A blog on travel, the outdoors, photography and perhaps music
A short hop down the Danube, through wheat and corn fields. Framed by pretty working villages and the usual hill top extravaganzas.
Straubing has its fair share of old churches and towers. A prosperous wee place with a choice of breads 🍞 to make a tenement building quake (“you canny through a piece out a twenty storey flat, 10000 hungry wains will testify to that; if the breed is plain or pan, the odds against it reaching earth and 20000 to wan.” ….the Jeely piece song.
Not the normal tour of the sights. Off to a bike shop for a spare tyre, a short 2.7km each way walk through where normal people live and work.
Bike shop? Bike shopping Hall more like. 26″ tyre (and every other size imaginable); replacement nut for SKS mudguard; cycling sandals for Barbara. And bikes in quantities to boggle the imagination. Mainly e- bikes and commuting hybrids with a smaller number of mamil road bikes. Saddles from tractor seats (there are a few buttock challenged folks – at least they are cycling – to razor thin “where do I sit?”. Stands, baskets. And spares galore.
The centre is nicely cooking by the time we sweat back. The unexpected sign is for Compostela de Santiago. Lost? There’s another Compostela from Prague to Santiago.
Tomorrow a short 50km hop.
A river route today. Two rivers, as after 60k we joined back with the Danube. Which is getting big enough for cruise and pleasure boats. Prosperous villages, aspiring church towers. The occasional telecom mast, which makes a change and contrast from masts with somebody hung out to dry. New gods replacing old.
Families out enjoying the Sunday cycle. Traditional dress in places: hope they have ice packs underneath.
We continue mainly downhill on gravel tracks. Buttocks like tenderised meat. There’s an uphill payback coming, never fear. Over 1000km done, 12/39 cycling days.
Entering Regensberg tomorrow’s rest day. We’re near the Dom. Let’s hope Quasimodo sleeps in late and the morning 🔔 is muffled.
A pleasant surprise day. Looking up was the theme. If it wasn’t a church or castle perched imperially on a tall rock, it was May poles decorated with the local guilds.
After about 30k along the route we left the Danube cycle path, North and followed the Amper Altmuhital Trail. Which leads us along the Altmuhital River to our destination.
The landscape changes into limestone gorges cut out by the river. Popular with cycling families and drinking parties rowing uncertainly in the river.
“The Altmühltal Nature Park is world-famous as the “homeland of the Archaeopteryx”, because the fossils of the so-called “primeval birds” have been found only here. This is a particularly rich fossiliferous region, where many other extraordinary fossils have been uncovered, too.”
Rich farming too with a wide variety of crops. Which gives plenty of stopping places. What a relief.
Gently down hill. Rather arse shredding gravel paths down hill. Lovely variety of crops and places hugging the Danube. Which is getting exponentially larger. The towns are immaculate and give the air of being prosperous.
One of the group had a tyre blow. I’ll follow him for luck: they were less than 1k from a good bike shop. New tyre and motoring.
Today marked the crossover with the Athens to Amsterdam ride of 2019 at Dillingen and Hochstadt. No blue plaques yet.
Insects are happy: Dragon flies dance with butterflies. Wasps are just annoying.
Tonight we’re near the Airbus factory on an industrial estate. Very pleasant though. Different from 2 July 1704 when 5000 French troops drowned in the Danube fleeing the British. The War of the Spanish Succession apparently.
Travelling reflections 