Day 16: to Wehlen (80k) (815 total)

Minus my computer I need to start a tally of total distance. 80k today felt good, it was warm but not roasting and such beautiful countryside, lots of off-road paths and ever more steep vineyards on each side.

Ed bought a spoke from a man first thing and fixed his wheel which has been fine. Horace was grindy for much of the day but recovered at the end. Katy has slight sun allergy but it recuperating now. We all had a brief (in my case very brief) swim in the Moselle when we got to the campsite tonight. It is very peaceful and has a wonderful vineyard view. We have been warned that there will be a helicopter hovering tomorrow at 6am to spray fungicide... Unless it rains. Here's hoping for helicopters!

Day 15: to Cochem (40k)

A very satisfying day, though somewhat curtailed in the cycling stakes by mechanical disaster.

We woke up to rain but it cleared by the time we got up and organised with sweet bread and Nutella and hazelnut coffee for breakfast. All was going well as we cycled merrily through the vineyards... And then a loud twang and Ed broke a spoke. Apparently he does have the tools to mend it, but has no spare spoke. So we wheeled him to the nearest station and popped him on the train to Cochem, a larger town which our guidebook promised has three cycle shops. Well, it does but they all close at lunchtime on a Saturday, and Ed missed them by minutes. One is open briefly tomorrow, so we very much hope they will be persuaded to fix it then. 

Katy and I cycled on in a massive headwind to meet him in Cochem. It is a lovely, if somewhat touristy town. The hordes (including Dutch motorbike hordes) are apparently drawn by the ridiculously picturesque castle, a very old town, vineyards, and a mustard mill (?!). We had a lazy Mexican lunch with delicious Riesling, and then found a small campsite a little off the main drag. We wandered up to the castle which has spectacular views over the gorge, and through the town for a bit. Back at the campsite we got a little further in our exploration of weizenbeer, cooked up some veggies and couscous for supper, and then had a quick stop at the bar, which featured a darts match, and a very cute cocker spaniel pup. 

I do really hope Ed's bike is fixable tomorrow but in the meantime, Cochem has proved a pretty nice place to be stranded!

Day 14: to Winningen

Companions again, hurrah!

Katy and Ed were due in to Koblenz at lunchtime, leaving me a rather wet morning free. I passed it looking around the enormous warren that is the Ehrenbreitstein fortress. Apart from the structure itself, highlights included the rehearsal of a French orchestra, a Ukrainian photo exhibition, and a museum of local industrial power, including a display on our good friends Boehringer Ingelheim. My favourite exhibit, for sheer weirdness value, was a video of a group of handicapped kids dressed up as Indians and re-enacting Indian burial rites. As the commentary was only in German I have no possible explanation for this oddity.

I met Katy and Ed at the station and Ed impressively transformed two bags into two bikes in, well, less than two hours anyway. We set off... As far as the promenade where we settled in for an excellent late lunch. Then we left the Rhine, crossed the Moselle, and then really set off.

I have bust my bike computer so distance estimates are going to get a lot sketchier. My estimate for today is 20k: 15 along the Moselle and 5 buggering around in Koblenz including the frankly rather scary road down from the fortress. Sad about the computer but no real clue what has gone wrong. 

At Winningen, the biggest town for a while, we stopped to try and locate some food for supper. The Spar - the only shop - was unfortunately shut so we gave up cycling and camped instead. The campground is large and busy, but beautiful, on a peninsula sticking out into the river. The Moselle valley is much steeper than the the Rhine, with impressively walled terraces of vines on both sides.

Having failed to locate a shop we dined deliciously but somewhat incongruously in a Greek restaurant. I still know more Greek than German.

Day 13: to Koblenz (39k)

So here's the thing: often the only thing I can find to eat for breakfast here is cake (!).

Another hot and lazy day after a deliciously warm night under canvas. My destination is Koblenz, an ancient and surprisingly large town at the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle where I am to meet Katy and Ed tomorrow.

I casually booked a night in the youth hostel, thinking 'oh it's in a fortress, that's cool'. When I got into town I realised the fortress has a very imposing position a good few hundred feet vertically above the river. Gulp. Then I saw the cable car. Which takes bikes. Hurrah for laziness, that's 6 euros well spent.  

It certainly has the best view of any youth hostel I've been in, with the two rivers meeting at a famous landmark ('German corner'), umpteen enormous river cruiser boats, train lines everywhere, and the old town including statuesque monuments and palaces opposite. The whole town was apparently massively spruced up for a garden festival 3 years ago, which resulted in the aforementioned cable car. As told to me by a nice local with whom I just had a beer. He takes the cable car home from work every day apparently, 

The 'inside a fortress' thing is also rather unique. As in, there's a huge fortress all over the hill, that is in a perfect state of modern preservation, and the youth hostel is in one wing of it. In other wings, a restaurant, museum, wedding venue... Tis a strange place! 

Half way through writing this the weather has started to break. There were definitely some raindrops on the canvas last night but not enough to really count come morning. We are sadly overdue some cooler and wetter weather. It has also driven in a group of perhaps twenty 11-yr olds who (unlike me) seem to have got here purely by cycling.

Day 12: to Bad Breisig (67km)

I awoke happy to be off, though sad to leave the hostel of endless-free-cappuccinos.

