Day 0: It begins again

Once again it’s time for a long-distance self-supported cycle trip across Europe.

After the relative success of last year’s Rhine Cycle Trip(i.e. we had fun, didn’t get divorced, avoided most of the things that can go wrong) there was an intensive planning session just after Christmas where we investigated the possibilities for a trip this year.

• A ride in North America was a possibility but the US and Canada are really sparsely populated which makes it hard to route and plan. Also, logistics is hard.
• We seriously considered Warsaw to Tallin or Vilnius to Tallin. These would have been a bit shorter than usual but would have been new countries, lots to explore, lots of history but maybe more challenging weather and the proximity to Russia was…problematic.
• Cycling from the Rhine to the Danube following the Rhine-Main-Danube canal was a nice idea since it would have linked the ride last year to the one the year before but it turned out that there was a lot of it which was through the industrial and financial wasteland that is Frankfurt.

Eventually having bought maps for all the routes, burned the midnight oil on Garmin Connect and Strava and practically caused booking.com to declare a denial of service attack due to how often I was hitting their server, we settled on doing the other half of the Danube. I had cycled from Budapest to the Black Sea, and we would complete that by cycling from the Donauquelle (the official source of the Danube) to Budapest. By February it was all routed and planned, all the hotels were booked and then suddenly it was July the 31st and this happened again.

I have seen the future and it looks like this.

Rather than getting some old bike boxes which are cheap and protect the bike but are exceptionally unwieldy in cars, airports and trains, we found some excellent soft bike bags on Amazon for £30. With bike boxes we would have had to get a taxi from Zurich airport to Donaueshingen which, given how expensive taxis are in Switzerland, would have cost more than the GDP of some African countries, buying two of these and then donating them to the hotel when we got there seemed like an excellent idea.

While walking through Zürich HB with two bike bags weighing a total of 38kg is not pleasant, it’s certainly better than manhandling bike boxes.

Today was a long and somewhat boring day so I won’t bore you all with it.

Waiting for the next train in Zürich.

Automobiles, planes and trains and an exceptionally grumpy and smelly taxi driver for the final 700m from the railway station to our somewhat funky starting hotel. German railways rather let us down and, to be honest, let themselves down by leaving us stranded in the unlovable town of Tuttlingen while they worked out some scheduling or signaling problem but that’s hardly the jeopardy and danger that you come for. Although if you come for random facts, Konrad Adenauer is a big deal in the Tuttlingen railway station with a big plaque and a statue for reasons which seem to have escaped the internet’s attention.

Thanks German Railways. Tuttlingen was a joy

So we’re in Donaueshingen in the weird Hotel Linde. Stuck in a 1950s time warp, it boasts a “Vietnamese restaurant cooking in the French style”.

French style? Hmmmm.

But they do have beer and that makes everything ok.

Getting ahead of any future dehydration problems.

So everything is ready for tomorrow. And hopefully the blog tomorrow won’t be quite so soporific.

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