We woke up with legs like large-print Braille novels after yesterday's mosquito attacks. With our washing dry and after a reasonable breakfast, we headed for the railway station (so close it wasn't worth riding the bikes). Tickets bought, we boarded the train to Worth am Rhein to continue our journey with only a gap of less than 10km in the continuous track. Now, we could have followed the 'official' route from here but instead elected to stay west and keep to the roads and rural villages in the light of everyone's warnings about the Rhine flooding the cycleway. When I say roads, I generally mean the excellent cycle tracks that link, and are signed, between every village in this part of Germany (maybe everywhere in Germany?!). This has the advantage of finding bakeries on the way to refill our cake box. All the villages are very quiet and no coffee stop presented itself until we reached the former military town of Germersheim and made a small diversion into the centre for lunch. The rest of the day's journey was on fast paved flood dyke or agricultural road through water meadows. At one point a friendly Algerian pensioner got out his bike and rode with us to make sure we got on to the right Rhine cycleway (the wrong one was flooded - a recurrent theme around here!). We arrived in Speyer, dry and rather warm, mid afternoon for a look around the impressive cathedral and a very welcome beer. After checking in at the hotel and changing, we headed off to explore and, to our delight, met up with 'The Brompton Ladies' we had met earlier in the trip. Rita and Martha (from Lisbon, Portugal) had not had such a good day as us as they had gone up the east side of the river and it was tough going. They had also been forced to use the train yesterday, which made us feel better! After a chat and an exchange of email addresses, we left them to their planning and went for a walk, ending up at the Domhof beer garden for an excellent meal. Now we are back at the hotel trying not to scratch our lumpy legs!
58.8 km; 17kph avg; 3:28 moving time; 145m ascent
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