The Rhine Ride

On our trip down EV15, I posted a blog entry every day. This document is all of the blog entries combined into one long document.

Almost all of the trip looked like this.

Cambridge to Andermatt

Once more into the breach...but this time it's different!

After the "challenges" of the Danube ride last year, I really felt that I wanted to do a long-distance self-supported cycling trip which didn't involve nearly dying on multiple occasions. I thought about doing the other half of EuroVelo 6 which would have gone from the Atlantic to Budapest or maybe cycling round Spain...although Spain in August might have been a hot and dangerous mess.

I settled on cycling from the source of the Rhine all the way back to Cambridge. This is broadly the Eurovelo 15 route and (a) is downhill all the way and (b) Lichtenstein and Germany aren't likely to be as challenging as, say, Serbia and Bulgaria. However, this year the trip was going to be different. Rather than doing a solo, self-supported long distance cycle, I was going to do a self-supported long-distance cycle but with my lovely wife.

Two bikes, two beans and two people this time

I have often said "there isn't a friendship or a marriage which would survive two weeks of self-supported cycling". Let's hope that our return to Cambridge isn't just a short stop before the divorce courts...

In an effort to avoid some of the most egregious (and pointless) hardships of the ride, I upped my Booking.com game and also planned the route in much more detail. I was keen that we didn't end up either sleeping in some 1.5 star youth hostel or, possibly worse, grovelling along the side of a high speed dual carriageway while 18 wheel trucks thundered by. Neither of these outcomes would be conducive to marital harmony. Along with the solid four and above hotel bookings I've also planned each stage to be a little shorter.

I've even taken a spare pair of socks in order to up my sartorial game a little too.

As always, logistics dominated the week before leaving. We were going to do the same trick as I'd used on the Danube ride: pack the bikes in a recycled box which had been used to deliver new bikes to Primo Cycles and when we get to our start point in Andermatt, we would make up the bikes and then dump the boxes. As always Stephen at Primo was fantastically helpful. If you ever need a bike or help with bike stuff, go and see him. Support your local bike shop.

Two people, two boxes, what could go wrong?

We left from London City Airport on a BA flight. After my disaster with Ryan Air last year I wasn't willing to go through the budget air wringer again — although, to be fair, BA managed to screw up pretty badly last year too.

Much to our surprise, everything went incredibly smoothly.

Spot the bike boxes

The flight was on time and apart from having an exceptionally irritating family right behind us, it all went well.

No drama in Zürich either. Passport control was quiet and our bike boxes appeared relatively quickly. We had thought of taking the train to Andermatt but the train would have been four hours, three changes each of which would have required lugging a giant 22kg cardboard box around stations and across platforms. We took a taxi which was comfortable although somewhat funky inside.

The taxi of luuuurve vibe was somewhat unexpected

The hotel is pretty nice. It is very new and has a little bit of a feeling of not quite being finished yet. As always with Radisson hotels, there is always a vague Scandi vibe going on. Just a touch too much blond pine or too many uncomfortable but trendy chairs.

The only thing left to edge us over into a drama was making up the bikes. Once again, everything went smoothly, the bikes have survived and seem to be fully functional.

The bikes are ready to go.

Regular readers of this blog will have been waiting for the hotel to be a building site, the bikes to have been broken in half by burly Swiss baggage handlers, an outbreak of Ebola…but no. The first day was surprisingly and reassuringly smooth.

So…ready to roll tomorrow. Everything kicks off with what, it turns out, is the “Queen Stage” of the entire trip. Most of the ride is going to be pan flat but although tomorrow has 2,200 meters of descent (woo hoo!) it also has 700 meters of ascent which is the most we will do in a single day. Probably best to get it out of the way when we’re still fresh.

More cycle stories tomorrow and less boring successful travelogue. If you’re bored, here’s a picture of a Swiss Mountain dog who is at the table next to us in the bar. Nice dog.

All we need is a cuckoo clock, fondue and some Toblerone and it’s a Swiss flush.

Until tomorrow when it all kicks off properly.

Day 1: Andermatt to Vaduz

A long day with a lot of gruesome uphills but some absolutely stunning views and a lot of descent.

Last night, dinner at the Radisson Blu Andermatt was pretty underwhelming. Poor pasta, terrible soup. Not a good start. In the morning Andermatt looked its usual charmless self. The town was never one of the traditional ski villages so it’s now just a mess of ugly apartment buildings and soulless windswept squares. We’ve been here in the winter and, unlike other alpine villages, it doesn’t get better with a covering of snow.

The Radisson Blu did rather redeem itself with a superb breakfast buffet but apart from that, I wouldn’t consider it a “destination hotel”.

Getting to the Oberalppass from Andermatt on a bike involves climbing 600m on a twisty and busy road at gradients of 12%. Or you can take the Matterhorn Gotthard Railway to the source of the Rhine for 8 CHF and 4 CHF for your bike. Let’s face it, that’s the easiest decision of the day.

On the train ride up we were surrounded by walnutty folks in their later years all wearing almost identical “sensible” hiking gear, all carrying walking poles and all twinkling with excitement about wandering around in the alps. It felt very Swiss.

When we got to Oberalppass after 20 minutes of riding the train (as opposed to 1.5 hours of miserable grinding up a steep alpine pass on a bike) we were greeted by the Stiftung Leuchtturm Rheinquelle, a lighthouse sitting at over 2,000m above sea level and a hell of a long way from the sea.

It’s a lighthouse at the source of the Rhine!

It’s a little unclear what’s going on here however, quoting from the website (auto translated from German) we get this:

The only lighthouse in the Alps stands at the source of the Rhine at 2,046 meters in the middle of the Swiss mountains. But what is it doing there? It was originally conceived as a tourist attraction, along with a real ship. The ship hasn't arrived yet. So the lighthouse stands there, waiting. One day, a ship will come, from Rotterdam.

The lighthouse also comes from Rotterdam. The original is in the Maritime Museum. It once stood in Hoek van Holland at the mouth of the Rhine. The lighthouse on the Oberalp Pass stands at the source of the Rhine.

The ship would be just as out of place as the lighthouse. It simply doesn't fit on the Oberalp Pass. It's too big, serves no purpose, and isn't attractive. The lighthouse is already there. The ship will come. Absurd? We live in absurd times.

We do indeed live in absurd times and this prose is exhibit one.

Looking happy at the source of the Rhine. This would not last.

The descent down from Oberalppass was steep, twisty and bitterly cold.

Downhill is all very nice but not at sub-zero temperatures.

Of course having to pack light and planning for August meant we had little or no warm clothes to deal with the descent. At one point I thought my hands would shiver themselves off the handlebars.

Eventually the arid high mountain scenery opened out into something that had a little bit more of a “you’re in Switzerland guys” look.

🎵The hills are alive…🎵

Yes yes yes, I know the Sound of Music is set in Austria…

We saw our first Eurovelo 15 sign and we were off.

The route is exceptionally well signed.

But more important than the Eurovelo 15 sign was our first sight of the mighty Rhine.

That little stream down there is going to get a lot bigger soon.

Of course it wouldn’t be a Eurovelo route without a little bit of pointless fannying around and, on cue, we were directed onto a gravelly forestry path.

At least it was downhill gravel.

The road twisted down, crossed the Rhine a few times. It got warmer thank god and we started to make some pretty good time. There was even time to snap the traditional picture of an amusingly named road and some Swiss cows.

You take your amusement where you find it.

Mmmm, toblerone.

By this point we were cycling into the Ruinalta. This is known as the “Swiss Grand Canyon” and it is quite impressive although small potatoes relative to the real Grand Canyon. I recommend reading about the Flims Landslide which created the gorge. Largest landslide ever in the Alps and it happened about 10,000 years ago.

The road next to the gorge does have a lot of ups and downs as the road twists up and around the various bluffs. Although this was beautiful, it was hard work.

Impressive bridges

And impressive tunnels

Your author, over the Rhine

The Rhine Gorge was unexpected and quite beautiful. It made up for the sub-zero descent, the illness that Dr T was suffering, the brutal climbs through the spurs around the gorge. Highly recommended although definitely only highly recommended in the direction that we did it. The other way would be…challenging.

As the landscape flattened, we stopped for a coffee in Chur and unexpectedly the owner of the coffee bar was from the UK. He seemed impressed that we were heading back to the UK on bikes. He should have been, it was going to be long long long way.

Once we got down to the Rhine level, the landscape opened out and we were directed onto the dykes which run along the Rhine.

Dykes, river, mountains.

This section was very reminiscent of the dykes along the side of the Danube although, compared to them, this very much was Swiss style cycling. Buttery smooth tarmac and the occasional high quality cow to look at.

For some reason along the Rhine, the Swiss grow maize. I spent a long time trying to work out why this might be. Here’s a country which is outstandingly productive and has a real premium on flat land given that it’s the second most mountainous country in Europe (10 points if you know the most mountainous country in Europe). Why would you grow one of the most commoditised agricultural products on land which could be used to build a watch factory or some high end engineering company? Rather like the presence of the cows, it makes no sense to me. Put your maize production in Romania, put your cows in Ireland for god’s sake.

Economically irrational maize but some great cycling infrastructure.

The last 30k were a bit of a grind but with great cycling infrastructure: the Eurovelo dudes had done a great job. It bode well for the rest of the trip.

Blasting along the Rhine on the aforementioned buttery smooth tarmac and traffic free paths soon led us to Lichtenstein. One of the world’s two doubly landlocked countries — an extra 10 blog points if you know the other one without looking it up on Google.

Rather sadly, the capital of Lichtenstein makes Andermatt look like a cute Alpine village. It’s a soulless concrete dump but very rich though. Maybe the two things go together? Apart from the double landlocked thing, the only other great fact about Lichtenstein is that it is the only army to have sent troops to war and after the war to have more troops return.

During the First World War, Lichtenstein sent 17 soldiers to fight with the Germans. After the war, 18 returned. They had made a friend.

The Prince is a bit of an autocratic nutter but is in the phone book. Under P.

The autocratic nutter lives up there.

This house may or may not be here.

Alpine charm

We ate cheap Italian food in a soulless concrete square which was better than it sounded.

In a change from previous blogs, I now have the opportunity to add a guest blog post. Dr T is pretty tired this evening but here’s the guest post:

I have lived these epic cycles vicariously for several years and now I am doing one in the real world - which turns out not to be the same thing at all! Today was challenging - the Rhine does indeed flow downhill but the route has to pass through the Grand Canyon of Switzerland so a lot of epic scenery and climbing - somewhat unexpected and not entirely welcome. For those who know the Ski area we passed Laax, Flims and the lovely Foppa - happy memories.

I will post more on the numerous outfits crammed into a tiny cycle bag but for now I must say I have no idea how Ewan does it - ‘chapeau’ as cycle people say which as a saying is somewhat ludicrous being truncated to the point of incomprehension…

On to more prosaic matters - it turns out the whole hotel upgrade has its downside which is centrally regulated temperature and therefore NO towel rails.

Tomorrow is another day. Less climbing, same distance, weather will be worse. But it is doable.

The stats:

• Distance; 124km. Not huge but a big day
• Climbing: 606m of ascent which doesn’t sound much but they were steep hills.
• Average speed: 21kmh. Blame the climbs and the gravel.
• Contact points: both sets seem to be holding up but it is just day one.

Day 2: Vaduz to Konstanz

Well this was a long day.

We woke up in the funky Hotel Central to be greeted by the sound of rain pouring down outside. The rain did nothing to enhance the vibe-less feel of Vaduz.

East Kilbride shopping centre but with watch shops rather than vape stores.

Even the excellent buffet breakfast at the Hotel Central didn’t manage to dull the sense that we were going to have to go out in this and cycle 125km.

Rain, the Rhine and some cold wet people.

The Eurovelo folks had started the route on top of the dykes along the Rhine which were, compared to the Danube cycleways, the absolute paragon of cycling infrastructure. However, despite being smooth, flat and going in the direction we wanted to go, it was time for some traditional Eurovelo distractions.

We crossed the Rhine and headed up into the hills through little Swiss villages. All very cute but really rather tiresome in places. Nice to see a more traditional side of Switzerland I guess.

Heidi probably lives here.

After a lot of rolling up and down it was time to head back to the Rhine and the beautiful Rhine side cycleway which, in a sane cycle routing world, we could have just taken to this point.

Country number three!

The fantastic cycleway crossed the Rhine a number of times and each time we skipped between Switzerland and Austria without any border checks. Isn’t the Schengen Zone fantastic?

On the Swiss side we were stopped at a cow crossing. Not what one expects on a long distance cycle.

Rather sweetly, the farmer brushed away the poo before opening the road.

We had a quick coffee stop in some nameless Austrian or maybe Swiss village. Although the cafe was open, it appeared that the chef hadn’t turned up and the waiter didn’t know how to work the coffee machine. After a frustratingly long delay, two coffees appeared and the waiter was so embarrassed he gave them to us for free. We gulped them down and headed back out into the intermittent rain. There was a good tail wind so we made pretty good time down to Bregenz and Lake Constance (or the Bodensee).

There’s a bit of blue there but the showers kept coming.

I’d done the route to run along the eastern side of the lake. It took us along some outstanding cycling infrastructure. In 40km there was almost no cars, no difficult junctions and the route was stuffed with folks on e-bikes having a much better time on the hills than us.

We past through Friedrichshaven which is famous for being the home of the zeppelins so much beloved of the Germans until the folly of using hydrogen as the lifting agent became so obvious after the Hindenberg disaster. However, old Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin has a quite lovely and tasteful monument.

If it were me, I would have made it zeppelin shaped.

Like yesterday, the last 40km were pretty tough. Dr T got a knee problem and the kilometres went down very slowly. Even an excitingly bijou little fire station did little to raise our spirits.

Honestly, every village in Germany has its own tiny fire station. Wonder if they’ve got a pole?

