24 June 2007

Lindau, Germany to Ruederbomm, Switzerland

It has been a while, but this morning the sky was mostly sunny and it stayed that way until mid evening. It was a glorious day. We dragged our sore bodies (hiking uses different muscles than cycling) out of the tent and again deviated from our original plan. Instead of simply going around Lake Konstanz, we decided to go about 15 kms farther around the lake this morning, head south into the mountains and then back north to rejoin the lake later in the day. We were going along the busy lake trail fairly well and then got a little mixed up as to where we were when we began to head south. We were stopped and looking at the map (a very familiar pose on this trip), when along came Mannfred. We showed him where we wanted to go and, although he thought we were crazy for wanting to ride up the hills, he insisted that we follow him. John was not convinced that he would get us where we wanted to go, but before we knew it we were blindly following him. Marie and Mannfred were wr!
apping in German and having a good old time while John tried to figure out where we were on his map the whole way. Mannfred was so excited to hear that we are from Milwaukee because in 2005 he visited Chicago, Milwaukee and Canada.
Well, even though we had our doubts about good old Mannfred, he ended up getting us to the Swiss border at the town of Au, the place we wanted to be at the base of the climb ahead. Thanks, Mannfred!
Once Mannfred left us on our own, we were not able to find the bike route we were looking for but found another bike route that climbed into the hills. We started with a 7 km climb out of Berneck, then a short descent, another climb into Oberegg followed by a long descent into Heiden where we sat and ate our lunch. We did a lot more climbing and descending before getting to the city of St. Gallen. Here we got very frustrated because we were unable to find the bike route we wanted and ended up on a busy road right through town. Eventually we found an alternative to that busy road which took us on a very loose gravel path for a short distance before rejoining that busy road that now had a bike path next to it.
Eventually we made our way back to the lake and the trail that goes around it. We were pretty tired and were ready to stop at the first campground we had scoped out on the map just north and west of Romanshorn. We stopped to check it out and didn't like it. The camping area for tents was right on the grass beach which at 4:30 was still full of picnickers and swimmers. There were 2 more campgrounds a little farther on, so we continued. We stopped at what we thought was a campground attached to some sort of beach/recreation area but couldn't figure out how to get into it. Frustrated, we continued on. The 3rd place was a winner. It was a farm which had rooms to rent and camping. They had a nice grassy area, bathrooms and showers, so we were in. We were both quite hungry, suffering from our usual "everything is closed on Sundays" famine, so we set up and showered quickly and then walked into "town" to find a restaurant. We walked up a big hill and looked at the traile!
r park's restaurant which wasn't thrilling. We walked through town and back down the hill where were found a very expensive hotel restaurant and a place with hot dogs and hamburgers. So we walked back up the hill to the trailer park place which we found out was a self-serve restaurant. This meant there we no waiters. You just place your order and they call your number and you pick it up. The choices were limited and the food was nothing to write home about and expensive. After eating we took a walk down by the lake and then headed back to the campground. Again we are frustrated because we are not able to make a phone call from Switzerland. We tried everything we could think of to get our phone card to work with no success.

Kms 84.00
Time 5:42:19
Avg 14.7
Max 50.00
Total 2229.4