Sept 5th, On the Danube Bike Path

September 5, 2016 Scott

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Hi Everyone! I am finally on the Danube Bike Path! This starts near Freiburg, Germany and runs all the way to the Black Sea. I opted to take a train from Freiburg yesterday (Sunday, Sept 4th) instead of biking to 60 miles or so to the trailhead. The ride would have involved a lot of climbing and may have actually taken me two days. Right now, I have a lot more path than I have time, so I opted to put the gap in the middle instead of the end.

Most of this path has been really nice. Without exception, the path has been in very good condition, but a higher than expected fraction of it is dirt–about 25% so far. And, considering the fact that this path has no hills–it sure has a lot of hills. I suspect that this is due to the location of the mountains with respect to the starting location, Danaueschingen, Germany. When I get some better internet, I am going to take a second look at the first two days to see if they are atypical.

The official starting point of the Danube river is a spring. They’ve built sort of a shrine around it, and you can actually see the water bubbling up out of the ground. Pretty neat!

The official start of the Danube River.

I got a late start yesterday, because of the train ride. The train, by the way, was filled with people who had the same ideas as me. Most of them, however, were planning on coasting back down hill to Freiburg.

Train full of bikes

When I boarded the train in Freiburg, I had a helpful ramp to get into the bike car. But, when we switched trains in a nearby city, there were steep stairs that had to be negotiated to get onto the train. If I did not have help from several other cyclists there, I could never have got my bike into the train (it weighs about 100 pounds). But it all worked out.

I ended up getting on the path around noon. After checking my ACSI app on my iPhone, I saw that the next campground was about 60 km away, as the crow flies. That means about 90 km on the path, so I put some effort into it and kept my speed up over 20 km/hour. At one point, I passed a large group of tourists who were using “E-bikes,” a popular bike with electrical assist mostly for hills. They are good for a day’s ride on one charge. This is rapidly becoming the standard around these parts.

It would have been fun to ride with these guys for a few days, but they were staying in hotels and going slower than I needed to go to get to the campground. So, I cranked up the effort and bid them farewell, as I sped up past them. One of the E-bikers kicked on his turbo-boost and caught up with me yelling, “The Germans are coming! The Germans are coming!”

It started to rain pretty hard around 3:00, but I was ready for it. I was not ready for the hills that ran for about 10 miles, so I was going to be getting to the campground pretty late. But, as I passed the town of Hausen im Tal, I saw a group of campers off in the distance, and I headed for that campground. I have a new set of cycling maps that show this level of campgrounds and, sure enough, there was a little camping symbol by the highlighted path. This will likely be my standard for now. I am in a similar campground tonight (Sept 5) which is costing me 5 Euros.

Today was a really nice day riding. The only glitch was that, part way through the first few miles, I realized that my wallet was not where it normally would be. I figured that I must have left it in the tent when I put it away (I was in a hurry because my weather app said rain all morning.) Well, you don’t go forward unless you know for certain where your wallet is. So, I had to stop and take out my tent to retrieve the wallet. I also retrieved my pajamas, which were left there as well.

Riding out of the valley I was in was really interesting. It looked like there was no way through the cliffs which surrounded me. Of course, I knew that the river exited somewhere, but it was amazing just how concealed the outlet was.

The Danube exits somewhere between these cliffs

The ride was very pleasant all day, except for some short, but steep, hills. The location of the campground forced me to stop a little sooner than I would have liked, but overall I am 2 km ahead of schedule. Here are a couple of other pictures that I took: