Basel, where the banks are lined with narrow colorful buildings that look as thought they’re about to fall into the river. Leaving Basil we crossed the triple border of Switzerland, Germany and France into France and left the Rhine behind. Instead, we followed a canal that would eventually connect us to the Rhone. Shortly after branching onto the canal, the skies opened up again. Rain is tricky on a bicycle, not just because of slippery leaves and oil slicks and decreased visibility, but because it’s a constant decision-making process to balance staying dry and warm. The rain poncho keeps you dry, except for your feet and calves, but it balloons out like a parachute and slows you down noticeably, and any sweat from working harder to pedal stays trapped. The windbreaker jacket is water resistant, perfect for light drizzle (“spittle” as we called it in Cuba), but useless and heavy in anything heavier. So it was that we arrived, soaked from the knees down, and slightly humid everywhere else, at Camping d’Ill, and checked into our “Magic Cabin”, which is as precious as it is miniscule.
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