Well, the apartment may have been good but the windows opened out onto a narrow street bordered by high buildings that magnified all sounds. Add to that an event that was taking place that seemed to funnel the revellers back and forth past our window, with many of them staying in the hostel and congregating outside, and you may suspect we didn't have the best nights sleep. You'd be right. Light out at 23:00; asleep at 03:30. I kid you not!!! Breakfast consisted of the bakery purchases we made the day before, and we clearly picked the worst bakery in Germany as it was largely inedible. Happily fruit and yoghurt filled the gap. We collected the bikes to find that, despite them being locked together, someone had moved them in order to protect their bike!! DON'T MESS WITH MY BIKE! We loaded up and left Regensburg fizzing, or I was anyway. It was a pleasure to turn away from the nose-to-tail tour groups that plodded around the city following their guides like goslings following the mother goose, and to clear the suburbs out to the open road. Spirits started to lift and we realised it was going to be a scorcher. And so it turned out to be. The tracks were flat and, again, a mix of smooth tarmac and gravel. The latter is such a pleasure to leave when tarmac replaces it, not because it's a bad surface to ride on (it isn't, its smooth, flat and fast) but because it's noisy! Everything goes deathly quiet when the smooth, fine-grain blacktop is ridden onto. We found a farm offering coffee and cake at just the right point (Kiefenholz) and expected a cheery red-faced farmer's wife offering home-bakes. What we got was a surly, glum-faced wifey who served us aged filter coffee and the cheapest, crappest cream roll cake that Asda, or its equivalent could provide. Then demanded, in menacing tones, instant payment of €10! We continued onward through rich agricultural land of mostly maize alternating with flood dykes, and stayed self-sufficient until reaching the city of Straubing where we dived into a Bierhaus for a late lunch, just 6k from our destination. We ordered adventurously and I ended up with pigs trotters and dumplings which rather took me by surprise! The former was actually very nice, the latter, disgusting! As we sat with our beer the sun suddenly disappeared, the wind got up, the sky turned jet black, the thunder roared, the waiters rushed around clearing tables and lowering umbrellas ... and we retreated inside to watch the spectacle of a torrential downpour. Coffee followed beer as we chatted with a Swiss/English couple who were cycle touring with 2 dogs in a trailer, and the rain eventually eased. We hit the road in the lull and reached our gasthof just as the rain started again. Laundry and showers complete, we had a good value light tea (by German standards) then Anne spent a while on the Translate app in an effort to facilitate an actual knowledge of what food we may order in future. We now know, for example, that dumplings are Semmel Knodel and are to be henceforth avoided!
37.7 miles at 10.6 mph avg. 3 hrs 33 mins moving time to ascend a pitiful 140m!
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