After the best night's sleep in a few days, and an excellent breakfast, we saddled up and rode off into a fresh morning with sleeves and socks worn against the unaccustomed chill. The path followed the river, road and railway as you'd expect in a 'gorge' so no navigational challenges presented themselves. This was a good thing because just 4km north of St Goar, to my absolute dismay, the Garmin stopped displaying detailed mapping having defaulted to the Europe base map which is about as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike! Happily, I can still display a Eurovelo 15 track to follow, but without mapping. And I preloaded mapping and routing on my iPhone. And I have the same mapping and routing on my iPad mini. And a guidebook. And anyway, every cycleway is signposted, with distances, because this is Germany. So the only irritation is not understanding why the maps have stopped displaying!! An early coffee stop in the sun at Boppard was soon afterwards followed by the rain starting. Socks off and waterproofs on, we continued through the deluge, as others sheltered, until we reached Koblenz and visited the massive statue at the Deutsches Eck which is the headland at the confluence of the Rhine and the Mosel. A clear coach party destination! We found a place to eat ahead of the crowds and shared yet another flammkuchen. We set off again and just at the point we started overheating and were about to take the rain gear off, the rain started again! A coffee stop on the outskirts of Andernach enabled us to finally strip rain gear and we arrived into the medieval walled town in the middle of a town fiesta. The centre was absolutely rammed! We eventually managed to weave our way through the crowds pushing the bikes and found our cheapest hotel yet, an excellent bijou establishment in a residential (hopefully quiet) part of town. Then it was off to eat and check the maps for tomorrow - horror: some bits are missing from the phone so now I need to fix that ... ! btw, we passed the 1000km mark today.
64.6 km; 16.8 kph avg; 3:49 moving time; 146m
No comments:
Post a Comment