Day 20: Good Day to Ride July 20
Bayreuth to Etzenricht 51miles
Today was a great day of cycling. Isn't that nice to hear? We had a few hills to start which was frustrating but once we climbed up and over into the next river valley it was great. Smooth, flat-ish, nice scenery, little to no head wind. Just partially cloudy, blue skies, green grass and us pedaling along at about 10mph. We had smooth sailing along the Haidenaab Radweg. These bike ways are named after the rivers we are following, which means we are following the Haidenaab River. Finding the signs is a little like playing Where's Waldo. They are small and often hidden on telephone poles, street signs, and warning signs... Often behind overgrown hedges or rose bushes. At one point they changed from green and white metal signs to yellow stickers which was confusing. But it is a game to keep your mind active since the terrain is so much easier than before. Te he he... Easy terrain....The surface went from sweet asphalt to single track dirt very strange all on the same Radweg. We passed used gravel pits with big dump trucks and diggers. The scenery has changed as well. We are now following roads lined with pines that are more like the ones you find in Georgia or Northern Florida. It smells sweet with pine sap and gives descent cover from winds. The first gasthaus we tried in Mantel wasn't really a gasthaus. "Only food, no sleeping!" But Andrea is getting down some basic phrases in German, "Haben sie ein zimmer frei?... Double zimmer? Bitte." Oh yeah... You try making words sound right in a language that uses different parts of the mouth to make sounds:). We are trying. So we pressed on to another hotel Bruce had found online in Etzenricht. At first there was no one around at the guesthouse (not inside or out) so Andrea went across the street to the Getrankemarkt and bought a couple of radlers for ridiculously cheap and we drank them on the front patio. When the bell struck 5pm a man poked his head out of an upstairs window and low and behold it was the owner. It turned out that he did not have a room but he called another smaller pension down the street and got us a room there. So we pedaled down to the other pension Kern. The daughter spoke English and had studied in West Palm Beach Florida for a semester. It was a very nice mom and pop business. We went back to the first hotel for dinner and had an xxl schnitzel and lumberjack pork steak which came on its own chopping board. We were hungry. We watched darts on television at the bar while we used their wifi to route plan so we didn't use up any more data. We used a lot of data today by accident,( 1GB)
even though we thought we were using the offline maps... Grrrr... A walk back to our room in the twilight of 10pm... Felt like we were back in Serbia for some reason. Good day!
The World is Ours!
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