I certainly feel like I qualify to take over the reigns from Michael Portillo if the BBC needs someone to take over the Rail Journey Programmes. Hopefully, I don’t need to wear colourful jackets and trousers, but instead display knobbly knees and cycle jacket.
Our route today involves several changes....The Hague to Eindhoven, to Venlo, to Düsseldorf, to Offenberg and finally to Strasbourg. We have realised since we booked the tickets that we could have booked from Offenberg, to Freiburg to Bad Bellingen without the need to stay at Strasbourg overnight.
The train did fill up but it never got rammed with people as we had expected on a Monday morning.
This is our 20th Day of Cycle travel. We have completed the journey significantly faster than I thought we would and we only got soaked once. We have done 18 days of cycling on the trot and by tomorrow we will have done 1300km. The weather has been generally kind although the last few days have been a bit showery but typical of what we would expect in Autumn in Northern Europe.
What can I say of the trip as a whole.....
Well, first and foremost, Janice has done fantastically well with the cycling, with the living out of panniers, with a different bed each night, with eating on the hoof and mostly with putting up with me and watching my backside on my bike (perhaps it’s an improvement on my front). So, I owe a big thank you to her (I mustn’t forget it’s her birthday a week today)!
We have enjoyed the adventure together and probably had our highlights in the southern parts of the Rhine and Lake Constance. Landau and Meersburg are totally stunning, Konstanz is a lovely large city.
Bad Säckingen was the surprise small town favourite with its wooden bridge over the Rhine.
Strasbourg was our favourite large city and it was even more memorable because of the visit to the EU Parliament in session. The Petite France section of the city is beautiful too.
The Rhine Gorge section is possibly the best natural landscape of the route and Rüdesheim was very pretty as were some of the other small towns nearby. After that stop we cycled to Koblenz and thought that it was the perfect place to tour the whole area of the gorge and the Rhine and Mosel Rivers....
.....and Deutches Eck is a dramatic and grand structure.
We were a little disappointed with Köln other than the Cathedral, maybe it was a bit big and too much of a bustling city for us. I must remind you that we only really get a small snapshot of the places we visit and we will have missed so much. We only had one hotel stay that was dodgy...the one at Erstein, room 21....don’t take it!
There were places that we would either like to go back to or wish we had extra time. Those included Wörms, Utrecht and The Hague but really Lake Constance is hard to beat.
We have arrived at Strasbourg. The train journey has taken 12 hours to get this far. We had to run at Eindhoven to get the Venlo train. The longest section was from Dusseldorf to Offenberg, about 7 hours on a train. It was a wide and comfortable train and we had our bikes booked on it....
I think we have done a mini tour of southern Germany. We’ve been through Köln, Koblenz, Mainz, Mannheim, Stuttgart, Heidelberg, Karlsruhe and Offenberg. I think we could have done a quicker train but had to come on this one for the cycle availability. We could do with cycle capacity like this in the UK but maybe we still need more people capacity too!
We got to our hotel opposite Strasbourg Railway Station. It is a small but nice place but it has nowhere for bikes and the people hanging around the railway station area doesn’t make me feel it is very safe. We spent about 45 minutes moving the bikes from place to place to find a safe parking place, we were even prepared to pay.. We have eventually left them outside the main entrance to the station which is fairly busy and well lit. We have fingers crossed that they will be still there in the morning.
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