Route: Donaueschingen - Black Forest - Umkirch
Distance: 74 km
Elevation: 705 m
Duration: 4:32
Weather; cloudy , a little bit of sun, but no rain, 20 C
Today was probably the day where I climbed the highest mountain I ever climbed with a bicycle. Luckily already Donaueschingen is pretty high, so it wasn’t that crazy amount of climbing too reach over 1,000 meter above sea level. But still, pretty proud of my achievement and the views I was recompensed with:
The climbing started straight away from the hotel and also very quickly the region becomes very sparsely populated. The route today I had planned entirely with Komoot as I hadn’t found any official cycling path crossing the Black Forest at this angle, but while riding I was always at the lookout for cycling signs and if I found one that went into my direction I changed to that option instead of my planned route.
This also brought my to this straight, maybe 10 km long, gravel path through the forest. Very lonely there…although I did encounter one woman doing Nordic walking.
I took the climb slowly and after a while I found a nice bench and had a pear I had bought about a week ago in Wellheim! It was nicely juicy, exactly what I needed.
Although the temperature has gone down compared to the heat a few days ago, all that climbing still made me quite thirsty, and I quickly finished my first bottle of water. But I have always 2 bottles, plus this time I bought an extra bottle of sweet ice tea as well. But when bottle 1 gets empty a slight panic sets in searching for a source of water. Which in retrospect yesterday was totally unnecessary, but well, that is the benefit of hindsight. I was really quite afraid of not meeting another soul for the entire day and even was quite worried if I would be able to find something to eat.
When I planned the ride yesterday I checked restaurants on the route and did find some, but many were closed in the day, or only item on the weekend. But I saw 2 that should have been open. So they were my goal for lunch. I even planned an alternative route and reserved and alternative hotel in Titisee just in case I was not able to find anything to eat, or the weather would turn to the worse. Talking about the weather, the forecast again was much worse than reality. Per the forecast it should have drilled all morning and there was even the distinct possibility of a thunderstorm! Nothing of this came true and specially on the decent I was very relieved that the roads weren’t wet.
When I emerged from the long forest road there was a very tiny village, but with a production plant for some engineering. Very archetypical of Baden Württemberg! There I found a worker and asked him for a refill of my bottle.
Not too much later I came to the highest point of my cycling trip (and I guess it will stay the highest point for a long time), 1040 m! And right there at the mountain station of a small T-bar lift I had lunch in the first restaurant that per my search should have been and actually was open!
After lunch the first, not long decent started, and I noticed that descending isn’t that much fun either if it is too steep. I was essentially on the breaks the WHOLE time! Sometimes I looked at the speed on Garmin, and I was kind of going at 20 km/h okay and when it got up to 30 km/h that was really the maximum I could live with. So my admiration of professional cyclists who decent at 80, 90, 100 km/h had grown a lot. And also all the non professional cyclists who would be laughing about my attempts to get down a mountain. It just feels very sketchy to decent on two small wheels a road that is only going down and down.
This first decent wasn’t too long and so there was a bit more climbing to be done, but quite gentle. And with nice, typical Black Forest farmhouses dotted across the hillside.
Today and yesterday were also one of the few days were I saw cows grazing outside. Such a normal view in the Netherlands, in Germany it seems that most cows are indoor dwellers and the fields are only used to grow crops. But here in the Black Forest the hillside is too steep and probably the ground not fertile enough, so that there is only grass for cows too munch on:
After this second, shorter ascent the final descend started and my hands are hurting from all the breaking. It was also interesting to feel that once down in the valley that then leads to Freiburg the temperature went up quite remarkably.
I didn’t stop in Freiburg as I know the city and my hotel is outside. Also I couldn’t really have parked my bike safely in such a big city.
In the evening I tried to clean a bit the bike from all the dust it has accumulated over the strade bianche of the Danube valley.
Tomorrow onto country # 5, France!
