I have no exact mileage information for this day because we used the tour company's GPS routing in their phone app and that information is no longer available to us. Whatever the mileage was, we rode more than that.... and then some. This post is rather long because it was an unexpectedly eventful day.
You notice that I'm not mentioning the tour company we used for this part of the tour. I wish it had been Europe Bike Tours, the company we used for our Czech Republic bike tour....
Our best guess is that we rode 46 miles (76 km) that day.....
The day started out like most of our previous tour days. Breakfast, load up the GPS, head out, take photos, bathroom breaks, etc. Nothing unusual. The ride was very enjoyable. It wasn't long before we crossed into Austria. We were following part of the Eurovelo 6 bike route, which along the Danube was also known as Danube 1 in Austria. The signage was very good for this tour. My husband and I agreed that if I couldn't check the GPS in time to indicate which direction to go when there were options along our route, that he would follow the signs for that bike route. It was always correct.
The weather was perfect, the trail was paved, the river views were nice, and the ride was pretty easy.
It was shaping up to be the perfect day. We were in great shape, too after five days of challenging cycling (at least for us) in the Czech Republic and daily walks around whatever city we were staying in overnight. Mid-way on our ride we had to take our very first ferry across the Danube. The one-way trip cost 4 Euros. A round-trip fare would have been 6 Euros:
We continued our ride down along the Danube following the GPS along the Danube, winding through little villages and towns along the banks. When we get to the end of the day, the GPS tells us to go back over the Danube to the other side where the end point of the GPS is. So another ferry ride, similar to the one we took earlier.
When we exit on the other side, I start looking for our hotel. I can't find it. The GPS ends right there so it can't be far. Then I start to search the internet and find a hotel with a similar name (there were a few in Austria with this name) and the nearest one is five miles away (8 km) back along where we came from. That can't be right.... I tried to call the tour company and the call would not go through.
Okay, I KNOW this is going to sound very dumb, but I had zero idea that when making an international call, you literally have to type the "+" sign in your phone in front of the country code. I just thought that was a visual indicator of a country code, not something you had to physically input into the phone itself. I felt really stupid later on when I figured this out. So, in the absence of phoning them I emailed the tour company, asking where our hotel was and what time we should expect our luggage to arrive. They got back to me shortly, which is how we discovered their GPS tour route did not lead to our hotel. It only ended in the 'general area' of where our hotel was. We'd actually ridden right by our hotel five miles ago. I was not happy to find this important information out now, instead of via email when I asked the night before if there was any important information we needed to know, because of the missed meeting. They never gave me an answer with respect to when our luggage would arrive.
In the midst of all this angst, while I had the tour packet open looking for information, sitting on a bench in somewhat windy conditions, a gust suddenly took our papers off my lap and I watched our train voucher, boat ticket and other documents head straight for the Danube... I jumped up in a panic, dragging my phone by the charging cord and power pack running to get those things back. I was successful and they did not end up in the river, but it was close. I'm freaking out, my husband is stressed as I'm battering my phone as I'm chasing our papers.
Once we figured out where our hotel was, we decided to have lunch where we were before we took the ferry back across the Danube to ride back to the hotel. After a great grilled chicken salad, we headed back. When we exit the ferry, we see the German couple we'd met at the laundromat in Passau the previous day.
"Where were you? We stopped at your hotel to have a coffee with you, and you weren't there..." Boy was that an embarrassing explanation. They found our hotel and we couldn't. Unfortunately, they were moving on, so we only got a few minutes with them right there on the trail. They were impressed with our bike, so we offered to let them try it out. This is a photo of my husband with the wife sitting on our bike (the dimensions are skewed, I know):
We finally arrived at the hotel and found out one very important fact. No restaurant, not even the one in our hotel, accepted a credit card. We did not have enough Euros for dinner. This problem was not going to be solved soon unless we found an ATM. We did find one. Eight miles back the way we came from Passau, on the other side of the Danube (of course...). So this time we crossed back over on a bridge and rode uphill... I mean really uphill, and into the town of Engelhartszell to find an ATM. We found it, and got some cash.
Lucky for us there was an attraction to see there called Engelszell Abbey. It's the only Trappist monastery in Austria and they brew their own beer and make their own cheese there. So, of course we stopped, went inside to see the church part of the monastery and had a beer before heading back. I was grateful that this trip wasn't all about getting some cash out of a machine. It was stunning inside....
If you could overlook the bodies of dead saints in the glass tombs around the church.
We ride back down the Danube and come to.... the mid-day ferry crossing we used earlier that day. The pilot is confused, because he clearly remembers taking us across the Danube in this same direction earlier today. When he asked us about it, we said "It's a very long story...." so he charged us the balance of a round-trip fare so that our total fare with him was one round-trip ticket instead of two one-way fares, which was more expensive. We thought that was extremely nice of him.
We decided to eat dinner at this little outdoor place before heading back to the hotel, just to make life easier. We get back to the hotel and I'm dying for a shower and change of clothes BUT our luggage hasn't arrived yet. Hmmmm....Usually, our luggage would arrive at our hotel between 2:00 and 4:00 pm. My husband had the brilliant idea to attach trackable luggage tags to our bike bags, in case the bike bags got lost during our flight. He fired up the app, to discover that they were still in Passau. It was 5:00 pm by this time. I waited until 6:00, like the tour booklet said we should, before I texted the tour company.
They had forgotten to transport our luggage.... I just couldn't... at that point. Now I'm mad because had she inquired about when our luggage was due to arrive, to answer my email question, she would have realized it had never been picked up for transport.
While I was taking a moment to go to the bathroom, the hotel proprietor called us on our room phone to tell us that the tour company wanted to buy us dinner to compensate us for this mishap. We'd already eaten but we ended up having dessert and a few drinks on them in lieu of a meal. It then occurred to me that the hotel lobby of the hotel in Passau closed at 7:00 pm. That's where our luggage was. They had to send someone to pick it up and bring it to us. Would they get there before the lobby closed? I hoped so. After drinks and dessert, our luggage finally arrived to end what was an enormously long, stressful day that should have been a no brainer.
At least we had this lovely view from our hotel room:
What we didn't know about the tour company's app was that there was a point of interest section in it. I saw this section, but it contained a very long list that I didn't read closely. In this point of interest section was a list of hotels, of which ours was shown. If you tap your hotel, an option button pops up and if you tap that button, you can see a choice of "external navigation." If you choose that, you can use Ride with GPS, which is what we used in the Czech Republic, to navigate directly to the hotel.
This was a critical piece of information that would have saved us some time, miles and money that day. We never used the app's GPS again and always elected to take the option to navigate to our hotel rather than the general area where their GPS route ended. By the way, we could not open and play with the app before the tour because we'd get an error message that we were too far out of range of the actual tour location, so we could not really have prepared (even though we tried).
You can see pictures of today's adventure on Instagram under the handle 7th_decade_redhead.
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")
