Month: June 2014

Left Germany this morning, starting with a 20km or so ride from our Protestant hostel to Uberlingen, then down the shores of the Bodensee to Meersburg, where we caught a small car ferry to Constance, which is still in Germany but right against the Swiss frontier.

The ride from Constance along the Rhine to Schafhausen was really nice, through the usual mix of small villages, the occasional small town, farmland, and a couple of pieces of woods.

The Swiss have a well marked series of cycle routes which are generally simple to follow, and so far Swiss drivers seem as generally well housebroken as their German and Austrian counterparts, with the usual slight question mark for delivery drivers and any Audi you see…

We’re staying in a very interesting hostel inside Schloss Laufen, which is directly beside and above the famous Rheinfall, where the entire Rhine crashes over a really dramatic waterfall. The hostel is… old-fashioned. Really genuinely antique, there are ten people in our room in a sort of massive bunk with five on the top deck and five below. Apparently one of the rooms on the ground floor has eighteen in it. It really is like they set this place up in the 1920s (or possibly earlier…) and haven’t changed a thing since.

Also, Switzerland makes the rest of Europe look cheap. More on that later…

Off deeper into Switzerland tomorrow, to some sort of farm hostel further along the Rhine. No idea if WiFi will be available, so this place might get quite for a day or three.

We left the Danube behind today and climbed up and out of it’s valley and to the Bodensee (Lake Constance).

We had been warned about the climb up and over from the Danube to the Bodensee, but the route we chose (largely by accident) involved a slightly longer route but a much, much shallower, easier climb.

The descent on the Bodensee side was awesome, several kilometres of descent on easy, curving nearly car free back roads.

We’re staying in a Protestant-run hostel about five km outside Uberlingen. Uberlingen has, unfortunately, the worst drivers we’ve seen since starting the ride: aggressive, crowding and acting most unlike the housebroken, polite road-sharing drivers we’ve gotten used to!

Comparing this Protestant-run hostel to the two Catholic ones we’ve stayed at, the Catholics are coming out ahead so far. They have far more interesting buildings in better locations and slightly better food; the Protestants have better WiFi…

Tomorrow we’re off into Switzerland, which is a first for me, and we start with a ferry ride across the Bodensee, which should be fun.

Short ride today, just 34km or so, but a bit of a slow ride, both because we stopped quite a bit and because a lot of the riding was up and down on gravel paths, gradually climbing into the hills where the Donau starts.

We’re spending the night at an old hunting lodge turned guesthouse about 8km upriver from Beuron, Germany, about 20km east of Tuttlingen.

The Donau abandons all pretence of being a navigable river just outside Siegmaringen, where we started this morning, and quickly enters much more rugged and hilly country, with limestone bluffs along the sides of the valley and a couple of dramatic schlosses up on the bluffs.

At the Jagerhaus we’re spending the night at, the Donau is only about four metres wide, you can wade across it and only be wet to the knees, and if you don’t want to get wet a nice line of big rocks has been arranged as stepping stones.

Quite a change from the massive river we started biking alongside in Vienna just over two weeks ago!

The one minor downside to this Jagerhaus is that they’re not really equipped for groups as large as hours, so four or five of us are sleeping out on the balconies. It’s actually quite comfortable, I have a good sleeping bag, and there’s even a plug to charge my phone at overnight!

We depart from the Donau tomorrow at Tuttlingen and head south to the Bodensee (Lake Constance) to spend the night at Unterlingen before heading into Switzerland for a few days.

Nice ride today, warm but not hot and through a good mix of small town, forest and farmland.

Siegmaringen Schloss is what happens when you take the fairly standard German castle-onna-big-rock and turn it all the way up to eleven. Start with a dramatic rocky bluff, add castle, keep adding castle, then start renovating castle right up to the opening years of the 20th C and you get Schloss Siegmaringen. The plaque at the door calls the current architectural style “Historisch”, which as far as I can tell is a polite way to say “made to look as romantic as possible”. It looks like the Hollywood version of a German castle onna rock because it’s supposed to look that way.

Incidentally, this photo was taken from a side of the schloss only visible to cyclists, pedestrians and possibly train passengers. Car users need not apply.

Off into the edge of the Black Forest tomorrow to spend the night at a guesthouse that used to be a Jagerhaus, a hunter’s lodge. It’s supposed to be spectacular and all by itself on a hill beside the Donau, so WiFi seems unlikely!