First hitch: my panniers didn't fit on the new rack, and I had to remove the sideways guard thingies to get them on. Second hitch: my gears are still grumpy from time to time, though better than they were - weirdly for a while they work perfectly then for a while they don't. Ah well maybe Horace and I just need to learn to live with this imperfection.

Cycling the actual Rhine river path, for the first time, is fantastic. For one thing, it's hard to get lost... For another, there are clearly quite a lot of other long-distance cyclists on it, so I think the chances of bumping into similar folks is getting higher. Finally, the river is a mecca for cafés and beer gardens so I think it's going to be easy to stay happily fed and watered.

I stopped for lunch in one such Biergarten in the middle of Bonn, where alcohol-free wheat beer (here called weizenbeer) was the cheapest liquid on the menu. Now that's civilised! My offline translater app seems just as, ahem, effective in German as in Spanish. I ordered bean soup which, according to my app, came with bread and arch support.

The cycling was easy and pleasant, and basically consisted of off-road paved paths across meadows and along the promenades of towns. I took it slowly, partly to try and rest my knee, but also because I felt lazy and was enjoying the scenery. The biggest hazards today were willow fluff and aphids, both of which were everywhere, coating everything, and sticking to my slightly sweaty legs and arms.

The Rhine river route is signposted from time to time but funnily enough the most consistent signposting has been the scallop shell! Yes this too must be part of the Camino network (here signposted Jakobsweg or Pilgerweg). 

I am feeling a bit crippled, language-wise. It makes it all a bit more 'experimental'. But I guess over time the most crucial words will sink in.

My second night of camping tonight, and it's definitely going to be a warmer experience: currently forecast not to drop below 17 degrees! I'm in a campground up a tiny steep valley called the Rheineck. As seems to be the way, 95% of the campers look to be long-term guests in static caravans, but there are actually two other cyclocampers present (albeit at the very far end from me). The campsite also has a washing machine and tumble dryer so that has made me a happy camper! 

Popped into town for a pizza and beer and now heading for an early night. The loudest thing here is birdsong. Perfect!

Day 11: in Cologne

A really roasting day - and thus a good one to be stationary. Despite vague intentions to do top tourism sites in fact I have done very little except laze around in parks, cafés etc. I seem to feel a bit twitchy whenever I stop like this. But I am feeling much better after two large beers this evening in a lakeside beer garden (where the waiter gave me his phone number!). The park is absolutely covered with people barbecuing and sitting around listening to music. It looks like a festival but is in fact just a regular sunny Tuesday evening.

Cologne is a town of a million, of whom 100,000 are students and it has a really nice laid back vibe. Moreover my bike has been returned with a new rack and with gears realigned. The heatwave is supposedly on its way out, with potential thunderstorms arising.  Tomorrow will be my first day of actual Rhine cycling! And all being well I am planning some warmer weather camping.

Day 10: to Cologne (75k)

A hot and rather tiring day. Today's ride was straight across country to Cologne in order to finally touch base with the Rhine. I had preconceptions that this would be a fairly uninteresting but necessary day of cycling and my prejudice was bolstered within a few K of setting off. Immediately after crossing the German border the cycle paths degenerated to English style, ie often there but annoyingly narrow, covered in garbage, bumps, parked cars etc and with a tendency to end without warning. The day's cycling was unexpectedly redeemed however by a couple of lovely paths where I had long car-less stretches across the countryside and saw only rabbits.

At a place called Julich I turned alongside a strange forested hill structure which I thought might be some kind of fortification - Julich has a long history of being fought over, from Romans to Napoleon to WW2 where it was trashed by several months of fighting. The hill went on for many kilometres however... And the power of google now tells me that it is in fact the world's largest artificial hill caused by open cast mining of lignite. So there you go.

From my point of view (ie whilst circumnavigating the bottom of it) it was a lovely peaceful stretch of easy dirt path through bright green cornfields and (modern) windmills.

I planned a lunch stop in Elsdorf, a town which I thought might be worth a visit since it had been being signposted as a destination on cycle routes for the previous 25k. Not so - it consisted of a tiny, dead main street and the whole place stank of drains. I grabbed a consolatory ice cream and pushed on.

A very long straight (Roman?) road which I took for about 20k delivered me into the centre of Cologne and eventually right to my hostel doorstep. The hostel is an amazing place - it has sort of bunks that are actually double bed-sized pods equipped with anything you could need. It's in an area called the 'Belgian quarter' which, I gather from the street life, is where the hipsters live. In fact Cologne in general is dripping with hipsters and in the heat  they make for great people-watching!

The bad news of the day is that my bike is suffering a bit from the after-effects of yesterday and several of the gears are slipping quite badly. I'd been debating living with this until the end of the week when I will meet up with technically competent friends who could help me fix it. However, it turns out my pannier-paranoia was well-founded and one of the arms has now broken on my rack. Since I'm hoping it'll need to take me at least another two or three thousand kilometres I thought I'd probably better get this fixed sooner rather than later. Apparently racks aren't solderable (or more likely, aren't worth soldering) but a local bike shop (..hipster) has promised to fix me a new rack and realign my gears by tomorrow evening for 50 euros. So lucky Horace is going to enjoy 24 hrs of R&R too!

------

Peaceful paths through the corn

Fountains and folks enjoying the sun next to Cologne university