I've been trying to post each day about our bicycle trip but had to skip yesterday. We had just arrived at our summer camp, which is a 20-year-old travel trailer. There was lots of unpacking and setting up to do. I was just too tired from it all yesterday to give this blog my full attention so decided to wait until I'd had some rest and some coffee.
Day Nine. Still don't know how many miles because I can't find this ride on our GPS app, so maybe I figured out how to navigate the way we wanted to days later. I do see tomorrow's ride in there. According to Google, we rode about 38 miles (61 km).
It's probably a good thing I didn't have all the information in the GPS app in advance....
Our day started with a city ride as we headed out of Linz, Austria. I was thinking we would be dealing with lots of traffic but we really didn't. It was a nice ride down wide city paths, back over the Danube to continue our ride. I like how there are separate lanes on the bridge for pedestrians and cyclists:
We crossed over the Danube three times today. No ferries, which I'm sad about because those are always fun.
And every so often, we got a glimpse of the Alps in the background. I believe this is the last day we will be able to see them on this tour. I wouldn't let my husband pick a tour with a better view (and more hilly terrain) so this will have to do until the day I can see them without having to ride a bicycle to do it.
There are some days on the tour where you are riding a bike path or trail, and the route goes through a nature park or protected area. This is nice because you don't encounter cars or that many people, but the downside is that the scenery doesn't change that much. I much prefer to come across different things as we ride, whether it is an interesting building, a tiny village, a church that towers above the town, a cluster of contemporary houses or even a very elaborate garden someone has in their front yard.
One thing we've noticed is every village seems to have its own May pole to celebrate the coming of spring. We saw them in every town we came across. They are all different heights and decorated differently. These types of things that we do not see here in the US always intrigue me. This one was in Grein, Austria:
We were riding through some pastures and saw this church. I was hoping for a toilet/water closet but was out of luck. The church was locked and as you can see, there was really no place to commune privately with nature:
We also had a horrible head wind today, which is very tiring to ride through, and we were riding in a lot of open areas which made it hard. Then, of course, my husband decided to engage in a tradition that he always does on these tours. He must dip his toe in a stream or river of every foreign country we ride through. He decided that today was Austria's turn....
He picked some little stream, overgrown with reeds and weeds, in the middle of nowhere along the trail. Meanwhile, I sat there and watched, told him how nasty it was and not to put his injured toe in it, but he did anyway. He had dropped a 45-pound (20 kilos) weight on his foot several weeks ago at the gym and his toenail got battered.
Not too long after that we found a cafe on the trail, had some lunch (and took a bathroom break) and headed back out. Our GPS at that point was telling us we were going to Grien, but our hotel was in Bad Kreuzen. We were jokingly pointing up at buildings way up on a hill and jokingly said "Oh look, I bet that is our hotel....."
The photo above was taken as we were riding into Grein, Austria. Sorry it's a little blurry. Grein is a nice little town along the Danube. They some really cool old buildings, a bank with an ATM, which we used, and a bicycle shop that my husband walked over to look at. Typical old-style buildings with some cobblestone streets. We had used the tour company's GPS to get us to Grein and saw that our hotel was a few miles from Grein. However, we did not realize what that actually meant...
It was probably around five miles (almost 8 km) to our hotel. And it was mostly uphill. This was our punishment for joking about it earlier.
The route took us on a more roundabout route, from what we could see using Google Maps, but was more bike friendly. I preferred that option, but still.... This photo was taken when we were only part way up to our hotel:
And further up the hill yet. Remember that we rode up from the lowest point, the Danube:
This tour is supposed to be a relatively flat, easy tour for beginners. We are not beginners and I'd say after our previous days of riding in the Czech Republic and the few we've ridden on the Danube, that we are in relatively good shape and should be able to handle an 'easy' ride with no problems whatsoever. Having said all this, one must ask this question of the tour company, who shall continue to remain nameless: Who in their right mind sends people on a five mile climb after a 37-mile day of riding, on a tour that is supposed to be for beginners and labeled as 'easy'? At this point I was really mad. I felt this was a very thoughtless thing to do to someone with no warning (again something that could have been explained at the meeting they blew off).