After a long long time we finally got to Meersburg where we were to get the ferry across the Bodensee to Konstantz. The ferry system is incredibly efficient and runs every 15 minutes so, statistically, we would only have to wait 7.5 minutes for a ferry. As it was, we only had to wait 5 minutes for a ferry, so yay for statistics!

Waiting for the ferry.

The ferry journey was short and it was incredibly nice to be sitting down and moving without turning our legs. We even got a selfie on the ferry.

Rainy and wet but moving without turning our legs. Happiness.

Getting through Konstanz to our hotel was an unexpected additional five km through the suburbs which required concentration and real-time Garmin skills. We had been lulled into a false sense of competence by the well signed and safe Eurovelo route up to now.

Tired and wet we eventually arrived at the Hotel Constantia which is one of the most expensive hotels I’ve booked. Unfortunately there was a 30 minute check-in procedure and the towel rail doesn’t work. Given that we have two sets of things to wash and only two sets of towels, we really needed the towel rail to work. A rather tetchy conversation with the person on the desk resulted in a shrug of Gallic proportions despite being in Switzerland. The brutally expensive room itself is really disappointing too. We were pretty unhappy before heading out to dinner. There was a lot of cycle gear dripping wet on various bits of furniture around the room and it didn’t look good for a dry start tomorrow.

Konstanz is split in half by the Swiss German border. We went to the German bit and had cheap pasta and salad at a restaurant notable for the high density of loud children and the slow speed of service. However, it was food and we needed food.

Unfortunately the threatened thunderstorms started as we left the restaurant.

This is a proper thunderstorm.

The weather was biblical. Along with having wet cycle gear, we now had wet clothes. If only we had a working towel rail. Rather ironically, so far the only hotel we’ve been in with a working towel rail has been the one in Andermatt in which, ironically, we didn’t need to dry anything.

Well…that was hard today. Dr T has a buggered knee, the gears on both bikes are a bit dodgy, every single bit of clothing we have sits somewhere on the scale from damp to dripping and we’ve got a wet day tomorrow. This isn’t a high point.

The Stats:

• Distance: 125km. 10k of that is on a boat but this is a long way.
• Climbing: 540m. This is somewhat surprising given that Garmin told me it would be 340m,
• Average Speed: 20km/h. Not great but however good having cycling infrastructure is, it slows you down at all the junctions.
• Contact points: All good at the moment but Dr T’s knee is a worry.

Day 3: Konstanz to Waldshut

The day started pretty badly. We woke up to thunderstorms and lightening (“🎵very very frightening me, mama mia mama mia🎵” thanks Freddie). There was much discussion over the disappointing Hotel Constantia buffet breakfast of how much fun it might be to ride 125km in thunderstorms.

While we are here, what is it about Central European breakfasts in hotels? Are they made out of a kit? “Hans, do we have the slightly rubbery scrambled eggs?” “Of course Helga, but your job is to check that we’ve laid out the platter of suspiciously generic smoked meats, fish and the plastic cheese”. “Hans! What about the disfunctional coffee machine that produces flavourless brown coffee juice?”. “No problem Helga, I’ve made sure that it misfires every second coffee and produces only hot water”. “Well done Hans, we are ready for the guests this morning”.

The Hotel Constantia is definitely somewhere to avoid if you’re ever in Konstanz. Poor breakfasts, non-functional towel rails, desultory service at an eye watering price. What’s not to hate…?

The rain poured down, the thunder rumbled, we sat in our damp cycle kit and, in a change from previous trips, it was time to make a properly sensible decision. We would take the train today.

We managed to get completely soaked cycling just 700m from the hotel to the railway station. Rather confusingly, there are two in Konstanz. One on the Swiss side and one on the German side. We bought a ticket on the German side which, it turned out, was the wrong one.

Wet bikes, wet people, wet trains.

We had decided to do a two leg train journey to Waldshut stopping at Schaffhausen to take in the majestic beauty of the Rhine Falls.Who could miss the opportunity to see the “most powerful waterfalls in Europe”? Not us, that’s for sure.

However, we still had to negotiate the confusing but combined German and Swiss railway systems. We had bought a ticket in Germany but were going to Switzerland. This involved a local train which was rather cute going to Singen and then a hot, sweaty and still damp rush across some platforms to get the Swiss train to Zürich which stopped at Schaffhausen.

We got on the Swiss train which was completely empty and an enormously fat ticket inspector berated us for not having bike tickets and not having reservations. After 20 minutes fannying around downloading the inevitable app, I bought two bike tickets (that’s 30 CHF I’m not getting back) but…that still wasn’t good enough for Herr Creosote…we still weren’t reserved. This could have been a problem had it not been for the fact that (a) the train was already moving and the next stop was Schaffhausen and (b) the train was completely bloody empty.

No reservations? That’s a pretty big problem.

Oh well, I paid for the bikes and when it comes to reservations we were happy to stick it to the (corpulent) man. Take that Big Train: we thumb our noses at your irrational corporate rules. We skipped off the train like two teenagers thrilled to have beaten the system.

Leaving the station we saw this sign.

Back on route.

Note the sign for Swiss Route 2 (which is Eurovelo 15) and Eurovelo 6! At some point many kilometres east of here, Eurovelo 6 becomes the route I did last year all the way to the Black Sea. How good is that? Also, let’s face it, this is a pretty good set of bike signs. You would think it would be hard to get lost but subsequent events would prove that to be a false assumption.

Also note the sign to the Rheinfall. We cycled up and down on bike paths through the town and eventually ended up at the major tourist attraction.

Biggest waterfall in Europe.

This is pretty impressive when you’re there although not on a global scale.

There were thousands of Chinese tourists who, with reasonable justification, must have been thinking “Is this it?”. We’ve been to some of the amazing falls in China and this is small beer in comparison.

The visit to the Falls coincided with a break in the constant rain and, in terminally stupid decision, we decided to cycle to Waldshut rather than take the comfortable, dry and warm train all the way there. How miserable could it be? The answer to that question is “really very miserable indeed”. Almost as soon as we were committed to cycling, the heavens opened once again.

We were, rather obviously, at the level of the Rhine and to get back up onto the plain involved a pretty tough climb which, despite Dr T being a long way ahead, didn’t do her dicky knee any good.

15% in the wet.

For the rest of the day we would be skirting the Swiss German border. Here is one of the heavily fortified crossing points.

It wasn’t as easy as this in the Great Escape.

As the rain seeped into our shoes and our clothes, we stopped for a coffee in a no-name German town and regrouped. We had no route and were completely lost. Google maps wasn’t helpful and so I worked some magic with Garmin Connect and put together a route which would hopefully get us to Waldshut in a couple of hours. We sipped our coffees and watched the rain pour down for an hour. It wasn’t going to get better and so we we stuck our courage to the sticking place and rolled out onto the soaked roads. After only a couple of km fighting with annoying traffic, we turned onto quiet roads and into the German countryside.

There were fields of wet sunflowers as big as your head. They were all looking a bit sad in the rain to be honest.

Droopy sunflowers.

A head and a sunflower, approximately the same size.

I am tempted to once again go off on a long digression on sunflower seeds, the Golden Ratio and other mathematical oddities but I refer you to this post from my first trip from Cambridge to Warsaw and this rather wonderful Numberphile video if you really want to know more.

It rained a lot more, the wind got up, the roads were boring, long, straight and wet. Cycle touring at its very worst.

A ghostly Sean Kelly voice droned in our ears “Oí tink dis is going to be a majorly difficult wun for these two breakaway riders. Dey’s been givin’ it wun hundert percent for the past number of kilometres”.

Damp, windy and, despite the smiles, not that much fun.

As I have said, we were skirting the Swiss German border. It’s marked with little stone blocks with “D” on one side and “S” on the other. Honestly.

On the Swiss side

On the German side

I spent a couple of minutes childishly jumping from side to side chanting “Germany, Switzerland, Germany, Switzerland”. When you’re soaking and tired, you take your amusement where you find it.
The kilometres ground down very slowly but quite suddenly we were negotiating the cycle paths in Waldshut and then we were on Peter Thumb Straße and we were at the Hotel Bercher. A cheery chap helped us park our bikes in an airy and dry bike store. He also was very convinced — incorrectly it turned out — that the towel rail in the room was fully functional. That being said, everybody in the hotel was helpful and kind. After the Hotel Constantia this was a step up. Also…half the price.

We cheered ourselves up with a glass of the excellent local wine.

Things got slightly better after this.

This was a short day but pretty tough. We are both tired. It’s clear that there’s not much to Waldshut so it looks like we’re going to eat in the hotel. Google Lens helped us translate the menus and it appears it is Chanterelle much room season and so they’re in every dish — and rather touchingly known as “ Pfifferlinge” in German.

We are in deep Germany. As I type this, there is an Oompaloompa band marching up and down the street and everybody is singing songs in the rain. I think this is going to be fun in a very Germanic way.

The Stats:

• Distance: 37km. There was 60km on the train but these 37km were not a huge amount of fun.
• Ascent: 217m. Not much but they were brutal steep climbs.
• Average speed: 18km/h. Slow but blame the hills and the rain.
• Others: Contact points still good. Dr T’s knee is still causing problems so we’re going to need to watch this. Every single item of clothing we own is either damp or very damp and the towel rail doesn’t work.

Day 4: Waldshut to Neuenburg am Rhein

A long day in time if not in distance. The rain which has so far been our constant companion, stopped after 30 minutes and we had an entirely dry day. This was one of the main upsides of the day. Dr T’s knee problem was joined by my knee playing up. These trips really are all about how much punishment you can give your body without it just packing up.

A broken knee and some well coordinated nail polish and bean.

The Hotel Berghaus did a lovely breakfast including a full display of the bakery potential in small round lumps of bread.

Who knew there were this number of bread roll types?

It was definitely still raining when we left the hotel but after a while the rain stopped and the sun came out — sort of. We zoomed along the German side of the Rhine and then crossed over into Switzerland. Then back into Germany, and then back into Switzerland. For quite a large part of today we were pretty unsure which country we were in.

There were little cute German (or maybe Swiss) villages along the Rhine.

I think this is German.

We stopped in a Bad Säckingen for coffee while they were doing their Sunday morning bell ringing.

You definitely need sound on for this one.

It’s an well worn joke but Bad Säckingen seemed pretty good to us.

We crossed the Rhine once again but this time on a stunning old covered bridge.

Take that Madison County!

There followed a long section which was pretty excitingly off road. The Eurovelo folks definitely like a difficult gravelly path through the trees. It’s very pretty although your average speed drops a very long way unless you’re willing to do a “crazy Tom Pidcock” and power your way past the walnutty old folks taking their dogs for a walk and the impossibly German families with their insanely cute little blond kids on tiny bikes.

The selfie of the day is after 15km of gnarly off road gravel. Not sure why we’re smiling.

The signage on this route is absolutely outstanding. In Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria, I would regularly cycle for an entire day not seeing a single sign for Eurovelo 6. Here in Germany (or is it Switzerland?) there were signs every 100m.

Great signage Eurovelo dudes!

I am more tickled than I should be that our route (EV15) has, for the past couple of hundred kilometres, been coincident with EV6 which I followed from Budapest to the Black Sea. It turns out that the first half of it from the Atlantic to Budapest follows the EV15. Completing the EV6 was one option after last year’s ride so it’s nice I’ve done some of it.

It seemed to take an awfully long time to get to Basel. I suppose the off-road cycling caused that but we did spend a lot of time cycling through endless fields of maize watching the km-to-go drop down very slowly.

Quite surprisingly, there’s no maize here but there is a giant bio fuel reactor in the distance.

On the way, we saw quite a few of these:

Is it a house? A church? An animal store?

If anybody has any insights into what these are, let me know. They often come in pairs which face each other across fields.

Finally, as Basel got nearer, we braved the chaotic cycling which is navigating the suburbs of any large city. Strange junctions and tram tracks waiting greedily to suck your front tyre into an accident which will surely result in expensive dental reconstruction.

We finally reached the river again and stopped to regroup at an achingly cool riverside coffee shop. Two coffees and two inedible “Basel speciality cakes” cost 22 CHF. At this point, it became clear that we were pretty tired and there was 40km to go. As we sipped our wildly overpriced coffees and attempted to masticate the inedible — but brutally expensive — Basel speciality cakes, we reviewed our options.

You’re in Basel you idiot!

Two buggered up knees and Dr T practically weeping with tiredness weren’t a good starting point but the last 40km looked doable. It maybe wasn’t a great idea to push on but it was really the only option.

Getting out of Basel was also fun. Motorway underpasses, one of the largest inland container ports in Europe, heavy engineering and train tracks. What joy. We very temporarily crossed into Germany — on the aptly named Zollstraße and then crossed a cycle bridge and we were in France! Country number 5.

As one might expect, the French have not fully embraced the concept of Eurovelo and therefore we had to sort out what the route might actually be called in France.

Whatever it’s called, it’s really rather tranquil and beautiful.

A large part of the route followed a canal through Petit Camargue de Alsace. The gravel was lovely, the route was beautiful but there was definitely a feeling that a mutiny was about to kick off if we had one more difficult junction, one more confusing French sign, 10 more km to go…

There were further endless fields of maize. I suppose they end up in those bio-reactors. One would think that turning those fields over to solar panels might be a better use of the land? Then again, the capital cost of solar panels is a hell of a lot higher than planting a bunch of corn seeds.

Our final border of the day. Almost a Bridge Too Far.

I think we crossed an international border 9 times today. The final one involved scrambling up a gravelly bank and then over this 19th century era bridge. We were back in Germany for the night.

We are staying at the Hotel Am Stadthaus which is very firmly in the three star zone. I know I had promised to up my game but this is the best hotel within 50km so it had to do. Unfortunately the towel rail has been switched off for the summer but I used my superpower (Charm-Middle-Aged-Woman Man…the shittest Marvel superhero) to get the owner to lend us her tumble drier.

