2 June 2007

Au, Austria to Passau, Germany

For the most part last night was eerily quiet except for a few calls from the resident peacocks that decided to sit in the tree right next to the tent. There were just some very light sprinkles overnight and the morning was foggy but looking like it was going to clear. A short day of riding took us into Passau, Germany where we wanted to spend some time looking aound the old city. The 40 km's flew by and we had our tent set up by 11:30. There was a Canadian couple that had just arrived late last night still packing up to start their day and their 6 week trip. We got to chatting and kept on chatting under cover as a pretty good rain shower came through. When the rain ended they took off and we headed into the city to look around and see if we could find a map to guide us up to Prague. The Aussie couple, Robin and Peter, peeked our interest and we decided to go for it. As we were heading into St. Stephen's cathedral, we saw their bikes parked outside and Robin inside so we gri!
lled them for more info. St. Stephen's cathedral was very impressive and holds the world's largest cathedral organ with 17,974 pipes. We even got to hear it being played. Incredible. From there we searched out a book store to find a map of cycle routes in the Czech Republic. We found one that will get us to Cesky Krumlov, where Peter said we could find all the maps we would need to bike the greenways to Prague. With that taken care of we shopped for food for tomorrow since no stores are open on Sunday, then strolled the city some more and made our way to an internet cafe to see if we could get more info on routes up to Prague. No luck. Back in camp John had some repairs to make to his bike due to another spectacular wipeout that bent his two biggest chain rings. So now he has matching road rash on both sides of his body. He had to take the chain rings off and hammer them back into shape (flat). He also found he was missing a screw on his pedal for his clips but another bike!
r in camp had a spare. A test ride around camp seems to indicate that
the repairs were successful. With all tht going on we didn't eat dinner until 8:30 P.M. and as we were finishing up the rains came again. So it was a mad dash to the tent. As we finish writing this the rain seems to have come to an end.

Kms 39.51
Time 2:12:21
Avg 17.9
Max 31.7
Total 1114.9