Needless to say, we walked the bike up the incline in a few places and there were actually a couple of descents due to the rolling hills high up on that hill/mountain. We did garner a bit of interest from the locals:
At long last (and not a moment too soon) we arrived at our hotel. It was a really modern, nice hotel attached to this old castle. As we were locking the bike up, we met an English-speaking gentleman who was securing his bicycle as well. He and his wife had e-bikes, had re-charged them down in Grein, but hadn't charged them long enough so they ran out of juice on the climb. I felt really bad for them because they were not prepared. We were all commiserating with how horrible a climb it was, and I felt vindicated and not like a wimp at all.
We had a great room with our own balcony, which overlooked the stunning view from up on the hill (see thumbnail photo for this post.) I just stood there looking at it, mainly because I could not believe our luck with this nice room. My husband came out on the balcony to join me and after a few minutes said "You have to ask yourself after all that.... Was the juice worth the squeeze...." I just started laughing because sometimes he comes out with these sayings, and I have no idea where they come from. He's a man of few words, but definitely spouts some wisdom at times.
I was really reluctant, to the depths of my soul, to admit it but this view truly was worth the climb. As was the view from the top of the tower in the castle attached to our hotel:
The hotel had a restaurant and a bar, where we had a "we survived the climb" beer, before we ventured up into the castle. We could access the castle from a staircase through a door in the bar. We really weren't going to venture out and explore the surrounding area, given that everything was downhill including the nearest restaurant. We were happy to enjoy the spectacular view and explore the castle and eat dinner in the hotel.
Tomorrow we are reminded that what goes up..... must come down...
As always, you can find additional pictures of our cycling adventure on Instagram under the handle 7th_decade_redhead.
UPDATE:
I discovered something today, literally a month after we completed this leg of our Danube tour. I was looking at the hotel list we were given, which has written instructions to the hotel on it from the town centers, which is what I think we used to get to the hotels before we figured out how to use the tour GPS app to navigate to them, and I notice this sentence that says to go to this point and wait to be collected at 4:35 and 6:35 pm if you do not wish to ride up the hill.
I read this to my husband, and he just cracked up laughing and said "really!" Okay... I guess this is MY fault for not seeing this when we were riding. However, given that we are done riding between 1:00 and 3:00 pm, we would not want to hang around waiting because we want a shower, meal/snack, beer and a rest. So, not sure we would have elected to remain down the hill until a ride came along. We also wonder if they would have been able to even haul our nine-foot tandem up the hill on their transport vehicle. So, my bad for not reading this and knowing we had this option, but still... the meeting would have been a great place to bring this up and let us know. Apparently the other couple doing the cycle at our hotel failed to notice that blurb as well.
If you would like to read more about our three week-long bicycle tour starting in Prague, Czech Republic and ending in Budapest, Hungary, here are the links to our entire adventure:
Day Zero in Prague (Weather or not I wanted to)
Day One.... The Hills are Alive .... and I am not
Day Two....Vistas and Grocery Stores (and an angry cashier)
Day Three.... Are we Hiking or Cycling? (Today it was hard to tell....)
Day Four.....My Favorite Place on the Entire Tour (and a nod to the Beer of Kings along the way)
Day Four and a Half (I couldn't do it justice in one post)
Day 5 ...... Will This Day Ever End???
Day Six... Pausing in Passau (AKA This is the way we wash our clothes.....I think....)
Day Seven - Off down the Danube (If we'd only had that meeting.....)
Day Eight - We needed a day like today.....
Day Ten Cycling the Danube - Cloudy With a Shot of Melk
Day Eleven Cycling the Danube... A rare short mileage day!
Day Twelve Cycling the Danube - Aahhhh Vienna!!!
Day 13 - Our Day in Vienna (It's not supposed to be this HOT)
Day 14: Vienna to Petronell-Carnuntum (Apparently, I can speak some Italian.....)
Day 15 Petronell-Carnuntum, Austria to Bratislava, Slovakia (Rain and broken Chain...)
Day 16 Bratislava, Slovakia to Gyor, Hungary (There's a snake in the grass....)
Day 18: Komarno, Slovakia to Esztergom, Hungary (A tense tummy and a tense moment......)
Day 19: Esztergom to Budapest, Hungary (A long ride for the last day)
Day 20: A Day in Budapest (We had to see the last of the "Stevens/Stephens")
