TdE - Day 29 Umkirch - Saint Hippolyte

Route: Umkirch - Breisach (New &Old) - Colmar - Route du vin - Saint Hippolyte 
Distance: 85 km
Elevation: 469 m
Duration: 5:26 h
Weather: generally sunny with some clouds, plus one major downpour in Colmar

Today I entered the last new country of this trip: France!

And this was probably the last time I see the Rhine before joining it again at home in Leiden. 

From here onwards I plan to follow EuroVelo 5 all the way to Brussels and then see from there how to get back to Leiden.

My first stop was Neuf Breisach, a fortified village constructed as the ideal garrison, and on the plan it is interesting and still totally maintains this form:

But in reality at least inside it looks like a very depressing, small town. Not very well maintained. What was impressive though were the fortifications:

My next stop was Colmar, a city that I already visited in the past. I had hoped for a bit less tourists due to Covid travel restrictions on non-Europeans, but no, the city was pretty packed with tourists. So I wonder how it looks like normally when also all the international tourists are there! But it looks nice:

One can already see in this picture that it was starting to rain. At that moment it was more like a drizzle, but as it became stronger I searched for a hiding spot and luckily found one under a roof in front of a Fnac. Not totally ideal, but it protected me from the ensuing downpour, that within minutes transformed the street in front of me into two, small, rivers. So I had a forced stop at Colmar for about 45 minutes, and not in the absolutely nicest place of town, but at least reasonably dry. 

After Collar I first encountered the cycle path that should bring me closer to home. Here it generally does NOT go through all the small villages but instead stays somewhere below them, so I had tweaked it to go through the villages. Tomorrow instead I plan to follow it a bit more strictly, also because tomorrow it actually does go through the main villages! 

All these villages now in my head kind of combine into one, with a city gate (often looking quite similar)…

… old, half timbered houses…

.. and often a main square:

But quite arbitrarily some of these villages (e.g. Riquewihr) we’re totally flooded with tourists, others such as Turckheim or Bergheim had hardly any (in comparison), but looked pretty similar ‘, except the absence of all the tourist shops.

TdE - Day 17 Bad Homburg - Miltenberg

Route: Bad Homburg - Main - Seligenstadt - Aschaffenburg - Miltenberg 
Distance: 107 km
Elevation: 305
Duration: 5:42 h
Weather: cloudy, sometimes rainy, 18C

Back on the road and bike. After a week of “rest” at my parents place, today on the second rest day of La Vuelta I continued my ride towards the Danube. 

I explained my ride to my parents (and my father continued to forget it, so I explained it over and over again), but I got some good tips, e.g. Miltenberg, a small but very picturesque town along the Main, which is where I am sitting now in the oldest restaurant of Germany!

I started quite late today (after 10:00) with my parents holding awkwardly the bike in front of their house:

The first few kilometers were along the road I took to school by bike for many years. I stopped along the way for this Thai temple (it’s one of two in Bad Homburg):

Strangely enough only a few meters behind my school “terra incognita” started. It seems I never ventured beyond that point. But today I did. The general plan was to follow the Main river, but from Bad Homburg you need to get there first. I planned a basic route yesterday with Komoot. Wasn’t for sure the best route, but it got me to the Main. The nice part started once I had crossed the river with a ferry in Rumpenheim:

From there onwards I followed a bicycle path along the Main. It was well indicated but I also had my trusted Garmin to show me the way. 

At about 25 km I took a relatively short break for half a sandwich brought from home and then decided that Seligenstadt sounded like a good next stop. I remember hearing that name as a child, but I somehow connected it with gliding not with a nice small village with a huge abbey and a very interesting garden, which I found by pure chance (the public toilet was closeby).

The garden was so interesting because it used vegetables and fruit trees with a clear decorative purpose. 

But not only vegetables, I got a grilled sausage at a local butcher’s. Tasty and quick. The weather looked as if it was getting worse over time, so I didn’t want to spend too much time on lunch today. 

After this stop I continued along the river. Twice today it rained. Once it wasn’t actually that bad and a tree provided sufficient cover. The second time I got lucky and found the roof of an outdoor pool, without any guests and waited for the shower to pass. It was never a very long rain. From tomorrow weather should become better. 

Aschaffenburg to my by surprise. I didn’t have any specific expectations and probably I haven’t ever been before, so I was very surprised by this huge palace along the river.

In Aschaffenburg the cycle way was a bit convoluted but I found my way back to the river cycling path.