We ate at the only restaurant in town which is a cheap down-market semi-Italian joint where everybody is having a good time, the food is more than acceptable and the price is low.

This hits the spot.

Big decision for tomorrow. Both Dr T and Dr K are limping with a buggered up knee each. Dr T fell asleep in her pasta tonight so I think 120km to Strasbourg might be a “Strasbourg too far”. So the plan is to have a day off tomorrow. We’ll take the train from Neuenberg to Strasbourg (somehow) and have a day off travelling during the morning and then the afternoon in Strasbourg. This seems pretty sensible although there is obviously some chance that either the German or French railway systems will conspire to leave us on a platform in the middle of nowhere because our bikes aren’t reserved or the right colour.

We shall see…

Stats:

• Distance: 112km. Felt like more.
• Climbing: 437m. Garmin definitely lies regarding the climbing. Said it would be 200m this morning. Although most of it is just bumps.
• Average Speed: 18.7kmh. The gravel really really slows you down.
• Others: Contact points seem ok (not the euphemism for “soft tissues”). We both have a right knee in pain and without a rest day, Dr T would be doing a Fletcher Christian impersonation tomorrow morning.

Day 5: Neuenberg am Rhein to Strasbourg

This had been planned to be a long cycle day and it wasn’t clear that we had a long cycle day in the tank and we have a very long day planned for tomorrow. So we decided to take the train and have a “rest” day. We had eaten cheap ‘n’ tasty Italian food in the restaurant next to the hotel last night and we had also had our sodden cycling kit professionally dried in a tumble drier by the lovely woman who runs the hotel. So we were set up for a relaxing day.

We intended to get the train from Neuenberg to Strasbourg. I’d done some internet searching and there was definitely a train which connected in Mulhouse. However, Neuenberg is not exactly the hub of the universe and when we got to the Bahnhof, it turned out that the next train to trundle down the single track to Mulhouse was two hours away.

It was only 25km to Mulhouse so we (once again) screwed our courage to the sticking place and set off.

There ain’t no train coming down these tracks.

We had sensibly prepared for this possibility. I had a route from Neuenberg to Mulhouse in the Garmin and with only a tiny sub voce grumble from Dr T we were off.

Through gritted teeth: “do I have to get on this bloody thing again today?”

5km and another border back into France.

You can tell we are in France. A tiny itty bitty Eiffel Tower in a roundabout.

We joined the EV6 route which heads west from here to ultimately reach the Atlantic coast. There were 10 or 15 km in a forest which were absolutely beautiful.

There was a lot of this. Really lovely.

As we were rolling along, I thought about the strange towers that we had seen yesterday next to the Rhine. My good friend JJ told me they were “salt drilling towers”. A little bit of internet searching brought me to this delightfully badly translated description of the towers.

Impressive witnesses to the industrial era in Bad Zurzach are the salt drilling towers between Zurzacher Flecken and the banks of the Rhine. The 17-meter-high salt derricks were decommissioned in the 1970s. One of them now serves as a salt museum. Peepholes give you an insight into its inner workings, and the brine pump can be set in motion at the touch of a button.

Cornelius Vögeli had a good nose. Shortly after the definitive end of the Zurzach fairs in the middle of the 19th century, the building contractor and former mayor of Leuggern took up the trail. He could smell it, the stuff that the next upswing would be made of. The treasure lay right at his feet. Now he would lift it.

To recover the treasure, “Salzvögeli” needed money. He borrowed it from another entrepreneur, Jakob Zuberbühler. Vögeli used it to build a tower. Inside it hung the key to the underground treasure chamber – the drill bit. This ate its way through the layers of rock and encountered rock salt deep below. Cornelius Vögeli discovered this raw material for the production of table salt during test drilling in Koblenz in 1892. After further drilling attempts in the Zurzach-Rietheim area, he discovered significant salt deposits. He obtained the state concession to mine salt, but sold it again and died without having started mining.

After the Swiss Rhine Salt Works had secured the concession, the upswing began thanks to the founding of the Swiss Soda Factory in 1914: “Sodi” and later Solvay (Schweiz) AG provided many jobs for decades and shaped the social and economic structures in the area. The fact that the Zurzach thermal water was also discovered in passing thanks to Cornelius Vögeli’s sniffer is a story in itself.

I am very pleased that Cornelius Vögeli’s sniffer is a story unto itself. Switzerland is a strange place sometimes…

Since we’re on interesting history, we are in the middle of “goitre country”. Goitre is a swelling in the neck caused by a lack of iodine. It turns out that being close to the sea causes a lot of iodine to be dropped on the land where it’s absorbed into the food. In the centre of Europe near the Alps, not so much iodine. Also in the middle of the Great Plains in America.

There’s a great story about an American doctor/chemist called David Marine who added iodine to the salt in Akron Ohio and solved the goitre problem. He is the reason why we all have iodised salt now. There are some interesting questions about the ethics of doing this sort of thing without consent but there’s no doubt that he solved that problem. Probably RFK Jr is about to suggest that Bill Gates is trying to control us through microchips in our iodised salt….Make Goitre Great Again.

Anyway, enough about salt. You came here for the cycling stories, not salt-based political commentary.

This area has been intensively fought over during the past couple of centuries. There was a tiny memorial to a battle that I’d never heard of but, in which 1,500 French, Moroccan and German soldiers died in 1944.

This is the original M1 155mm canon. The great great grandfather

of the M777 which Ukraine is using so effectively right now.

When you seamlessly pass over borders which were brutally fought over in the past, it all seems so fabulously civilised now. Probably doesn’t seem like that in Ukraine right now though.

The EV6 rolled smoothly and effortlessly into Mulhouse. We avoided slipping perilously into the canal.

Shout “huiii” if you fall in!

All in all, it really was quite lovely even close to Mulhouse with a beautiful canal side pathway leading directly to the railway station.

Unexpectedly nice.

Literally one hundred metres from the canal-side marina, we were at the main Mulhouse railway station.

I had expected some painful omnishambles booking tickets or — horror or horrors — being told there were no trains until tomorrow which took bicycles. However, it turned out perfectly. A lovely lady at the ticket counter handled my mangled schoolboy French with good humour and we had two tickets on the next train to Strasbourg with our bikes included.

Mulhouse station is modern airy architecture in the ticketing hall. Not so much on the platforms.

There’s a strong “former Warsaw Pact country” vibe going on here.

The train arrived on time and we wrestled with other cyclists to get our bikes on board. There are a certain type of entitled cycling folks who are definitely very keen to get their bikes on the train in front of you even if they have to push you out of the way. There was a rather tense stand-off and I had to deploy my Angry Eyes™.

The train set off and over an hour into Strasbourg, Dr T slept and I looked at almost endless fields of corn. This region really produces an absolute shit-tonne of maize. There’s even a website if you want to know why.

Strasbourg arrived, we again fought with the entitled wrinkly cyclists with their e-bikes to get our bikes off the train and then negotiated the medieval streets of Strasbourg to the hotel.

This is a long architectural journey from Andermatt and Vaduz.

Our hotel is definitely a considerable step up from the one in Neuenberg. It’s built out of nine renovated ancient buildings around a courtyard. It’s funky and quirky and it is really nice.

Big brownie points for me in choosing this place!

We were allowed to check in early — many thanks to the small gods of hospitality on that one — and then headed straight out for some shopping.

Despite my effortless sartorial elegance over the past five days, it was made clear to me I was going to have to buy some new pants and socks. One pair of pants and two pairs of socks is really not enough for a long trip when you have somebody with you. On your own…it’s a different — and much smellier — story.

We bought pants, we bought more athletic tape for broken knees and we bought more…lotion for irritated soft tissues…

The smile of a man with brand new pants!

A little bit of touristy wandering took us to Strasbourg cathedral which is arrestingly huge and beautiful. I would like us to be able to report that the inside was also arrestingly beautiful but unfortunately the queue to get into the cathedral was about 200m long. Life as a long-distance cyclist is too short for queuing.

Woah, look at the size of that!

And then it was time for a traditional Alsace lunch of cheese, meat and white wine. There’s something to be said for short days cycling and then afternoons being tourists in a stunning European city. Maybe next time I should rethink the plan but unfortunately, most of the plan for this trip is now set in stone.

High performance nutrition.

Our hotel has a thermonuclear towel rail so we washed everything and then snoozed until dinner.

There was time for a little bit of sight seeing. First up was the Astronomical Clock which was unfortunately shut for the day. There was another incredible attraction which is the oldest barrel of wine in the world. They’ve got a barrel of wine down there which dates from 1472 and has only been tapped three times since then.

It was shut too.

As a travelogue of Strasbourg, this isn’t really working out well for our readers. However, on our way to dinner, we passed the Büchmesser or the “Belly Measuring Column”. Built in the sixteenth century, it was used by the Strasbourg big-wigs to test whether or not they had eaten too much at a feast night. I can report that we both passed the belly test.

No giant bellies for us!

After our giant Alsatian lunch, we couldn’t really fit much of the Alsatian specialities into our (measurably slim) stomachs but it was nice sitting in a trad restaurant and enjoying the vibes.

Strasbourg is very pretty indeed. Although there are some scars from the various battles and wars which have been fought here over the past couple of millennia, it has managed to preserve — or maybe recreate — a medieval charm. The post war history is a little dark. Upon liberation in 1945, the French undertook a very aggressive “Frenchifying” campaign against the local people of whom 90% were of German-Alsace heritage. People who had only spoken Alsatian their entire lives were forced to speak French in public and at home. Maybe understandable given the history but not something we might be comfortable with today. In a little side note for our US readers, Alsatian is the dialect of German spoken by the Swiss Amish in Allen County, Indiana.

Tomorrow we have to get back on the bike. We did have a 145km day ahead of us but that’s not going to work. By rerouting around Karlsruhe, I’ve managed to get it down to 130km. That’s still a lot to get done in a day but there’s really nowhere else before Speyer which is our next stop.

An early start and a slow pace should get us there. Knees permitting.

The Stats:

• Distance: 26km. The rest was by train but that was one of the most tranquil and pretty sections we’ve done so far.
• Climbing: 72m — ho ho ho.
• Average Speed: 18kmh. Taking it easy.
• Others: Well…there’s a bit of an ongoing undercarriage problem at the moment. We did get some new knee strapping which might help the knees and some baby nappy rash cream which might help…down there.

Day 6: Strasbourg to Speyer

Today was going to be a long day but I’d cut the route down by 15km and it was probably in the “achievable” range.

The hotel in Strasbourg was outstanding. If you’re ever there, the Cour de Courbeau is the place to be. The breakfast was delicious and the hotel is achingly cute and lovely.

We left early to take advantage of what looked like it was going to be a good day.

7am. There would be less smiles 135km from here.

Now is the time to have a little homage to the cycling infrastructure in this part of the world. We cycled out through Strasbourg and its suburbs and it was 15km before we hit a point where we cycled on the same road as cars. EV15 has really got into its stride now. Cycle paths are everywhere and every single junction is signed and I’m pretty confident we could have done the whole thing without a Garmin route.

Most of today’s route was on tarmac paths on the top of Rhine flood dykes. We had a tail wind, the weather was good — modulo a couple of light showers — and it was pan flat.

Endless lovely cycle paths.

The route occasionally wound its way through quaint little French villages with Germanic names.

There was a lot of this sort of stuff.

Although this part of the Rhine isn’t the fully industrialised version which we will be seeing a few hundred kilometres north of here, it appears to be the very epicentre of gravel production in France and Germany. We passed countless gravel works presumably sucking up the bottom of the Rhine, grading it into everything from sand to quite large pebbles and then selling it to the sorts of people who need sand and quite large pebbles. If you ever need gravel, you know where to come.

Get your luuuverly gravel here…

The tail wind sped us along and after an abortive coffee stop at 33km, we decided to keep going and enjoy the gravel works fun.

No pretending to be sick here.

At some point we ended up in Lauterbourgh which is, I think, the most easterly point in France. Since we were about to leave France for the last time, we stopped at a tiny bakery to have coffee and maybe the best cheese and ham baguette I have eaten in my entire life. I should know the answer to this question since I own a bakery but what is it about French bread which is so so so good?

We left France for the last time and continued on the outstandingly easy EV15 route.

Imagine all of today was like this.

These paths just went on and on and on.

For those of you who are missing your salt based political commentary, I recommend this episode of Revisionist History which, if you are ok with Malcolm Gladwell being…er…Malcolm Gladwell is pretty good on the whole goitre, iodised salt thing. I completely realise that this is not going to be everybody’s cup of tea due to Malcolm Gladwell being…er… Malcolm Gladwelly..

Dr T was very taken with this sign.

Who isn’t going to stop and take a picture of this?

We saw barges on the Rhine for the first time and raced one of them — carrying gravel no less — for about 10km.

Gaining on the gravel barge!

The last 30km were…tough. This seems to be something independent of the total distance. If you’re cycling 60km, the last 30km are tough. If you’re cycling 200km, the last 30km are tough.

It had been a good day but grinding out the last 30k is always just challenging.

Both of us looked a little like this after 125km

We rolled into Speyer pretty tired and reviewed the day. Fantastic cycling infrastructure, enough scenery to keep us interested, a fascinating array of gravel works and some outstanding French bread.

Speyer has a fascinating history. It’s a UNESCO world heritage site and has been continuously inhabited for over 2,000 years. Given it’s built on a hill, it was one of the few places along the Rhine which didn’t suffer catastrophic floods and therefore the Romans used it as one of their sites for a fort.

The Cathedral is very impressive. Begun in 1030 and consecrated in 1060 it’s the largest remaining Romanesque church in the world and one of the most important architectural monuments of its type.

This doesn’t really do it justice to be honest.

In 1529, the Diet of Speyer gave us the word “Protestant” and therefore was partly responsible for kicking off a good 400 years of sectarian Christian wars resulting in millions of deaths.

