Distance: 136 km
Elevation: 780
Duration: 6:38 h
Weather: gray, some rain, but mostly dry, 20 C
Today turned out to be better weather than I thought and I did nearly 60 km more than originally planned, thanks to advancing reasonably fast, specially until Neuerburg which was my original destination of today, thanks to the general downhill and the cycle paths on former train lines.
It really makes a huge difference. Former train lines have a steady gradient which is extremely comfortable both for riding up as well as down. While more normal cycling ways, even if they follow a river, so are generally downhill, have much more up and down.
When I looked at the weather forecast this morning it seemed to lie. It said it’s not going to rain in the next 3 h, but as a matter of fact it WAS raining. Drizzling, but still. But there was nothing to be done about it and it didn’t rain to hard. So I started taking the train-bicycle path in front of my accommodation downhill. After a few km it stopped drizzling and there I understood that it hadn’t really rained before either, simply the clouds were hanging so low, that I was inside.
My first stop was in St. Vith again in a German bakery, this time I had a “Donauwelle”, a cake I like a lot and which for a ride towards the Danube makes a lot of sense to eat.
Shortly after I restarted it started to rain again a bit, but never for very long or very hard.
About 37 km into today’s ride I met Felix, a chemistry engineering student from Delft on his way to Marseille to proof his flat mates wrong that he wouldn’t be able to make it. So far he has got a good start, doing about 150 km/day since his start in Delft and absolutely loving it.
Although he is doing far longer average distances than I do, we were actually going at a pretty similar speed. He was faster uphill (but overall there wasn’t that much of it today) and I was faster downhill thanks to my better breaks. And it turned out we were both going to Neuerburg… and I had a route planned while he was following Google maps. So we joined up for the day and had nice chitchat along the way.
When we arrived at Neuerburg it was still quite early, maybe around 14:30 and the weather was reasonable so I decided to cancel my reservation I had in a hotel there and rebook about 60 km further down the valley.
We took a longer rest inside the castle of Neuerburg, which was open although there was no one around. I finally ate my sandwiches I had been lugging around for 2-3 days. Plus the castle had a modern toilet for us to use and refill our bottles.
Although the cycle path after Neuerburg did follow a river, first the Enz, then the Prüm and finally the Sauer, it had more up and down than I had expected. Simply sometimes it goes down right by the river and then a bit higher through some fields, then through a village and down again to the river…
When we came through Irrel one could still see the damage done by the recent floods.
I knew that there had been severe floods (more than 100 people got killed) in July, but when I had searched where these floods had been, I thought it was mainly along the Ahr, which is an other river roughly in this region, but a region I did not plan to cross. What I hadn’t realize is that actually the valley of the Prüm and Sauer had also been severely affected. The main chaos has been cleared, but one can still see the remnants of the flood of what now seems to be a quiet, small river.
At two points our cycling way was blocked but the main road is open and we could divert easily. Actually it seems that the main road isn’t open since so long. So we’ll, I feel a bit unprepared.
This also in retrospect explains why we met so few other cyclotourists.
After a bit over 130 km I arrived at my very old style basic hotel in the small village of Metzdorf. The restaurant was closed and I had eaten my breads under way, but luckily the small pedestrian bridge over to Moersdorf in Luxemburg was open and the local Chinese restaurant as well. So I had a rather bad Chinese dinner, but it was filling enough for a cyclist.
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