Danube River Trail

Donauradweb

I might add maps later,but it’s a bit fiddly to do on my phone, and not all that interesting since we’re just covering the distance along the river, so only the stats, photos and not much more.

Day 1. Tulln

40k 25% battery use

Day 2. Klein-Pochlarn

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93k 65% battery!

The last part through the Wachau valley was into a big headwind so I used level 2 power, and towards the end I was on 3 because there was a hill and a sore knee, but I reckon that’s pretty low useage.

All the restaurants are on holiday so we went the the supermarket, got some great lederkase and kartoffel salad, beer and wine and had a wonderful dinner sitting on a gently rocking swimming platform while the sun sank into the river. Life could get better, but I can’t think how right now.

Day 3: Klein-Pochlarn to St Pantaleon

70 k 50% battery use.

Gentle day, beautiful section of the river, St P is not even a one horse town so we’re eating in the gasthaus and shouting ourselves breakfast too because today we earned our Junior Tourer’s badges for having completed 1000km.

Day 4: St Pantaleon to Inzell

99k 50% battery use!

Yep, that’s right. I set the power on 2 because my knee was giving me gyp, and we mostly cruised at 25k which meant the power was just on but the momentum was dragging us along and if we had the energy and more daylight we could have cruised through even more of this stunning landscape. Jill still loyally thinks NZ is prettier, but I think that this area is just another of those 10/10 places that are dotted around the world, and I can’t judge them more finely than that.

Stayed at a lovely gasthaus right on the river, and I love the way these owner run small hotels set up the conditions for friendly dinners. The couple next to us have a son in Hamilton, a doctor, and it’s not uncommon at all for people we meet to have some sort of connection with the place.

Day 5: Enzill to Passau

45k and about 25 – 30% battery use.
Short day so I left it on 3 to give my knee a break.

Passau could be called Passthrough because it’s another tourist focused, Disneyfied town, but it’s worth more than that. A bit more anyway. We had a lovely chicken and chips with salad takeaway dinner, sitting on the point where the three Rivers converge, the Ilz, Inn and Danube, with two lit up castles reflecting in them variously, and pitied the other punters stuck in their traditional restaurants sucking down schnitzels and spare ribs.

It’s getting a bit chilly though and I broke out the puffer jacket for the first time

Vienna

Big, symmetrical, impressive and inexplicable.

 Went out for a walk when we arrived, 30 minutes to the center if we didn’t stop to be gobsmacked all the time. It feels like an illustrated guide to Greek mythology, with meaningful, perhaps beautiful statues all over every building, possibly depicting critical moments in the great tales. Other monuments no doubt celebrate great people from recent history, but given my appalling lack of knowledge about that they were just monuments to me. Classics are wasted on the youth and me alike.

Bloody impressive though, once I got used to the scale of it all. And everything was anally symmetrical.

Spent the next day biking about 40k around town, out to some big palace, around the whole perimeter, over to the gas silos (highly rated but disappointing), Hunterwasser village (highly rated and worth it), posh coffee and strudel because you have to in Vienna and home to replace brakes and chain via, accidentally and fortuitously the Judenplatz with it’s tremendously moving massive concrete sculpture by Rachel Whitread. There’s another sculpture in the middle of town of an old Jew scrubbing the pavement which had to have barbed wire added to stop jerks sitting on him.

I won’t be visiting any concentration camps.

 

Bohemian Forest

Czechia to Austria 15/09

 

80k, 1 1/2 battery fulls, lots and lots of off-piste and climbing.

Excellent mountain biking most of the way, lots of steep muddy ups and downs, forest tracks, meadow single tracks, wrong directions aiming for the summit of Lichtenberg instead of the town, top up charging at Bad Leonfelden, booking a pension in Lichtenberg St in some other town hours away, riding down the last 10k in the dark with failing lights, discovering leberkase (Austrian fast food meatloaf – delicious) as the last place open in town.

We felt like smugglers crossing the border on a remote forest tracks, and I wondered if I might be the first kiwi 68 yr old on an e-mtb to pass this way.

Total distance: 45.8 km
Max elevation: 985 m
Min elevation: 540 m
Total climbing: 915 m
Total descent: -687 m
Total time: 05:51:03
Download file: 20180915-084923.gpx
Total distance: 27.94 km
Max elevation: 926 m
Min elevation: 636 m
Total climbing: 478 m
Total descent: -603 m
Total time: 03:01:42
Download file: 20180915-163358.gpx

Tabor to Cesty Krumlow

Tabor to Trebon 12/09

50% battery use, mostly roads, not much off-piste, and fairly uppy Downy although nothing too serious.

Total distance: 70.45 km
Max elevation: 567 m
Min elevation: 445 m
Total climbing: 455 m
Total descent: -481 m
Total time: 06:20:11
Download file: 20180912-091312.gpx

Trebon to Cesty Krumlow 13/09

50% battery use again, similar riding to yesterday. I didn’t record the first 16k so 60k all up

Total distance: 43.8 km
Max elevation: 645 m
Min elevation: 304 m
Total climbing: 755 m
Total descent: -783 m
Total time: 03:51:42
Download file: 20180913-110323.gpx

Lesany to Tabor

To Tabor 11/09

75k, but 90% battery use due to a lot of climbing

Typically lovely Czeck country all day, and the help of the mapy.cz app we found ourselves on off-piste and even off-off-piste tracks which demanded mtbs. Mapy provides excellent routes for mtbs by default, so we’ve been getting off the roads far more than we could have done without it. We missed one and did a big loop around a forest because it was just an overgrown shadow down a steepish hill – awesome stuff.

Tabor is pretty and worth an hour or two if you haven’t seen enough we’ll restored medieval towns for a while, but I really enjoyed passing through the regular tiny towns a villages on the way here. I feel like we’re seeing Czechia, more than the tidied up and sanatisef Disney version the tourists get in the main towns. We’ll skip Cesky Budweiser tomorrow for that very reason.

Total distance: 74894 m
Max elevation: 657 m
Min elevation: 365 m
Total climbing: 853 m
Total descent: -733 m
Total time: 06:26:13
Download file: 20180911-093005.gpx