They also have a huge town gate.

To be honest, it’s pretty easy to go round the gate.

Speyer one of Germany’s oldest cities and although there is the usual dispiriting parade of chain stores along the Main Street, it’s pretty and this was very much helped by it being a beautiful evening. The sun was out, the tourists and locals were all getting their food into their face holes at 6pm because late nights aren’t really a thing here.

Before we went to dinner, I snuck out to the Technik Museum Speyer. Long time readers of this blog will be well aware of my obsession with weird and unusual museums which one comes across on trips like this. Who can forget the highlights of the Electrical Museum of Budapest or the Croissant Museum in Poznań?

The Technik Museum in Speyer is glorious. If you’re ever in Western Europe within 500km of Speyer, I really recommend a visit. It’s a hot steaming mess of random curation which is at once both charming and mind boggling. Here are some pictures to whet your appetite. For those of you who don’t like mad museums, skip to the end now.

It’s an F15 fighter and a Lufthansa 747 on a stick!

Three beautifully restored classic European, British and American sports cars…and a giant diesel engine and a motorcycle. Fabulous curation.

A “Hind” Russian attack helicopter. On a stick.

An AN22 on a stick. This is a giant aircraft.

It is very big inside.

They’ve got a Russian “Buran”. The Soviet version of the space shuttle.

This is the wiring loom of the Buran. You’d have to be a pretty brave cosmonaut to fly in this.

Next to the spaceships there’s 250 motorbikes! This is a mess.

Some dried space food. In a case.

It’s charming and wild but it really needs a curator.

Amidst all the examples of crazy German engineering over the past 200 years, it was nice to see the high point of British engineering rusting away in a back lot.

Ok, it isn’t a Russian space shuttle or an F15 but we should be proud.

I’ll spare you the other 60 odd photos I took. I know I’m boring the pants off everybody. However, if you like this sort of thing, it’s a great museum in a quirky way and well worth a visit.

We ate “Greek themed” German food in a restaurant run by Croatians in front of the oldest and largest Romanesque Church in the world. The European dream still lives.

Two tired people in front of a stunning church eating gyros.

Tomorrow we’re going to Mainz. It’s just over 100km and I think with our current “two stop” strategy, this is going to be easy. The EV15 is beautiful, there’s no gradient to speak of and, finally, the weather seems to be smiling on us. There have been some tough days so far but I am hoping that we’re through that.

Stats:

• Distance: 134km. This is a long way but the tail wind made it easier.
• Climbing: 277m. From here on in, I’m not going to mention the climbing because it’s basically flat from here to Holland.
• Average Speed: 21.1km. Weirdly, all the lovely cycling infrastructure slows you down because you have the junctions to negotiate.
• Contact points etc. The knees seem to be holding up. Liberal prophylactic use of SudoCrem™ might be doing the trick.

Day 7: Speyer to Mainz

It was a beautiful morning as we left our hotel in Speyer. To be honest, it wasn’t a great hotel — very much at the bottom end of the four star range. It was deadly quiet last night but when we got down for breakfast at 6:45 it was absolutely jumping. A hundred people stuffing huge quantities of four-star-kit-breakfast into their face-holes.

I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on but it turned out there was a big convention of pyramid marketing scheme wellness nutters. My glowering misanthropy worked its magic as a nutter-deflection-shield but unfortunately Dr T — who is a nicer person than me in uncountable ways — was cornered over coffee by an swivel-eyed middle-aged wellness nutter woman who was well on her way to adding Dr T to her WhatsApp group which could balance the chakras of our bicycles and supply wellness balanced nutritional “supplements” for only a small down payment of €100 or something. I hate wellness nutters. Eventually, Dr T charmingly prized herself away — I would have stabbed the wellness nutter in the thigh with a greasy breakfast fork — and we were off.

Getting out of Speyer was relatively easy and before long we were on the long, straight and beautifully signed EV15.

At this point we are still in “Jesus, there’s so much maize” land.

As we go further north, the agricultural feel to the Rhine will start to become more industrial.

As we turned a corner, we saw the biggest factory so far. Some research seems to suggest it’s doing something complicated with “grading”.

We thought this was big. But we were wrong.

As we were about to cross the Rhine on an unexpected ferry, we saw another couple doing the Rhine trip but using a different mode of transport. We cheerily waved at each other and they continued their sedate drifting towards Rotterdam.

I expect this is a lot harder in the other direction.

After the ferry and circling the factory, it was back to the endless woods and paths of Germany.

More paths through the woods.

One of the odd things about the EV15 is that you spend a long time in the countryside and then suddenly you hit an enormous German city like Ludwigshafen. We spent some time negotiating the cycle paths around the extensive urban motorway system.

Not exactly picturesque.

Ludwigshafen is mostly famous for hosting the BASF factory which is the largest integrated chemical complex in the world — it covers an area of 10 km^2 — and, as they constantly reminded us, “BASF creates chemistry”. We must have been cycling past it for about 30 minutes. They also have BASF supplied bikes for all the workers.

There are literally tens of thousands of these parked everywhere.

Interestingly — well interestingly if you’re a maths geek — they all have numbers and I originally thought we could apply the statistics behind the “German Tank Problem” to estimate the total number of the bikes. However, although I noted a statistically powerful number of the…numbers (130213, 250718, 115888, 239020 etc), eventually I realised that I hadn’t seen any under about 120,000 and for the techniques of the German Tank Problem to work you need to start at zero (or at least know the start number). So I think we’ll just have to go with the robust statistical statement “there are an absolute shitload of them”.

Another 20km of Rhine dykes and beautiful paths finally led us to Worms. Worms is another city which claims to be the oldest in Germany but this claim is heavily disputed by other cities who want the prestigious mantle of oldest city in Germany. There was a lot of Martin Luther action around Worms including the event which probably causes more juvenile sniggering in school history classes than any other historical event: The Diet of Worms. Let’s face it, Worms is a pretty funny name for a city but then again, Liverpool probably means something like scrotum or slug in German. You take your juvenile fun where you can get it.

We stopped for our now traditional mid-morning coffee, juice and a sandwich in Worms.

Our own personal Worms diet.

The cycle paths wriggled their way out of Worms — see what I did there? — and soon we were back in the land of long paths and gravel factories.

I promise this is the last picture of a gravel factory.

Because this was a shorter day, we weren’t quite so tired.

A lot of today was like this. Not complaining, it’s great cycling.

Quite suddenly, we were out of the maizeland and into vineland.

The home of Liebfraumilch. Much maligned due to its being the default wine in the UK in the 1960s.

From about 15km out of Mainz, the EV15 started to wriggle (but not in a Wormy way) through the industrial hinterland. With every big city, there is the doughnut of shit to traverse and, although it wasn’t pretty, the EV15 folks did a good job to get us literally to the centre of the city.

Like every German town bigger than two families and a cow, Mainz has a huge and impressive cathedral at its centre.

Oh look! Another huge impressive house for God. He’s got a good property portfolio.

Our hotel is very nice. A chain but done well. Not done well enough to have a heated towel rail though. We asked about using the hotel to do some washing but this was definitely more than the receptionists job was worth but she did suggest using a local laundromat. And this innovation has changed everything.

I wandered down to the laundromat, deciphered the instructions, and for €6.50, almost everything we have to wear were getting a 60C wash and a high temperature dry. It was like this.

Yes, I am Nick Kamen.

Actually it wasn’t entirely like that but our cycle kit and my disgusting green t-shirt are now laundry fresh.

Mainz is at the confluence of the Main and the Rhine and was the most important religious city north of the Alps and the only Catholic bishopric outside Rome designated as a Holy See. It’s most famous son is, of course, Johannes Gutenberg the inventor of movable type and the father of the printing press, but much more important than invention that changed the course of human history it has restaurants with high carb food and copious wine.

Today was a great day. The weather was perfect, the route worked well, we weren’t too knackered by the end, we saw the world’s biggest chemical factory — this bit was mostly for me — and we had a Diet in Worms.

Tomorrow we are going through the prettiest part of the Rhine. People come from all over the world to sit on pleasure barges and float past castles and pretty scenery while getting drunk and eating cake. I think cycling this part will be better than the boat although we might have some cake. We’re worth it.

Stats:

• Distance: 107km. This is definitely the sweet spot for this trip.
• Average Speed: 20kmh. We do much better than this in the countryside but in cities, you go a lot slower.
• Others: The bodies seem to be holding up well. Maybe shorter days are the trick.

Day 8: Mainz to Koblenz

We ate classic cyclist food last night: burgers and chips in a cool and quite hip place. The bottle of excellent Riesling went down well too. The hotel room was wonderful although we both slept badly. I had recurring nightmares of steering my bike into the Rhine…which is something to avoid when following EV15.

There was a superb breakfast (well done the Brunfels hotel) and then we were off negotiating the usual omnishamblolic exit from a city. The route is never quite right, there are always tram tracks waiting to grab your front wheel and every 50m or so you have to stop and check which way you’re supposed to be going.

It would be churlish to leave Mainz without a photo of the statue of its greatest son.

There’s some pretty exciting thigh and crotch action going on here. Who knew?

Mainz does have very cute traffic lights. They’re reminiscent of the ones that I saw in the former DDR which have a little man with a hat on.

Is this Cartman from South Park? Surely not..

After an age of wriggling around and stopping at cute traffic lights, we eventually ended up on a giant bridge over the Rhine.

The Rhine and some Rhine cruise ships. We shall be seeing more of them.

More junctions with Eric Cartman lights and some motorway underpasses eventually got us out onto the Rhinstraße. We are on the eastern (or here I suppose northern) bank of the Rhine at this point.

The weather is great. I really really need a shave.

We trundled along the path which you can see in the background of this photograph. We saw a gravel factory but I promised yesterday that I wouldn’t post any pictures of gravel factories. Also, the opportunity for humour based on medieval religious disputes is going to be thin today so don’t expect much of that either.

We were heading for Rüdesheim am Rhine which is — according to the Rüdesheim Tourist Board — Germany’s second most popular destination for foreign tourists after Köln Cathedral. Well…as we cycled through it, there were definitely a some tourists but they seemed to be exclusively German and also, Rüdesheim had a very strong Skegness-kiss-me-quick-hat vibe. I’m very suspicious of this second most popular destination thing. Don’t people know about Minatur World in Hamburg? I would gladly fly from Tokyo to see that.

Get your Küss mich schnell hat here.

After negotiating some extensive roadworks and avoiding large tourists with wheelie cases, we got to the ferry which would take us to the southern/western bank of the Rhine for the rest of the day.

A ferry and two large tourists.

There is something magical about taking one’s bike on a ferry. It is just so effortless.

The town on the other side of the river from Rüdesheim is Bingen and Bingen marks the beginning of the Rhine gorge. The Rhine cuts its way through the Hunsrück and Taunus mountains and the cycle path, road and rail lines all hug the Rhine on both sides with vineyards covering the slopes and castles perched high above the river.

This area is much beloved of both German and foreign tourists. Most people seem to take tourist cruises up and down this part of the river. The cruise ships are enormous. Not on the scale of the cruise ships one sees in the Mediterranean or the Caribbean but compared to the other ships on the Rhine, they’re big.

My idea of hell.

The boats travel relatively slowly up the Rhine but do about 25kmh when they’re going with the flow. This tweaked Dr T’s competitive instinct and therefore we spent a sweaty 30 minutes trying to beat a cruise ship to Bacharach. Tourists lounged on the sun deck drinking cocktails and eating giant strudels mit zahne while we pounded down the Rhine bike path. Ghostly Sean Kelly made his traditional doleful appearance “Oí tink Kirk is only just holding on here as Turner puts the hammer down. Dey’ve been on t rivet for turty minutes now and it’s going to be a real difficult one to time trial it to the stage end”.

We stopped in Bacharach mainly because it’s named after Burt Bacharach the legendary composer of such classic songs as Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head and Close to You. The town inhabitants were so taken by Burt’s melodic orchestral compositions that they decided to change the name of the town in honour of the great man. Here’s a picture of him looking bemused about having a town on the Rhine named after him.

“Where is the town?”

The previous paragraph is a complete lie. Burt was born in Kansas and had nothing whatsoever to do with this tiny and rather cute little Rhineside village. They had a cake shop and so we had cake. We were half way to Koblenz and deserved cake.

Cake and coffee. Only 50km to go and it’s unlikely 50km of cycling will burn this off.

From here until the suburbs of Koblenz, it was just stunning. There’s a lot of photos coming up. Sorry.

A castle in the river, a castle on a hill.

The castle in the middle of the river is the Mäuseturn. There’s a legend about some bloke inviting a bunch of his taxpayers for lunch, burning them alive and then being gnawed to death by vengeful mice in a tower. The “inviting people for lunch and then burning them alive” has a big Vlad The Impaler resonance but the mice thing? Feels a bit contrived but who am I to cast aspersions on the historical veracity of folk tales?

Due to the topography, the road, the train, the boats and the cycle path all follow the same routes.

All four modes of transport in a single photograph.

We passed by the famous Loreley Rock. This rock juts out into the Rhine and is over 120m high. It is seemingly one of the most difficult stretches of the river to navigate. The legend of Loreley is of a fair maiden — they’re always fair — who, having been spurned by her fisherman boyfriend, sat on top of the cliff singing alluring songs to lure them towards the rocks and their doom. The legend has inspired poems and literature for centuries — including the Pogues 1989 song “Lorelei”.

There’s supposed to be a statue but didn’t see it.

There were more castles including this pair which have a story behind them.

Two castles and a wall between them.

The story is long and complicated. I quote:

The two castles of Liebenstein and Sterrenberg feature in a legend of two brothers, sons of the lord of Sterrenberg, and their cousin Angela, who came to live with them when her father died. Both brothers were attracted to Angela. Henry, the restrained elder brother, kept his feelings secret, while his impetuous sibling Conrad wooed and won her hand. Before the couple could marry, the Crusaders passed by recruiting volunteers to fight the Turks. Conrad went away to war, leaving Henry to look after his fiancée.

