Day 4: Donauwörth to Bad Gögging

There was a lot of punishing grinding along gravel tracks in 41C heat today. Some really lovely towns and a lot of peach iced tea.

Dusty, baking hot and a long way to go. A dream holiday…

The Park Hotel in Donauwörth had air conditioning and a balcony and so while we slept reasonably well, our washed bike kit could dry in the night time heat. Breakfast was once again a “stamp it out of the machine which makes four star German breakfasts” affair. The coffee machine was strangely gated behind the bar and when I asked for my third coffee I received a skeptical raised eyebrow from the waitress. I was probably eating into their profit margin by having surplus coffees beyond the regulation amount.

After managing to pack the bikes without getting smeared with the increasingly filthy combination of oil and dust which is caking the drivetrain of the bikes, we set off at 7:50 and we whizzed down the hill that we had so painfully walked up at the end of yesterday.

The first part of the day was on great roads in the rolling foothills of Fränkische Alb.

Early in the morning with no traffic, this was delightful.

In a surprising break from the past few days, we were actually on real roads! With traffic and everything! This is not standard-operating-procedure in Germany but the traffic was light to non-existent, the hills such as they are were generally fairly gentle (although occasionally very steep indeed) and it wasn’t too taxing in the cool of the early morning.

Only bike obsessives need read this but the Garmin “Climb-Pro” functionality fails miserably here. Climb Pro looks at the route ahead and identifies climbs and shows you the profile of the climb beforehand and while you’re actually climbing the hill. Normally this works fairly well but on this trip, it reports a 50m climb as 3% average with a max grade of 4% when in fact it’s 7% with a peak of 15%. No idea why it’s so bad…I guess nobody else cares.

The road wound its way through the hill and through the sorts of anonymous German villages that have a truly stunning building in the middle.

Where’s this? No idea. Nice though.

Once we were through the hills we were routed down through the outstanding farm tracks through the neatest and most well maintained farms in the world.

Just look at this “farm track”. It’s better than most of the roads in Cambridge.

This was a lovely part of the route although it was 10:00, the heat was building up and we still had a fair way to go. Most of the tiny villages had one of these which were so popular on our Rhine trip.

Note the fire station in the background.

Yes, a town called Stepperg — which is so small it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry — has a fire station with two giant fire engines! If we were in Spain I could make the Hose A and Hose B joke but…sadly that one will have to wait for another trip.

We dropped down to the Danube (Big-D) and started grinding along the gravel paths on the dyke tops.

Yes, this was starting to get brutally hot.

We eventually got to the beautiful Renaissance town of Neuberg. We were getting very hot and so stopped for what would be our first stop of the day.

Neuberg was pretty nice although we didn’t see much of it.

Neuberg has a beautiful area within ancient walls which sits atop the Stadtberg. There’s a 16th century Italianate palace and the oldest Protestant church in Bavaria, the Schlosskapelle which is nicknamed the Bavarian Sistine because of its extensive and highly decorated ceiling frescoes.

We saw none of that because much more important than culture is hydration.

Iced tea, water and two coffees.

By now the temperature was 40C touching 41C alongside the Danube. It was really hot and I was internally casting aspersions on UK tabloid news headline writers who pull out the “Phew what a scorcher” headline when it hits 30C. They have no idea. At 41C, the external temperature is higher than body temperature and you’re effectively absorbing heat from the surroundings. It is…uncomfortable.

10 or 15 km after Neuberg, we rolled into Ingolstadt. This is a quite large (150k people) town dominated by the Audi factory and a couple of oil refineries.

Bars, cafes, blokes with chamfered beards. Ingolstadt is a happening place.

It’s well to do, very gentrified and quaint in the centre. The Altstadt contains a number of really important buildings including the rococo Maria de Victoria church (Asamkirch) which was built around 1734 and has a tromp l’oeil ceiling which is the worlds largest flat-surface fresco. Also, the old Ingolstadt school of anatomy in the university was chosen by Mary Shelley as the setting for Frankenstein.

We stopped at an achingly cool bakery for more peach tea and a couple of sandwiches. One thing that never ceases to amaze is the sheer variety of bread products which a German bakery can produce.

A small selection of the wheat based products that

this one German bakery produced.

There was still 25km to go to Bad Gögging and those were very tough kilometers indeed. 40C+ temperatures, and the slippy gravel paths on the top of the dykes were very challenging. We were often on the north bank of the river which meant we were in the full glare of the midday sun.

Big D, some random factories, the baking heat, still a long way to go.

In trips gone by, I would have done some research into these interesting factories but…who can be arsed when one’s head is boiling?

Bad Gögging eventually appeared and the route took us through a retail park and some light industrial development until we reached the Monarch Hotel.

Not exactly quaint.

The reception — while mercifully airconditioned — had a very strong “down market Las Vegas” vibe.

Let’s add some more marble Hans. That’s going to look great!

Apart from the young family you can see in this photograph, we are the youngest people in this hotel by at least 10 years. On our way down to the bar for a drink at 5pm, the elevator what rammed with old and very old couples heading for the buffet.

The buffet was very popular at 5pm.

We mused on why the hotel was rammed with older couples and the hypothesis is that these are people who would probably go on a cruise but don’t like the sea or find the idea of flying to Naples or Barcelona scary. You can drive here from anywhere in Germany, there’s a pool, there’s a buffet, and it’s familiar and easy. It was…strange.

Anyway, the day is over. If possible, this was harder than yesterday. The temperature was higher and the gravel was more challenging. Southern Germany in August is…tough.

Tomorrow is another day and it’s a shorterday. We are following the Danube for 15k and then taking a boat through the Donaudurchbruch…. That will be fun and then it’s only 30k to Regensburg where we’re staying tomorrow night. After four challenging days, both Dr T and I need a little bit of recuperation.

The Stats:

• Distance: 95km 😕. Doable but felt very long.
• Climbing: 338m 😐. Gradually the climbing is reducing but today it was front loaded so it was a blessing.
• Average Speed 20km/h 😐. The great road sections at the beginning upped the average.
• Bikes: 😬. For two bikes built out of bits from China, they’re still going strong. Filthy though.
• Soft tissues: 🙂. Sudocrem still working some magic and nothing important seems to be broken.

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