3 June 2007

Passau, Germany to Haslach, Austria
The journey to Prague began this morning with a 15 km backtrack east on the Danube to Obernzell. Once there we knew the routing challenge and the hill climbing were about to begin. We wanted to find the road heading up that was not the main road, highway 388. We tried asking a couple of different people, but none of them knew where it was. They all, however, made it very clear that the road we were going on is very steep.
The initial climb was 5 kms to the town of Untergreisbach where we rewarded our effort with a couple of pieces of bakery. The climb had a few switchbacks but didn't live up to all of the steepness warnings we were given.
From there the hills continued. We went from completely flat riding the past few days to not a single stretch of flat today. And we hit some steep ones. We were tuckered when we stopped for lunch in Wegscheid. When we came out it began to rain. We were in our usual indecisive rain mode (should we wait it out, should we call it a day, should we ride?) but decided to ride. We only made it to the near end of the next town when the rain started coming down harder. We ducked into someone's open garage and waited about 20 minutes before deciding to ride into town and get a room. Well, there were several gasthaus places in town but only one seemed to be open. It seemed a bit pricey and the rain had stopped, so we decided to roll on.
We went up and down, up and down through little villages. The sky still looked threatening, but it stayed dry. At Oepping we decided to leave the main road and take a scenic road for about the last 10 kms of the day. This turned out to not be the greatest decision in hindsight because the map we had wasn't very detailed. We did alright by asking people up to a certain point where we asked someone walking which way it was to Haslach and didn't clearly understand the way he pointed. We ended up climbing about 2 kms before we asked a woman washing her car which way it was to Haslach. She pointed back the way we came to our dismay. She went into her car and gave us a really detailed map of the area and we hightailed it back to where we had gone astray.
Finally we arrived in Haslach but it didn't get any easier for us there. One of our maps showed a youth hostel in the town so we thought we would give that a try. We asked a few people where it was and finally happened upon it. There was no sign anywhere and there was nobody there. There was a sign on the door with a phone number, so we went to a pay phone, called and were told it was only open to big groups. O.K. We had passed a campground sign on the way into town and decided to go there even though we really wanted to stay inside tonight to get some of our damp things dried out. We left the main part of town and went back to the campground to find it deserted with a sign in German telling us where to go for information. We would have just camped there anyways, but the showers were locked and we really needed to warm up a bit. So we rode back uphill into town and stopped at the gasthaus by the town tower. It ended up costing even more than the gasthaus we turned !
down earlier in the day, but at that point it was our only option. The area that we traveled through today has many long walking tracks. At one point we got on what we in the U.S. call rails to trails. Once we left the river the countryside opened up and we could see the big rolling hills that lay in front of us.

Kms 63.81
Time 4:32:15
Avg 14.0
Max 44.2
Total 1178.7