Years passed and the old lord built a second castle, Liebenstein, across a narrow defile from Sterrenberg, as a home for his younger son and niece when they married.

Eventually, the war was over and Conrad returned, accompanied by a Grecian princess he had married while he was away. Henry was furious and challenged his brother to a duel, but Angela came between them, urging them not to fight over her. She then went off to become a nun. Henry had a wall built between the castles so he should not see Conrad. After a cold winter in Germany, the Grecian princess fled south with a passing knight. Grief-stricken, Conrad threw himself from the battlements and died. Both castles still stand, with the wall between them as testimony to this tragic tale.

Well, that’s a nice story isn’t it?

This part of the Rhine flooded a lot in the past and, it appears continues to flood despite intense efforts to regulate the flow of water as the river comes down from Constantia. We saw this history of the highest flood waters on the side of a house which was easily 4 meters above the currently level of the river.

The most recent one is Jan 1995!

Gradually the castles came to an end as the landscape flattened out. The endless parade of cute little villages did not come to an end.

A less impressive residence in God’s property portfolio.

Almost without warning, we were in Koblenz and fighting the traffic, the road works and the one way system. I’m afraid we did cycle for at least a 500m the wrong way up a major road. Germany is a very ordered place and two sweaty cyclists going the wrong way up a road was a cause of great consternation amongst the burghers of Koblenz.

The area we were cycling through became a little seedy. The distance to the hotel was going down but the seediness factor was going up. In fairness, “seedy” for this part of Germany isn’t terrible but I wasn’t getting a good feeling about the hotel.

As it turned out, I had not only let the side down with my hotel choice I’d also let myself down. A heavily shuttered and graffiti covered concrete box spoke of rooms rented by the hour and still-warm sheets. I might have braved it myself but I'm kidding myself: I would have been on booking.com immediately looking for better accomodation.

However, within 5 minutes, through the magic of having a phone and a credit card, we were booked into the only 5 star hotel in Koblenz. It was a complex ride through the city to get to it but when it appeared next to the river, it was pretty obvious we’d made the right decision.

Reassuringly expensive looking.

The hotel is lovely and only suffers from one problem. The German BMW Z8 owners club is having their annual get together here and we’re the only people in the hotel who don’t own a Z8. I’m not really sure what they’re doing here. Do they just talk about BMW Z8’s all day? The bigger problem is that they’ve booked out the entire hotel restaurant tonight to have a BMW Z8 themed dinner. We were told we couldn’t eat tonight and I had to bring out the Slightly Angry Eyes™ before we were granted access to the restaurant.

We ate five-star food on looking out over the Moselle as people in boats and on paddle boards gently floated past our table. The Fährhaus Hotel has lived up to its reputation.

This is considerably nicer than the sex-worker hotel in the centre of town.

Today was beautiful. The weather was superb and looks like it’s going to continue that way for the rest of the trip. The Rhine Gorge is stunning, the villages are cute, the cycle paths were (mostly) fabulous.

This was a 100km day and worked well. Tomorrow is about the same and we’re going to Köln where we will see the absolute top tourist destination in Germany.

Stats:

• Distance: 105km. Very doable. An easy two 50km stage split.
• Average Speed: 19.5kmh. All those complex, yet safe, junctions in town take their toll on average speed.
• Contact points: It appears that all “soft tissue” issues are under control and there are no more body grumbles than one might expect after eight days cycling.

Day 9: Koblenz to Köln

Filled to the very brim by five star dinner the previous evening and five star breakfast — they had an eggstation! — we were ready in the early morning to tackle what should have been a relatively easy day. Follow the Rhine from Koblenz up to Köln and enjoy the lovely scenery… An easy ask.

Before leaving our lovely hotel, we had to have our own tribute to the enduring greatness of the BMW Z8 which a huge number of middle-aged overtanned couples wearing inappropriately tight white jeans had gathered in Koblenz to celebrate.

I was obviously obsessed about this. What do they talk about? “Ah, Hans, my car produces 395hp and has a top speed of 250 km/h”. “No way Ludwig! My car also produces 395hp and has a top speed of 250 km/h. What a coincidence!”

Two cyclists and a selection of the hundreds of Z8s in the car park.

I think, like gravel factories, it’s time to move on from the Z8 owner’s club.

Because we were in an entirely different part of Koblenz than the carefully planned route started at, there was a bit of “off-piste” and “where’s south again” route finding to do. We finally joined the EV15 just where the Moselle joins the Rhine at the Deutsches Eck. I recommend clicking on the link because the Wikipedia article has better pictures than the one below and the history of the “German corner” is more interesting than you might think.

The dude on the horse is Kaiser Wilhelm. Who else?

As we got into the rhythm, we passed endless caravan and motor home parks.

Germany is really lovely and everybody we have met has been friendly and fun. However, there are three things that definitely stick out in Germany.

• Germans seem to love a caravan or a motor home. There are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of caravans and motor homes in parks all along the Rhine.
• Germans definitely love an Eiscafe. Every town and village has a huge number of places selling ice-cream. Yesterday we passed a twenty four hour ice-cream vending machine for those moments when you just can’t wait until morning for your hit of frozen sugary flavoured milk.
• There’s a lot of middle-aged blokes with brilliantly large bellies. I mean absolutely huge. There is absolutely no way they would fit through the Büchmesser,

However, as I said, everybody we met has been lovely. They might have had giant bellies and been stuffing huge amounts of ice-cream into their faces in their caravans but they’ve been charming.

It’s fair to say that we’ve left the more picturesque part of Germany behind. We passed through the industrial doughnut of shit outside Koblenz and then along the Rhine there were lots and lots and lots of factories.

Some picturesque factories and…in the corner…a little tiny gravel factory!

Yes, gravel is still a big thing here. As are steel works and container yards.

It’s not a castle but I love this heavy industry stuff.

There were also indications of when the Rhine was as important for trade but less industrial.

A barge unloading crane from 150 years ago.

The route was quite wriggly since the topography on the western side of the Rhine is very steep and the road, rail and cycle paths all have to try and co-exist in a very small space. We conquered the final climb on the route before we leave Harwich. 29m at 3%.

Our planned stop was in Remagen. There were a lot of excellent bike paths along the river and some…not so much. One starts to hate those paths which have root bumps every few meters. The wrists and..”soft tissues”..take a bit of a beating on the less well cared for tracks. However, in defence of German cycling infrastructure, these paths are about a million times better than anything you would find in the UK.

Miles and miles of this.

The Rhine has become much more of a “working waterway” in this section. You see hundreds of barges plying their trade up and down the river. Mostly Dutch flagged, they carry everything from gravel (!) to containers and chemicals. We saw a Turkish flagged vessel carrying coal which seemed incongruous until I remembered the Rhine-Main-Danube canal.

This exceptional piece of civil engineering allows boats to enter the Rhine at Rotterdam, head up towards Mainz, take the Main river past Frankfurt and then go through a series of 16 locks after which they end up on the Danube and thence they can float down to the Black Sea and…Türkiye. Isn’t this just amazing? I estimate it probably would have taken about a month to get to their destination but…for the right cargo why not? Transporting things by boat is very efficient and cheap.

We finally got to Remagen which is famous for this.

There’s a matching one on the other side.

There was a fierce battle in March of 1945 in Remagen. It is, unsurprisingly, known as the Battle of Remagen. I’m not going to recount it here because a lot of the readership of this blog is coded middle-aged-male and if I say something like “12 V2 missiles were fired on the bridge in the first tactical use of the V2” there are going to be scores of middle-aged men shouting “STOP GETTING THE BATTLE OF REMAGEN WRONG” at their computers. The readership which is not middle-aged-male probably don’t care that much.

Enough to say, it’s a big deal. They have a Rhinepromenade with the pre-requisite 10 Eiscafes and somewhere for us to get coffees.

Many of the passing e-cyclists stopped to admire Dr T’s “bling bike”

We are somewhat unusual on this part of the Rhine. There are thousands of walnutty and large people — mostly German — on very heavily laden e-bikes. Double panniers on the front, double panniers on the back and wearing a rucksack. Given our very parsimonious approach to packing, it’s very difficult to imagine what they can be carrying in all that space. A dinner jacket maybe? A full dinner service for 12 people?

The e-bikers are also annoying because they go at precisely 25kmh. It’s a little bit faster than our normal pace and therefore they effortlessly cruise past us. I have started making electrical fault noises when they pass. “Bzzzt” and “screeeek” are favourites. I’m hoping that they start doubting their effortless travel option.

We skirted Bonn on more excellent cycling infrastructure. As we were passing through the city, we witnessed a very slow speed and boring police chase on the river. A slightly ratty old boat was drifting down the Rhine and obviously this was enough to tweak the crime-antennae of the Bonn river police. It was a very slow motion police chase. This was not the classic final boat chase scene in Face Off.

Hard to get very excited about this.

Bonn is the ex-capital of the old West Germany. When reunification happened, the government rightly decided that the capital should be Berlin and so Bonn ended up as the big loser in the whole reunification gig. It is tough to be a major European governmental centre for decades and suddenly just be a vaguely boring city on the Rhine.

From about 20km outside Köln, the industry started again.

A river and a lot of chemical works.

This was also maybe not as cutely picturesque as the Rhine Gorge or the Swiss Alps but, in a geeky-small-boy way, I was fascinated with all the pipes and reformulated-gasoline-cracking-reactors.

“Let’s stop and take photos of chemical works”. “Let’s not”.

Eventually the doughnut of shit around Köln ended and we pootled along a lovely Rhine-side cycle path towards the centre of town.

I understand that these buildings are a bit of “a thing” in Köln.

Actually pretty good modern architecture.

We wound our way along the river avoiding dogs, pedestrians, other cyclists and a wine festival. Surprisingly quickly, we were at our hotel for the night.

I had booked the hotel on the basis that it had a “Cathedral View” and this was the view.

Behind the van and the concrete bunker you can see one of the most famous architectural gems in the world.

Worse was to come. The receptionist told us that there was no place to put our bikes in the hotel. I had a quite extensive Angry Eyes™ moment explaining to her how this was not really the four-star service that had been promised on booking.com. She explained that there was a bike storage garage which was only a 10 minute walk away next to the railway station. After 100km in the saddle, that’s not what you want to hear.

We disconsolately walked our bikes through a concrete wasteland populated by drunk people and drug addicts. I would have asked the huge group of police officers for directions but they were too busy saving the life of a drunk guy who had been bottled by his mate and was bleeding out in front of the Köln main railway station. This was not a high-class holiday experience for Dr T. Eventually we found the bike store and for 15 EUR, we were informed that we could leave our bikes there but if they were stolen, it was not their fault.

We may never see you again.

It was long walk back to the hotel through the very unsalubrious parts of Köln…

There’s no towel rail. In future, I’m going to write to every hotel on the trip and if they haven’t got a heated towel rail they’re on the Dr K blacklist. We decided to just ignore washing the cycle kit, we showered and headed out to see the most amazing cathedral in the world.

Rather surprisingly, the most amazing cathedral in the world sits in the middle of some complex road junctions and has unexpected excrescences stuck to the side.

Shall we stick a concrete modernist camera shop on the side of this cathedral? Sure, why not?

The story of the cathedral is quite a thing. Started in the thirteenth century, it was only completed in 1880. More than six hundred years of construction. We might think that the Elizabeth line took a while to get done but this is on a different level.

The classic shot. The largest façade of any church…anywhere. There’s a fractal thing going on here which is hard to describe.

In God’s property portfolio, this is almost certainly his 50 million euro villa in Mallorca with sea views and an infinity pool. It is absolutely stunning. Surprisingly it managed to survive a lot of bombing in WW2. Seemingly, the spires were a great waypoint and aiming device for Allied bombers. The windows didn’t survive but they’ve been replaced by some excellent modern versions.

Kaleidoscope stained glass window.

The cathedral is, I am told, the most visited place in Germany by foreign tourists. I can get it. It is breathtaking. It’s just sad that modern Köln has grown around it like a carbuncle.

We went down to the river and ate cheap food a cheap place with lots of German tourists eating cheap food in a cheap place. We were sitting next to two giant guys who ordered pizzas and, when they arrived, they ordered butter so they could butter their pizzas. The pizzas were just the starters for the main course which was meat and pasta. It was a humbling experience watching them put all that food away. I did my wimpy best with this.

Literally every restaurant on the river serves this meal.

We were both a bit disappointed by Köln. I guess we had kind of expected something like Strasbourg but it’s not that. Great cathedral, the rest is pretty down-market. As we finished eating hordes of people were queuing to get on disco booze cruise boats where they could party the night away floating down the Rhine getting shitfaced.

The end of the day was a little challenging but the rest of the day was fine. Easy cycling even for two people who have used up most of their physical reserves. The sun shone a bit…but not too much. The scenery was good — especially if you like complex chemical works and container ports.

Tomorrow we head to Duisburg which, I understand, is ground zero of the industrial heartland of Germany. It’s going to be a shorter day and I have a cunning plan to visit an amazing site when we get there.

The Stats:

• Distance: 105km.
• Average Speed: 19.6 km.
• Contact Points: Everything seems to be holding up as well as expected. My Achilles tendon is buggered up, hands and soft tissues are suffering. Par for the course.
• Equipment and packing: I’m going to do a blog piece on the bikes and the state of our sartorial elegance later on. However, for the moment, it appears that my power meter has packed up. I’m either doing 20 watts all day or Tadej Pogačar levels of power output.

Day 10: Köln to Duisburg

The Köln hotel was not much to write home about although it did have a giant electrically operated bottle of Nutella™ which made Dr T quite happy. Every home should have (a) a kettle, (b) a rice cooker and (c) an electrically operated Nutella™ dispenser.

This is what you want to see when you’re facing a long cycle.

