37 miles today and drinking beer by 1:00! Can’t get into the hotel until 3:00ish so no early nap for us!
Left Donauworth after perusing the guidebook for route details and yet again being grateful we have the gpx files. Moving at a leisurely pace as ‘only’ 39 miles to go today. Listening to cuckoos as we rode. Three small, but steep, hills and then flat all the rest of the way to Ingolstadt. Think we’re spoiled by the flats on the majority of this trip.
Managed to find coffee and second breakfast in Neuberg, sitting in the sun in pretty town square. There aren’t as many towns with restaurants / coffee shops as you’d expect on this route so we stop when we find one.
We didn’t spend a lot of time by the river today. We mostly ran along gravel paths, some along the top of an embankment which ran alongside the river (to keep from flooding the valleys?). Pretty good paths as we still averaged 13.5 on the gravel. Think it was one of those ‘get from one pretty bit of the route to another pretty bit’ through some commercial / towny bits. Nothing to complain about, just not as scenic as some days.
Arrived in Ingolstadt at 1:00, in time for a very leisurely lunch as we waited for the code to be able to get into the unattended hotel. Found a proper lunch of sausages and sauerkraut for me and weird white sausages and a pretzel for Steve, followed by some very big coffees to keep us awake for the next 45 minutes. Good time to blog, I think! We’ll wait to ramble around what looks like a very interesting town until the bike and luggage are away and we’re not in our clackety-clack cycling shoes on the cobblestones.
Really nice town, plenty of pedestrian areas and plenty of out door dining. Walked down to the river to see where we’d be going tomorrow.
Steve didn’t like the place that the hotel wanted us to put the bike so it’s staying in with us tonight. Since the hotel is unattended, there was nobody to ask if it was okay! And it does make a good laundry rack!
Went out for aperitivos and then dinner - Vietnamese. Lots of different options here - German (obviously), Greek, Spanish, Turkish, Chinese, Vietnamese, etc. - tough to decide! Then, again, very early bed!
Comments:
You guys need to come to Vermont. We can visit the Von Trappe brewery as well as ride a rail trail (flat!) with many breweries alongside. We stopped at 3 for beers along the way and then went back with the car to purchase. Vermont = beer.
So only half a day really, feels like we “bunked off school” and went the pub!!! We were going pretty well today and that’s probably to do with us having done 200 plus miles in the last few days. It’s getting more “touristy”, where we had lunch the wait staff were in the traditional Bavarian Dress, the drinks waiter tonight had the curly moustache, some very Bavarian suits. We are getting close to Austria, land of The Sound of Music …. Expect to encounter the Von Trappe family any day now.
Tomorrow back to nearly 60 miles but c 3 should be on a ferry through another gorge to a place where the Rhine, Main and Danube Canal joins the river, this allows pretty big boats to go from the Baltic/North Sea to the Black Sea, highest point is 406m (c 1400 ft above sea level), should start to see more boats on the river which has become quite wide now. Every few miles there are dams and sluice gates and locks to make it navigable ie deep enough and can get past the dams…
Auf Weidershenen.