Here is a proverb for cycle tourists: 'A mile in the wrong direction is not helping your journey'. As we didn't have a detailed map for this stage, we had a go at following google's directions. Never again! After cycling for five miles we went past the hostel where we started from. After about an hour we were only about 2km from our starting point. Kirsty's knees were hurting so she decided to cycle back into Balingen and catch a train to Ulm. Sean ended up hitch-hiking so we were in three groups. Gill and I cycled through the heat all day. When we stopped for lunch there was nowhere open so we settled on finishing out water bottles with a couple of energy bars.
The journey seems like a long slog with a few more long slow hills going on for 1-3 kilometres. Seeing the Danube on the outskirts of Ulm was exciting and we met a very friendly lady out for an evening stroll who took it upon herself to help us find our hostel.
The tiredness and confusion was getting to us. After her shower, Gill put toothpaste on her bottom instead of her special saddle-soreness cream.
In the evening we had a fantastic meal bought and made for us by Sean and we chatted till late with a lovely German couple, who were also on a bike tour. We talked about our cheese-rolling and their greasy-pole-to-get-a-sausage-at-the-top races.
Barry
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Hi Gill and family.
ReplyDeleteRemembered the info you had given in the staff room and having returned from a wet boarding trip to Croyde with the kids, decided to see if I could locate the blog. Just enjoyed reading all the posts and am truly impressed by your progress. Can visualise your journey so far, though confess to knowing it from the autoroutes rather than the country roads! Sounds like you have met some characters already on the journey. Must be hard battling through the heat, but it's got to be better than getting soaked. The weather here has been truly awful for the last 24 hours, with little prospect of improvement. So whenever you get saddle sore and fed up, just think of us back in grey, wet Cheltenham, slap on the right cream (in the right place) and enjoy yourselves.
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Helen W