Very strangely for a downmarket hotel (but with a cathedral “view”) they also had a robot waiter/waitress.

It didn’t seem to do very much except trundle around waiting for people to put stuff on the trays at the side. This seemed, to me at least, one of the least impressive uses of robotics and AI. For what it’s worth, this fake internal monologue of the Tesla robot made me laugh and laugh.

Köln continued its down-at-heel vibe as I retrieved the bikes. I nervously scuttled through underpasses rich in feces, urine and the sad broken people who had slept there. It wasn’t nice although my good friend Rosa did point out last night that one of the reasons that Köln is an ugly concrete town is because some of the readers of this blog have fathers or grandfathers who spent a great deal of effort and high explosive reducing the entire city to a moonscape of rubble. When you have to rebuild in a hurry and without much money, you get somewhere like Köln. Complaining about it is rather like complaining that Coventry is a bit ugly.

However, I still think sticking a concrete bunker camera shop on the side of the cathedral is a bit much.

Rather later than we had hoped we set off along the river. The doughnut-of-shit around Köln is extensive and varied. There are the traditional chemical works.

Lots and lots of this stuff.

Those of you with an in depth knowledge of the European car industry will already have twigged that we were going to be passing through the Ford Cologne Body and Assembly plant. It’s quite a change from castles and cutesy villages but quite interesting. Despite converting to producing EVs recently, the workforce at the factory has halved in the past decade. One does wonder how long the German industrial miracle can keep running.

It isn’t enough to have millions of cars with your name on: you need a street too?

Like so often on this trip, we negotiated railway marshalling yards, lorry parks, factories producing mysterious concrete mouldings and then we would turn a corner and we were in the countryside.

I took this video to prove that we weren’t always passing through gravel, chemical and car factories.

See! Not all industrial wastelands.

There was a lot of this between Köln and Düsseldorf. The weather was great, the cycle paths wound their way past fields and horse studs. The Bayer chemical works could have been on another planet rather than just 10km behind us.

We rolled down to the Rhine for what I believe is going to be our last crossing of the Rhine on this trip. There was a highly efficient ferry which just shuttled between both banks not waiting for people to fill up the ship.

This was a speedy ferry

On the journey into Düsseldorf, I thought about the economics of the ferry. It was about 50m to the other side and they charged €10 for a car and €3 for a bike. It took 2 minutes to get to the other side and 3 minutes to load and unload. Even with a couple of cars and 10 bikes, they’re making €50 every five minutes and there isn’t much fuel involved in drifting over the river. It’s probably not a bad business.

The villages outside Düsseldorf are firmly in the gentile suburbia zone. Nice two-story houses with neat gardens and a couple of BMW’s parked outside. The cycle paths were filled with couples and their children out cycling about doing…stuff.

Outside on of the towns we saw one of these odd tree things which you see in so many German towns.

What the hell is this?

I turned once again to my lovely German friend Rosa. This is her explanation

It’s a Vereinsbaum - a tree / wooden structure that displays the logos of all the different voluntary organisations or clubs of a particular town. Germans LOVE club activities and tend to be members of five or more different ‘Vereine’ - running, cycling, hiking, football, etc clubs. On that particular picture there are also a number of signs of carnival clubs (the ones with the clowns) 🤡, a particular feature of the Rhine region 🥳 (I have it on good authority though that people tend to be members of various Vereine, but mostly meet up to drink beer 🍻 and socialise… much like certain ‘book clubs’ 😄).

And so now you know. Thanks Rosa!

There was a little bit of cycling flagging going on so we stopped at the first place in Düsseldorf that had coffee, coke and food. It was a golf club which appeared to have hosted some major German championship but, stuck on a meander of the Rhine in the middle of Düsseldorf, I doubt Donald Trump is queuing up to buy it.

Düsseldorf was buzzing and busy. We took a photograph of the inevitable big tower (Rheinturm) which serendipitously had the Goodyear blimp floating by.

If only it had been a Zeppelin!

We noticed more and more cyclists joining our route. All of them wearing red shirts with Düsseldorf 95 on the back of them. Before long there were thousands of us all riding along the Rhine in a huge red-shirted convoy on the way to the Düsseldorf 1895 match that afternoon. The crowd was good humoured and possibly had a more equal gender balance than one might see in an equivalent UK football crowd.

In a scene which could only happen in Germany, we watched a ferry boat load up with fitness fanatics who then proceeded to do a spin class on the boat as they floated down the Rhine.

Surreal is an overused word but in this case…very appropriate.

As we stopped at a junction with the other hundred or so people on their way to the football match, a bloke keeled over on his bike in front of us. Clutching his left shoulder, he lay there in the middle of the junction having a heart attack and probably suffering from some significant head trauma as he hit the ground. Unfortunately, we’re both the wrong sort of doctors and don’t speak German so there wasn’t really much we could do. People were phoning 112 and I guess that was the best he was going to get.

The thousands of football fans peeled off to watch Düsseldorf play Hannover 96 in the brand new stadium on the north of the city. If you don’t want to know the result, look away now.

A disappointing day for Düsseldorf fans. More disappointing day for heart attack guy.

We headed out into the country once again. There were more horse studs including one which specialised in tiny Falabella horses.

One probably gets more of these to the hectare than proper horses.

Duisburg started a long way out. From 15km to the centre, we were in the suburbs. Cheap but functional housing impeccably maintained.

There’s an election going on in Germany. A great mystery of life is the political language of another country. For example, why do people in America put up signs in their front “yard” and why is Nigel Farage on the telly so much in the UK?

In common with many European countries, getting elected in Germany involves putting a lot of posters up with your smiling face and your name on every available lamppost. While we traversed the suburbs of Duisburg, we played the “guess the political party” game. From 50m away, just by looking at the photograph of the candidate, you had to guess one of CDU, SPD, Green or AfD. It turns out having a beard as a bloke and a bad haircut as a woman is a dead giveaway for a Green. Earnest staring into the middle distance and sensible haircuts marks you out as SPD. Holding your hands clasped in front of you in the Merkel style is a CDU trope. The AfD candidates have a certain steely blue eyed 35 year old firm jawed white male thing going on which one might think had strong historical resonances. However, as I said, politics of other countries is a mystery.

Endless junctions, endless tram tracks to negotiate. It isn’t boring because it requires a lot of concentration and, counter intuitively, the time goes pretty quickly. Eventually we were on the Königstraße and we were done. The hotel is an Accor Mercure hotel and they win prizes for having a special room to keep your bike in and a friendly waitress who supplied beers while our room was being prepared. This too is a four star hotel and also near the bottom of that rating but the staff are helpful and the aircon works.

No heated towel rail though so I trekked through the streets to the local laundrette and once again paid a stupidly small amount of money to sit in a laundrette while everything got washed.

Not like the Levis advert.

Once everything was washed and dried, it was time for the big Duisburg event.

In the north of the city is the Landshaftpark. It’s hard to describe so here is a quote.

While most disused industrial sites are either seen as a dangerous eyesore and torn down, or fenced off and hidden away, calling to intrepid urban explorers, the former steel works now known as the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord in Duisburg, Germany, was turned into a public park that celebrates the site's brutal beauty and productive heritage.

The coal works on the site were first established in 1901 to take advantage of the fields of ore on the site. A blast furnace was built and from there a slow series of other coal and eventually iron and steel facilities were added down the decades until the site was a fully functioning plant complex. As demand for steel dipped in the later 20th century, the factory was eventually abandoned in the mid-80s leaving behind an ominous industrial hulk and immense amounts of pollution. However instead of blasting the land clean of the forsaken metal works, it was decided that the facilities would be refurbished and turned into a public park where the memory of the plant's good work could live on and be appreciated by future generations - once the pollution was cleaned up that is.

After extensive purging of the toxins that had poisoned the site and general refurbishment of the works, the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord was born. Many of the facilities were repurposed into such grand spaces such as a massive concert hall and even Europe's largest indoor dive site. However what is likely most stunning to the casual visitor is the neon light show that appears after dark painting the otherwise hard-edged, grim site into a sort of sci-fi dystopia.

Given all the factory action over the past three or four days, this was an absolute must to visit.

Firstly we had to negotiate the Duisburg public transport system.

Dr T looking happier than one would expect on a Duisburg tram.

After the tram we walked for 15 minutes to the park.

This is not Green Park.

Blast furnaces are big old things.

The Duisburg park authorities had spread a load of sand over some bit of the park and added some deckchairs and there were pop up restaurants and bars in the park.

This isn’t the beach in St Tropez either.

It was all very cool but there was no way we were going to wait for another 3 hours until the sun set to see the amazing neon display. We had a glass of wine in one of the pop up bars and then headed back into the centre of town by tram.

The dining options in Duisburg are not extensive but we managed to find a lovely traditional “Ruhrpott” place on a back street. It was full of locals — one guy, who made Gandalf look like a Gillette advert, just wandered in, sat down and the waitress brought him wine and food without being asked. It was all charming. The menu was very traditional and, since this is our last night in Germany, we went full-on German food. Schnitzel for Dr T and I had “crispy roasted pork knuckle with mashed potatoes and saurkraut”. It does not get more Germanic than that.

This was the best pork I’ve ever eaten.

We tried to have an Eis on the way back to the hotel — even though there was no realistic way that we could have fitted it in after the meal we had just had — but it appears that all the Eiscafes only take cash… I wonder why there are so many cash only Eiscafes in Germany? I wonder if tax evasion might be the answer… Sadly, no Eis for me this trip.

Today was absolutely brilliant. Shorter, full of incident, a great mix of urban and countryside cycling, high quality pork-based food in the evening.

Tomorrow we have a longer day and we will cross into country number 6. Weather looks good and as long as our bodies hold together, we’re going to make it.

Stats:

• Distance: 82km
• Contact points: Most thing settling down. Soft tissues are manageable. Hands are a bit numb. Knees holding out well. Only wrinkle is that Dr T’s neck isn’t holding up so well after all this time in the saddle.

Day 11: Duisburg to Arnhem

This was a long but great day. More bridges, the second last border, great weather, fabulous cycling infrastucture. Long distance cycling doesn’t really get better than this.

The Mercure in Duisburg was absolutely fine. Everything worked apart from a rickety old lift and the breakfast was pure four-star-hotel-breakfast-kit.

Early morning in Duisburg.

Unsurprisingly given it was 8am on a Sunday morning, the streets were quiet and easy to traverse. Duisburg is a very…neat…place. Nice roads, tidy little apartment blocks and big wide shopping streets. Of course, this is due to the fact that it has been rebuilt from scratch. Sitting as it does at the confluence of the Rhine and the Ruhr, it was a prime engineering and manufacturing hub for Germany and thus was a prime target for Allied bombing. Over 80% of the entire city was reduced to rubble To put that in perspective, after the Hiroshima nuclear bombing, it was estimated that 70% of the city was destroyed and the casualty toll in Duisburg was considerably higher than in Hiroshima — although admittedly over 4 years rather than in one horrific instant. But Duisburg has done pretty well.

I had rather foolishly said that we had crossed the Rhine for the final time yesterday. One would think that somebody who spent literally days working on each day’s routes wouldn’t make a rookie error like that.

We crossed the Rhur and then crossed the Rhine once more.

Look, you said we weren’t going to cross this bloody river again.

This section wasn’t the prettiest part of the route.

Very much Mordor am Rhein to be honest.

Before long, we were out of the heavy industry doughnut and back into the countryside. However, there was the presence of heavy industry on the horizon for scores of kilometres as we rolled north and west.

Not the best cycle path but very much “The Shire with Mordor on the horizon”.

I will have to do a whole blog post detailing how Dr T has managed to produce six or seven different off-the-bike outfits out of a 14 litre bean on the back of her bike. I have managed to produce one known as “green t-shirt I once got free with a purchase paired with terrible Craghopper trousers”. It's a mystery indeed.

Not only has Dr T done well with off-the-bike couture but it appears there was also space for a change of cycling top in the tiny bean.

No photos of the new cycle kit!

The route wriggled its way along the western side of the Rhine. Mostly below the dykes (or Damm) which are there to hold back the floodwaters in extremis. According to the turn by turn notifications on my Garmin, approximately 50% of our entire route in Germany has been on either a Rheinstraße or a Dammstraße.

Despite the looming presence of chemical factories in the distance, it was really very rural. Thrifty farmers were grazing sheep in temporary electric-fenced fields on the dykes. I would guess that this is some sort of common land but maybe not. They were awfully healthy and clean looking sheep.

Nice grazing if you can get it.

We’ve seen a lot of bridges on this trip. Rather like gravel factories, BMW Z8s and amusingly named towns, one does start to get a bit obsessed with them.

There are the box girder rail bridges that were probably thrown up after the war and then, as the car started to dominate travel, there are lots of really very nice bridges for cars.

This, in particular, seemed to be a very graceful design and is used frequently.

The whole area we were cycling through is a nature reserve constructed around the polders which are used for flood management. They are wildlife refuges and there were a lot of blokes in camo-gear sporting very high quality camera gear.

It’s like the Serengeti here.

We stopped at a nature reserve café run by a very bubbly Indian woman who served us apple cake and full-fat cokes. She was so happy to speak in English and her lilting Indian pronunciation was a real reminder of home.

Suitably fortified with apple cake and coke we continued along the endless dyke top paths. None of them were long and straight enough to be outright boring but we had definitely seen enough of birds and other cyclists.

Still on dykes, still pretending to have fun and me getting hairier and hairier.

In this part of Germany, a lot of cycling is on brick paving rather than tarmac. After around 1,300 km of cycling, one gets very attuned to the quality of the surface you’re riding on. The brick paving shown in the photo above isn’t great in that it tends to impart regular and irritating impact on one’s hands and soft tissues. As two people who cycle around Cambridge on the pot-holed paths masquerading as roads, we weren’t complaining but we were looking forward to some tarmac.