At some point I passed an other solitary female cycling tourist (the first I saw on my trip), and later on she passed me (because I had been hiding from the rain). So I approved her and we road maybe 20 km together until the camp grounds where she will stay tonight. Nice chit chat. She is riding from Frankfurt to Nürnberg. So depending on the river side we chose tomorrow and our departure times/speeds we might actually meet again tomorrow on the road. 

The last 20ish kilometer into Miltenberg I road again alone, before arriving at my hotel smack in the center of the village. (But I am not staying in the oldest inn of Germany, only eating here).

TdE - Day 6 Metzdorf - Bernkastel Kues

Route: Metzdorf - Trier - Mosel - Bernkastel Kues
Distance: 96 km
Elevation: 242 m
Duration: 5:18 h
Weather: Cloudy but no rain, 20 C

In principle I had decided not to ride THAT much today, but if you reserve a hotel 60 km+ down the road at 13:30 before having had a lunch break, it’s kind of clear that I wouldn’t arrive by 16:00. Let’s see if tomorrow what I think I want to do and what I actually do will be better aligned. 

After a few km in Luxemburg down the Sauer (or Sûre in French) it flew into the Mosel and I took my third picture of a country sign …

… and then turned left, Mosel downwards. Strangely my planned route in Komoot thinks that over the 225 km from Metzdorf to Koblenz there will be 1,190 m of climbing, but today in 96 km of it I only did about 250 m and I can’t really see that there will be that much more climbing to come. After all I am cycling DOWN the Mosel. 

The Mosel, a river that is winding and winding it’s way. 

It isn’t the first time I am doing a cycling trip along the Mosel. I was here once with my father when I was maybe 10 years old, for a cycling trip. I remember that one day I suggested to take a shortcut. Just straight through instead of following the river. Well it might have saved us 20 km of cycling, but it did cost us time for sure. Because first we were pushing up the bicycles over a high and steep mountain and then downwards we couldn’t cycle either because it was a forest road and too steep for us. I learned an important lesson that day and will now vow to not commit the same error again. 

My first stop of the day was in Trier, an old Roman town as witnessed by the largest Therms outside Rome (which unfortunately for me got destroyed 1700 years ago by the Germanics! A real pity as definitely one of the things that is soooooooo missing from this cycling trip is the hot onsen bath in the evening. Such a pleasure when cycling in Japan.) 

Originally my idea was to eat something sweet under the Porta Nigra, but when I went to a bakery not too far away it also had savory stuff including “Fleischkäse”, so I was tempted. Not the best decision as it wasn’t a specially good one. 

Once out of Trier the Mosel trip proper started. Well actually no, and yes… it started in the sense that I was now riding along the Mosel for the entire rest of the day, but what one imagines for “Mosel”, i.e. the steep vineyards doesn’t start until a bit more down the river. First one needs to get through some “normal” and even industrial river part. 

What I also noticed, is how few people actually greet each other while cycling. Yes, in the Netherlands greeting other cyclist isn’t the most common either, but to a certain extend I do understand it. There are just too many cyclists around. However in the region in Belgium where I cycled, greeting other cyclists was the done thing. Yesterday where we met only a few cyclists the whole day. It was the dome thing. But today along the Mosel giving as little as a nod was already too much for 90% of the cyclists. And yes, there were many more cyclists than on a rainy day in a remote location, but much less cyclists than in the Netherlands, This lack of greeting capacity was very surprising to me. 

I quite consistently greeted other cyclists and even pedestrians. Maybe on average I greeted 75 % of people I encountered. But I got only very little back. 

An other observation was the type of cyclists. Mostly elderly couples, sometimes groups of elderly couples, a few young families, some groups of men and some solo men. But I think that in the entire trip so far, I haven’t seen an other solo female cyclists on a tour. Is it really such an outrageous idea for a woman to cycle alone through countries such as Belgium and Germany? I myself wouldn’t describe me as specially adventurous and I wouldn’t do a solo cycling trip in let’s say Tunisia, Turkey, Vietnam or Argentine, just to name a few countries where my prejudice (?) tells me that it can’t be safe for a solo female cyclist. Or at least not safe enough for me to FEEL safe. But Belgium? Germany? 

After Trier, I had two more stops along the way to eat and drink (nothing to write home about) before arriving around 19:00 at my hotel for the night. Getting a good shower, doing my laundry and finally walking into the picturesque town of Bernkastel-Kues for a filling dinner (potato gratin with some local white wines). 

This castle is towering (in the most literally sense of the word) above this old village. I might actually have been there back on my first trip to the Mosel with a bike, as I remember that one night we were in a youth hostel which was in an old castle up-up the hill. Maybe at my parents there are still some old dispositives to check.