In the distance, this wonderfully elegant bridge appeared. This really would be our final crossing of the Rhine. However, due to a weird German polyp which juts over the Rhine at this point we weren’t going to be in country number six for a while.

A lovely bridge…sorry for the bridge thing.

At the centre of the graceful arch, I stopped for a picture.

All of Germany in behind us.

In the photo, there is a massive factory, a cute village, miles of countryside and the Rhine. Effectively the four defining features of the German leg of our journey. We have spent the majority of the time on this trip in Germany. There’s often articles in high-end travel magazines entitled “Germany, the under-appreciated jewel in Europe’s tourism crown” and, in some ways, they’re right. It’s varied and, in places, beautiful. It’s never boring — especially if you like industrial architecture. The cities have their distinctive vibe and are always interesting.

Most importantly, every single person we met — whether or not in a hotel or on the route — was unfailingly cheerful and helpful. Out of the last four long distance self-supported bike rides I’ve done, three of them involved significant time in Germany. I know, like every country, Germany is facing social and economic challenges but, given the history of both WW2 and reunification, it’s a surprisingly “together” country. It’s probably a sign of age but we both loved the orderedly understated competence that exudes from just about everywhere and everyone.

It’s time, finally, to cross the Rhine for the last time and say a sad goodbye to Germany.

Very soon after dropping down into the little German polyp which sticks over the Rhine, we were in forests again and rolling along enjoying the countryside.

There’s a giant petrochemical works about 50m from here.

There was 35km to go and we were getting tired. A suspiciously quiet bike path and road led us to a set of roadworks which entirely blocked my carefully curated route. There was an option to heave the bikes over some fences, take our chances crossing a busy railway line but sense prevailed — or to be honest, Dr T prevailed. I’m an idiot, I would have done it and ended my days squished by the high speed express from Arnhem to Duisburg.

Some Google Maps and Garmin fettling indicated that there might be a path which would take us to a railway crossing a bit further along the tracks which might be open. We set off and immediately hit gravelly and sandy path which taxed our somewhat depleted bike handling skills and concentration,

Oh yeah, this was fun.

My Garmin has the country borders on it and, according to Garmin, this is the border between Germany and the Netherlands.

Where the tarmac starts is The Netherlands: country number 6.

The Netherlands is much more densely populated than Germany. We immediately ended up on some dijks which wound their way through the neatest countryside in the world. We were joined by hundreds of beautiful tall blond men and women cycling along between their towns and villages. In Germany we could cycle for an hour on the cycle paths and never see another person. On the Dutch dijks we had to practice our overtaking skills every 30 seconds.

It was Sunday and so a lot of people were out enjoying the weather. We saw a “summer camp” around a tiny lake. Everybody was having a BBQ, lazing in the sun, and playing in the water. It was hot today and, had we had more time and space to pack a swimming costume, we might have joined them.

What fun!

We stopped to rest on the IJsseldijk and look across the virtually endless dijks and polders.

You may be saying to yourself “oh look, he’s got a typo in that previous sentence”. Well, it turns out that “i” and “j” together in Dutch is a digraph. When they come together they’re treated as a single symbol and therefore when the word is capitalised, they both get capitalised. Pronouncing “ij” is a bit difficult. Something like “eye” or the “eh” and “ee” sounds blended together. Still, you now know something you didn’t know before starting this blog right?

As is so often the case, the last 30km went very slowly. I’ve spared you the photographs of the endless vistas of dijk top paths, verdant green fields and big skies.

I’m not sure why the mammoth is here. There is some association but I couldn’t decipher it from the signs.

We might have been tired but one is never too tired to take a picture of a sign to an amusingly named town.

The “loo” for the past 10 days has mostly been behind a tree.

As we got closer to Arnhem, we were directed off the dijks and onto the world-class Dutch urban cycle infrastructure. I was cycling along thinking “boy, we dream of this stuff in the UK” and then realised they probably dream of this sort of stuff in Germany who have good cycling infrastructure themselves. We cycled for 10km right into the centre of Arnhem on dedicated cycle paths which were wide, well surfaced and, at every intersection, bikes had the right of way.

A real joy to behold.

I have resisted making “Bridge Too Far” jokes or references in this post although clearly the temptation is high. There’s quite a lot of history and a lot of memorials around Arnhem devoted to the failed — and some might say foolish — battle of Arnhem. It’s a great story and a good film. The film was created far enough after the war to be able to leaven the bravery and dedication of the fighters with a clear rebuke to the Allied high command for lack of strategic planning and support given to the soldiers and airmen.

This was understated and nice.

I have surpassed myself with the hotel tonight. It’s a hotel built inside a de-consecrated church. It is almost a caricature of Dutch coolness. Obviously because the hotel is very boutiquey as those of you who have stayed at this type of hotel will know that “boutique” is a synonym for “hopeless shower” and “”funky plug sockets which never work”. If you want working plug sockets and a good shower go to a Mercure.

Those boxes in the sky are the rooms.

Unfortunately, the hotel is way way too cool to have a restaurant or a bar on Sunday evening so we headed out into Arnhem to get some food. Arnhem on a Sunday night was…relaxed and inviting. Groups of people wandered around the quaint but clearly rebuilt centre of town window shopping and chatting. Everybody was tall, blond and beautiful. Dr T fitted right in. I was massively outclassed.

Having spent 10 days in Switzerland, Germany and France, not a single microgramme of spice or chilli has passed our lips. It was time to have some traditional Dutch food: the rijsstafel. In the same way that the UK has Indian food as a by-product of a somewhat questionable colonial history, the Dutch have Indonesian food. The rijstafel is some rice accompanied by 12 or 14 tiny little tasting dishes of various vegetables, meats and fish in varying levels of spiciness.

Carpet bombing the tastebuds

The restaurant was packed, run by an Indonesian family who were wildly friendly and helpful. We stuffed spicy food into our spice-depleted bodies as fast as it arrived. It was perfect.

Today was 120km and that’s probably as far as we can do in a day by now. The weather was sunny all the way, the route was varied and there was lots of see. We both thought it was a great day even with a few dodgy moments on sandy paths and long dijks with the wind in our faces.

Originally tomorrow was going to be a 160km suffer-fest all the way to Hoek van Holland but in the planning stage there was a rumbling of mutiny from Dr T so it’s been split into two days. Tomorrow is a relatively short day of 80km to Utrecht. We might have time to do some sightseeing before heading to the Hook the following day. Our Boutique Church hotel is way way too cool to have a heated towel rail — or even a towel rail — so tomorrow is going to start in a very damp way despite the good weather.

Stats:

• Distance, 120.9km. Long but we managed it. Would have been harder without the excellent cycling infrastructure on both sides of the border.
• Average Speed: 20kmh. That’s just fine.
• Bodies: We are not both very much in the endurance cycling zone. Stuff hurts but we tough it out. Over an entire day, the average heart rate is around 105…

Day 12: Arnhem to Utrecht

Today was going to be a bit of a shorter day but, in an ironic twist, we were going to be worrying more about the heat than the cold and the rain.

Despite the Boutique Church hotel being very boutiquey, we slept well and were presented with an wonderful Dutch breakfast spread in the morning. Breakfasts are a non existent feature of my normal life but a huge feature of these long distance cycle trips. I’m pretty sure the audience for this blog is getting a little cheesed-off with endless pictures of baked goods and ham.

Great coffee, great breakfast. Well done Boutique Church hotel.

Straight out of the door we were on to the frankly stupendous Dutch cycling infrastructure.

Basically the entire country looks like this.

There wasn’t a time between Arnhem and Utrecht that we weren’t on segregated cycle paths or roads. It was…blissful. I’m going to try to cut down on the endless shots of brilliant cycling infrastructure and also the photos of lovely cycle paths on top of dijks which defined today. Look at the photos from yesterday. It was like that.

But here are a selection of sights from the journey:

Car free roads through forests

For those of you who have been missing them: a gravel factory!

An amusingly named car repair shop.

The traditional windmill shot.

More of this. Lots more of this.

We stopped at a very downmarket “seaside style” resort based around a lake and had a coke and an ice cream.

This isn’t St Tropez either but everybody was having a lot of fun in the sun.

Eventually we hit the outskirts of Utrecht and were guided straight into the centre along a canal being used as a barge park.

No, not a great photo. Sorry.

As we cycled along the increasingly narrow canals we saw a large number of open boats with twenty or thirty young people packed on them. Loud music and lots of drink. While musing on this, I nearly killed myself at a road junction and Dr T nearly fell off negotiating the thousands and thousands of other cyclists in Utrecht.

And then…we were at our hotel. At 2pm! We are in another boutique hotel. This time it’s called “The Eye Hotel” and there’s a strong eye, glasses and opthalmics vibe to every single decoration on the walls and in the rooms. Like last night’s hotel the room is funky and cool and not really great at being a hotel room but I think I may have redeemed myself after some of the less wonderful places I had booked.

Eye oriented decoration

Our lovely trendy receptionist informed us that it’s freshers’ week in Utrecht. That would explain the boats and the fact that, as I trekked to the laundrette through the lovely canal-side streets, Utrecht was heaving with young drunk people flirting with new sexually transmitted diseases.

We have freshly laundered kit for the last day when we get to the end of the Rhine.

We headed out into the very cool Utrecht streets searching for one of Utrecht’s major attractions. There is a series of children’s books called Miffy written by Dick Bruna. They were a big part of our childhood and our children’s childhood. The author lived in Utrecht and, in a lovely tribute, many of the traffic lights have a little Miffy character.

Traffic light icons around the world…

We wandered the Utrecht streets. Utrecht is often thought of as Amsterdam’s poor relation but it’s got the same architecture and the same canals. Of course, due to it being Fresher’s week, most of the canals were blocked by 18 year olds getting absolutely shitfaced on boats.

Where do they go to the toilet? Maybe I don’t want to know.

It was a Monday night and everything was kicking off. Hordes of young people on bikes wearing their summery best outfits were embarking on a the three year journey of acquiring knowledge, emotional scars and a functioning personality.

We ate down near a canal and had pretty standard steak and chicken but done very well.

It was large portions in a trendy atmosphere.

Utrecht was great. Maybe it would have been worse on a wet Wednesday in January but it was nice on a warm summer’s evening in August. Definitely worth putting on your “weekend break” list.

So…last day on the European mainland tomorrow. After 1,500km on a bike, we are going to end up at the source of the Rhine. There will, of course, be a wrap up of the Rhine tomorrow night sent from our ferry as we float across the North Sea so let’s leave the Rhine trip discussion until tomorrow.

It’s 100km tomorrow which is not so bad although every Dutch person we’ve met has been surprised that we would attempt this in the scorching 32C heat which is predicted for tomorrow. We have more than enough time to potter along the last bits of the Rhine before boarding the ferry. It’s going to be a bit sad to have completed this.

Stats:

• Distance: 83km. Really quite short but it felt rougher than it might. Both our bodies are rather winding down into some ground state.
• Other stuff: I am definitely having some “soft tissue” issues which even the magic of SudoCrem™ isn’t managing. The rest…well, it is what it is. Various knee, neck, achilles tendon, soft tissue niggles are just what you expect after all this time in the saddle.

Day 13: Utrecht to Hoek van Holland

Top marks to the Eye Hotel (named after the famous British R&B covers band) for a quiet room amid the Utrecht freshers party central scene. We enjoyed another fabulous Dutch breakfast spread and then headed out on the road.

Today was just over 100km to Hoek van Holland and we had a lot of time to get there. Leaving at 9am meant we would get there around 2pm and have four and a half hours to wait for the ferry. So we dawdled.

Endless perfect cycling infrastructure.

The Netherlands are an absolute joy to cycle in. I’ve gone on and on about how great the cycling infrastructure is in cities and in the countryside and I’m going to go on and on about it a little bit more. Cycling is embedded in the country in a way that we could only dream of in the UK. From signage to just how many types of cyclists there are, it’s eye opening. We live in Cambridge which has the highest density of cycling per head of population in the UK and it’s nothing compared to way the Dutch do it.

As we trundled along, going considerably faster than we wanted to go due to a lovely tailwind, we discussed the Netherlands. It’s clearly a very rich society — about 40% richer than the UK on GDP per head basis — and being richer makes things a lot easier. It’s incredibly well ordered and civilised — a sort of end point for western liberal democracy maybe. I know there’s a big constituency of people who think that end point is a bad place but, for me as a centrist Dad, I love it.

The only thing in the Netherlands which seems weirdly disordered is the vehicle number place system. To understand why this matters, you have to realise that I am to some degree “on spectrum” and every country I cycle through or go to, I try to work out the how the number plates work. Germany? Easy, first characters (one, two or three) are a contraction of the registration place of the car. Everything after that is free for the individual licensing authority to designate. More characters for “B” (Berlin) or “M” (Munich), a lot less characters for “GER” (Germersheim District) since it’s smaller. Spain? Three letters, four numbers, no vowels in the letters, the first letter of the three indicates the age of the car.

The Dutch system, is mad. They have XX-99-XX, XX-XX-99, 99-XX-99, 999-X-99, XXX-9-XX etc etc. Basically every potential way of organising a six character address space. But they don’t use vowels (so you can’t spell “poo”) and don’t use “M” and “W” because they’re too wide in the font they chose. Aaaarghhh…this sort of thing hurts my head and seems deeply un-Dutch. Just add another character and you can increase your address space by a factor of 18 (26 minus AEIOUWM)

Ok, enough of that. You all know I’m a bit obsessive about this stuff.

And for those of you who are as obsessed about the orthography of other languages, here’s a perfect example of the capitalisation of the digraph “ij” in Dutch.

Orthography in action.

The hot kilometres counted down and we continued to ride mostly on top of dijks with the occasional foray into an impossibly cute little village with windmills and those bridges.

These cute bridges.

On one of the dijks there was a display of an engine which, I think, was from a Lancaster bomber and had been found during some drainage of the surrounding fields.

Memories of a darker time

As we got closer to Rotterdam, everything got busier and a little more complex to manage. At one point we had to get up onto a bridge using stairs! In the world of perfect cycling infrastructure, this could have been a demerit for the Dutch but they had put a little bike escalator along the side of the steps. Not sure if the video works but I’ve never seen this before.

You just press your brakes and the bike goes up by itself. Genius.

Coming from the east, Rotterdam is a big complicated modern city. Lots of junctions even with the great cycling infrastructure. We had time so we stopped underneath the Erasmusbrug which is so famous in Rotterdam that it’s part of the city’s logo. There was a very cool bar in which we ate Dutch snacks and tried to cool down.

It was hot and Rotterdamers were out in force drinking and eating.

Filled to the brim with cheese, ham and pickles we set off into the increasingly hot and humid afternoon.

As one travels west from Rotterdam, the northern bank becomes increasingly industrialised and the southern bank of the river morphs into Europoort. This is one of the largest port complexes in the world — and a big contributor to why the Dutch are so rich. It handles 12,000,000 containers a year along with bulk cargoes of everything from crude oil to iron ore.

We thought the BASF factory in Ludwigshafen was big. Pah! You could drop it anywhere in Europoort and probably lose it.

The shipping got denser and larger.

Big sea going ships (and some continuing brilliant cycling infrastructure)

If you like industry — and gravel factories — the EV15 is definitely the route to do in Europe. Right on cue, we saw the final EV15 sign of the journey. We’ve been following these for over 1,500 km and it’s a testament to the amazing Eurovelo team that they have pulled together not just this route but 20 odd other routes around Europe.

The last EV15 sign.

Just two km short of the Hoek van Holland Stena terminal is the Maeslantkering. I got this crap photo of it but the photos from the air in the Wikipedia article give a great insight into the huge size of this flood defence. When there’s a storm surge in the North Sea, the two giant segments swing out into the Rhine and save Rotterdam and most of Holland from catastrophic flooding.

Terrible photo. Sorry.

And then we were there. 13 days ago and 1,500km away and 2,000m higher than this we took this selfie with a lighthouse in the Alps and set off.

Colder, wetter, higher, and a long way away.

Hot, sea-level and, in my case, a lot hairier.

There is, in fact, a tiny bit more to the Rhine so it felt appropriate that we cycled out to the Strand (“beach”) and to the long spit that marks the end of the Rhine. It had started as a tiny stream in Switzerland and ended up like this.

The end of the Rhine.

We had a celebratory beer and a wine amid the Dutch families enjoying the rather wonderful beaches on the North Sea coast. I wouldn’t think that they’re going to rival the sandy delights of Thailand or South Beach but they were pretty nice on a day like today.

I think this was richly deserved.

We rolled back to the ferry terminal for our 18:15 boarding and inevitably had to wait for quite some time in a huge queue of cars and motorbikes to get on. By 19:00 I was thinking of deploying my Angry Eyes™ but I was amused by these truly awful “low rider” VW vans.

This is not cool. They look broken.

After about 90 minutes of fannying around, we did end up on the boat and with some trepidation we found our cabin. I’ve definitely ended strongly on the accommodation front. The “Captain’s Cabin” class is really rather nice. There’s a window looking out over the front (“bow”) of the boat and the room doesn’t smell of poo — which has been a problem on previous trips.

This is really quite nice. Maybe a cruise next year? Kill me now.

The bar and restaurant were…functional but unprepossessing and, on time, the ship left the dock, turned around and headed out into the North Sea.

That’s the North Sea out there. And the spit we cycled along on the right.

It’s tempting to think that we’re done, but we’re not. To complete this, we’ve still got to get back to Cambridge. There’s a long 115km day with a lot of climbing tomorrow. We’ve got used to pan-flat days and tomorrow we’ve got to brave the rolling hills of Essex which, I think, will be a very big shock to our bodies. Hopefully it all doesn’t go horribly wrong on the final day.

Stats:

• Distance: 102km
• Avg Speed: 20.3kmh. Tried to go as slowly as possible so we didn’t need to wait too long for the ferry but the tailwind blew us along.
• Body parts: I am having some significant “soft-tissue” issues but I’m hoping that copious application of SudoCrem™ will get me through tomorrow.

Day 14: Harwich to Cambridge and the wrap up

This final post of the trip will have multiple sections. One the traditional travelogue of the day and the rest on gear, clothing, kit, route etc.

The day

Due to some weird interaction between the Vodafone Maritime service, timezone changes and Apple's alarm app, we woke up at 4:30am. Two hours before disembarkation... This was not a great start to the day. The ferry had already docked and we stared at the trucks unloading in the early dawn light our of our giant porthole window. There were hundreds of trucks and, watching them driving off, one gets an insight into how much cross-border trade and transport goes on "under the hood" of economies. If only the Tory party had realised how much of this goes on day after day after day before they threw a giant bag of Brexit sand into the gears of the economy.

But you're not here for the economic commentary. "Tell us more about the biking stuff Dr K", "Were there any gravel factories?", "Any crap about number plates or interesting language digraphs today?".

So let us begin...and, it turns out...end.

Getting off the boat was surprisingly easy although we then waited for 45 minutes for passport control.

This was a bit miserable and considerably worse than the Dutch end.

We met a couple of blokes in their late 70s who had returned from a cycling holiday around the Dutch dijks. Dressed very nattily in khaki chinos, traditional business rain macs and flat caps, they seemed to have had a lovely time. One of them told us a very plausible reason for the great Dutch cycling infrastructure involving the oil crises of the 1970s but it turns out it was a load of old bollocks. Very confidently delivered though. Maybe he was an LLM in a rain macintosh. Read a lot more about the real history of Dutch cycling here. It's worth a read.

After passport control, we were out navigating the non-existent cycling infrastructure of Harwich and, of course, trying to remember which way roundabouts work in the UK and to ride on the left hand side of the road.

Fast cars, potholes, crap cycling path. So good to be home.

I had constructed a route back to Cambridge which mostly followed the South Suffolk Route A and since the route follows tiny Suffolk lanes, we weren't so worried about being mown down by a Ford Focus driven at speed by some bloke watching porn.

It was very pretty indeed.

Beautiful and quiet country lanes. Idyllic.

It would have been much nicer were it not for the fact that this part of the country is very much "rolling" countryside. Our legs had been lulled into a false sense of fitness by the endless flat plains and dijks of Germany and The Netherlands. Even the tiniest hills felt like trying to get up Alpe d'Huez. The temperature reached 37C which also added to the general sense of misery. "Why isn't this finished?".

We stopped for an uncharacteristically cheerful selfie next to a rather fine (and final) example of God's property portfolio.

Out of 4 selfies taken, this is the only one that vaguely looks like we're enjoying ourselves.

To add insult to injury, there were a lot of roadworks going on in Suffolk and we hit a few of these.

Oh...crap.

When you're hot and tired and have 1,600km of cycling in your legs, this really is the last thing you want to see. The diversions were hillier and they were definitely longer. We even ended up crossing a ford on a tiny bridge.

More premium UK cycling infrastructure.

The kilometers ticked down very very slowly indeed. We took a slight detour into Haverhill where we were greeted by some friends and family who had ridden out from Cambridge to ride the last bit in with us.

Coffee and a terrible cheese sandwich with friends and family.

Maybe not unsurprisingly, it's quite difficult to get back into the rhythm of conversation. We were both very tired and hot and had spent the past 14 days basically doing nothing else except talking to each other. It was a shock to the system to have to make what passes for normal conversation with friends.

As we rode back in a peloton, we gradually got into the rhythm. We were both absolutely crap on the hills as our legs decided that they would just turn into aged knicker elastic rather than put any more effort into getting us the final 20km back home.

I think we were stuck behind a giant combine harvester at this point.

I tried to take some pictures while cycling but...to be honest, I couldn't be arsed to do it well.

The other members of the peloton are behind my big sweaty hot head.

And then...we were done.

More friends and family were there to greet us and...our dog Ottie. We had both missed her a lot.

It's good to be back and the dog is happy too.

We ate canapés, drank champagne and took this photo to echo the one we had taken 15 days ago with the bikes in boxes and about to leave for Switzerland.

Back home and done for this year.

Equipment wrap up

Let's talk about bikes first. Both bikes are effectively identical. I had built up the Bat Bike™ for my first solo self-supported trip to Warsaw and then subsequently built an identical one for Dr T but I painted it an iridescent gold which resulted in it being named the Bling Bike™. 1x11 group set, deep section wheels, 32mm tubeless tyres.

I used the tool kit to make the bikes up in Andermatt and subsequently never needed to open the tool kit at all during the entire trip. I got one puncture somewhere near Vaduz and tyre jizz did it's thing and repaired it automatically. I pumped up the tyres once in Köln and, apart from oiling the chains every day, that was it. Hard to comprehend how two things I made managed to go all 1,600 km without a single mechanical problem. Since both bikes were built to a strict budget, they have very cheap power meters and there were a few days where they played up badly but...hey ho, power data isn't that important on trips like this.

We both used Restrap luggage. It too performed faultlessly. We had a 14 Litre Bean bag on the back which is large enough to store most of your clothes and a 10 Litre Handlebar Bag on the front which was a new innovation for me this year. Being able to pack all the heavy and awkward stuff like the iPad, the tool kit and the oil in a reasonably sized bag on the front took a lot of the weight off the back which made handling a little easier. The bar bag also has a little easy to access front pocket for passport, lightweight lock and the AirTag.

The only tiny issue with the handlebar bag was that it was slightly too big and would have rubbed on the front wheel. I created this heath robinson "bodge" to fix it and it worked perfectly.

This is a cheap adjustable stem which holds the bag out from the tyre.

Ugly but I'm actually rather proud of this fix.

In total, it's probably more like 20 Litres in total and, to put that in context, your typical small overnight wheelie case that you take on a one night business trip has 50 litres of capacity.

Chargers are important and I used the iPad every day to write this blog. Without wanting to go into the details too much, something like SudoCrem is pretty important. Buy this.

I wore exactly the same stuff every single day and bought new pants when I needed them. Dr T managed some couture magic and conjured up somewhere between 7 and 10 different outfits out of the same space that I managed to conjure...one. Not quite sure how that works.

Cycling stuff needs to be washed every night but hotels seem to have given up on the concept of heated towel rails. My view, not widely shared, is that this a harbinger of the end of civilisation. The "towel-twist" technique isn't bad but laundrettes were the huge discovery on this trip. For less than ten euros, we could deep wash and dry almost everything we were carrying in less than two hours. This is a game changer for future trips.

Health and fitness

Your body just gradually decays on trips like this. By day 5 or 6 there's something going wrong every morning. Knees, Achilles tendons and, the dreaded undercarriage are a constant problem. One of my tricep muscles started spasming from about 2pm onwards.

From 4 days in, our average heart rates were in the 100-110 range and even on hills, we never maxed out at more than 140. This is not a fitness challenge. It's a grit challenge. Every day you have to get up in the morning, download the Garmin route for the day, look at the display saying "125.38km to go" and just get on the bike and start turning your legs.

The Route

I can't recommend EV15 enough. It's incredibly well signed, easy to traverse and lots of towns and cities to stop at along the way. One is rarely, if ever, on the same roads as cars. There is a good series of books on the various Eurovelo routes published by Cicerone and I would recommend buying the relevant one if you're considering doing a trip like this. I used it in advance to create Garmin routes for every stage. Although EV15 is incredibly well signed, you really need to have a Garmin and know how to use it. Particularly in towns and cities you don't want to be stopping at some junction opening up a book and working out which way to go.

The Rhine valley starts out scenic and mountainous but, given how important the river is to the economy and industry of Europe, beyond Lake Constance there's a lot of oil plants, chemical factories, docks and, of course, gravel factories... Although we took a lot of photographs of this stuff, it's not nearly as overwhelming as you might thing. One can spend a day cycling through the Rhine/Ruhr corridor and you spend 80% of your time on well surfaced dikes looking at deer, rabbits and birds.

We took 13 days to get from the source to the end of the Rhine. It could be done in less time if you aimed for mean stage lengths of 150km rather than 110km but it would be pretty tough. A more relaxed schedule would expand this into maybe 20 days.

The entire route felt extraordinarily safe both from a cycling and personal perspective. This is very different from the EV6 route I did last year. Not a big surprise since we were cycling through some of the most stable western democracies in the world all of which have invested a lot of money in separating bikes from the fast-moving boxes of metal which kill cyclists.

Self Supported?

We carried everything we needed but we weren't camping. I maintain that camping on a trip like this is a false economy. You need a lot more stuff and although we were staying in better class hotels, it's possible to stay even in places like Germany pretty cheaply. Any bike that you're going to take on a trip like this is going to cost a few thousand pounds (or less than 1,000 if you build it yourself from bits from China) so you can probably afford a hotel for the night.

You do need to make sure you have everything you might need though. For example, the tool kit had spare chain links, a chain braker, some tubeless patches, etc. Pretty much everything except a catastrophic frame failure could have been handled even though, as it turned out, it wasn't needed.

The rediscovery of the self service laundrettes which I had frequented as a student was a game changer. Say goodbye to damp kit in the morning and say hello to fragrant smelling off-bike kit!

Solo?

My previous three trips have been solo but this time Dr T came with me. It was really nice to share the whole experience. There's a lot less of sitting around on one's own in a restaurant drinking beer and writing a blog. The downsides are maybe more of a sense of responsibility. Twice as many mechanical things to go wrong, more consensus building required. Not in any way worse but definitely different.

Dr T started doing a daily blog entry but in the end, doing these blogs every night is pain in the bum. Dr T has shown great fortitude putting up with me for 14 days and 16 hours each day. She gives the strong impression that she actually enjoyed it and there's no indication that a divorce lawyer is on speed dial.

That's a win in my book.

Will there be another one of these next year?

We shall see...