You know you're a touring cyclist when

you judge restaurants on the quality of the paper serviettes to clean your bike!

Is it a wise decision?

We read the SMo (Südhessen Morgen) newspaper every day and I was amused recently to read recently that the popularity of that cycle touring holidays is growing and shortly afterwards that the new double deck long distance trains ordered by German Railways for delivery in 2013 will have capacity for 10 bicycles. The ADFC, the German cycling club pointed out that this less than the 16 places the present generation of single deck InterCity trains offer. One does wonder at times whether German Railway's prejudice against bicycles will not cost them customers in future?

Bicycle Museums Part III

The Musée de l’Aventure Peugeot (Peugeot Museum of Adventure) in Sochaux in the Doubs Valley near Montbelliard obviously shows a lot of motor cars, but also has 300 bicycles, scooters, mopeds and motorcycles in the museum's collection of which about 130 are shown at any one time. It also has a good collection of pepper mills and coffee grinders. Peugeot built pepper mills, coffee grinders and bicycles before branching out into motorcycles and cars

Bicycle Museums Part II

From what I can gather the only bicycle museum in the Netherlands is the Velorama in Nijmegen. It has 250 bicycles including a hobby horse from 1817 or a replica of it. The museum is well worth visiting if only see the photograph of Queen Wilhelmina on her bicycle with the royal bicycle on display. What impressed me as well was the realisation that many of the features of the modern bicycle: gearing, springing and folding appeared very early on, but were not taken up.

Bicycle Museums Part I

A bicycle collector friend of ours, (A bicycle collector is defined as someone who has more bicycles than me.) sent me a link recently to
http://bsamuseum.wordpress.com/1911-bianchi-military-folding-bicycle/ which is not a museum in the usual sense of the word but an archive. We received this when we returned from a cycling holiday in Tournus, Burgundy. The town has a bicycle museum. We did not know this before we went and unfortunately found out about the place after it closed for the winter(http://www.enviesdevelo.com in French). It is open for individuals from Easter until All Saints Day (November 1st), but groups can visit the whole year round by appointment. Obviously we did not visit the museum but the next time we are travelling through the area we will try to stop in or near Tournus and visit it. It struck us that we could well try to set up a list of bicycle museums and or museums with bicycles to add interest to cycle tours and or provide suggestions for somewhere to shelter when the weather is wet rather than the usual bus shelter. So watch this space.

A rant about the Rhine cycleway

Apologies, but it needs to be said. The Rhine is the third or fourth most popular cycle route in Germany, in spite of the efforts of the provincial, local and probably national governments. The Cycleway has four or five names each with its own symbols: On Lake Constance it is the Bodensee Cycleway; Between Constance and Basel it is the Hochrhein Cycleway. In Basel the route becomes the Rhine Cycleway up to Remagen where it changes its name to the Erlebnisweg Radschiene. Then after Düsseldorf (plus minus) it swops to the Rhine Cycleway again, don't ask me why.

Once it crosses over the border into the Netherlands the route as such disappears. The Rhine gets another name. It is not critical in the Netherlands as the excellent Knooppunt system allows easy navigation. See http://www.fietsnet.be/routeplanner/default.aspx which shows an example in Flemish about Belgium where the same system is used. Life would be a lot a better if the Germans could adopt this system of navigation. It is ironic that this will probably not occur because of the problems of interprovincial cooperation, because this system was invented by a German mining engineer in the mines around Maastricht.

At the Travel Show Part 3

Eurovelo Routes
Remembering a pioneering bike tour we’d made from Mannheim to Orange (Rhone Valley) in our early days of cumbersome bikes, primitive panniers and quick to wet but slow to dry cotton clothing, we homed in on the Franche-Comté stand, to see what was new. Nantes to Budapest, Eurovelo Route 6 or the Atlantic to the Black Sea (4446 km) runs right through Franche-Comté (F-C). We had found our first (to us) new bike trail. The department of F-C lies south of Lorraine and Alsace, bordering the Rhine close to Basel, then running into the Jura hills along the Swiss border. When we rode through from Mulhouse to Belfort, Montbéliard and along the R. Doubs both cycleways and signposts were few. We made our own tour using the numerous D roads through wooded hills, sleepy villages and towns. The Doubs canal towpath boasted the usual French ‘c’est interdit...’ signs but as all the locals ignored them, we did too. It was not always easy to find places to stay, but we enjoyed the great variety of beds and the memorable notice in one hotel ‘in case of fire, open the window and make yourself known’. Fortunately the night’s worst problem was a violently sloping bed so the uphill body slipped down, the lower sleeper woke up, then walked round to the upper level to take their revenge. We ate wonderful meals, usually choosing the mid-priced menu and didn’t worry too much about what the collection of small birds on our plates had been when alive. We saw hardly any other touring cyclists and only had to joust with French camions for short distances. The Doubs is the rather strange river we had last seen whilst riding in the Swiss Jura, where it flows northeastwards through Pontarlier. As the Jura hills were folded along a NE-SW axis the river cut across the line of the folds in deep gorges until finally by Montbéliard it swung again to flow southwest, eventually into Rhone tributary, the Saone. The booklet we picked up covers the section from Dole to Belfort (187 km) and has detailed maps with information in French, English and German about things to see (lots), tourist offices, bike shops, restaurants, cyclist wardens as well as museums. The cyclist wardens, Velo guards are dressed in red and their aim is to offer assistance, first aid and advice rather than to act as police it seems. The information indicates that certain sections along waterways or by slopes can be hazardous, to careless riders. An accommodation list covers groups as well as individuals. It appears that almost the entire route is traffic free, well-surfaced and ‘signalized’ or signposted we would say. In cities like Montbéliard main roads need to be crossed with care, one section beyond Dole towards the Saone was still provisional in August 2010. Reading the information and looking at the maps suggests that the delightful, varied cities and landscapes along our old route are now accessible to the cyclist with less of the pioneering spirit needed. No doubt the ‘interdit’ signs have vanished too! Check out www:franche-comte.org

What about the rest of the route?
A useful website is http://www.eurovelo6.org/ which has practical details concerning travel and visa requirements. It also suggests that the whole route is complete, though whether this means all the signposts are in place is debatable. The initiative for these routes came from umbrella organisation European Cyclists’ Federation (ECF). This is consists of representatives from national cycling clubs from inside and outside the EU. It aims both to represent cyclists’ interests generally and to lobby for improvements in cycle routes and improved safety for people on bikes. It may have a better chance of attracting funds designed to increase bike riding in towns and other ‘green’ transport initiatives, e.g. in 2008 the EU transport committee agreed a grant of €300 000 to this end, so not peanuts! The various Eurovelo routes link existing cycle ways and to qualify have to pass through at least two countries. Find more information by typing Eurovelo into a search engine. The websites suggest that 12 routes are at least partially complete, athough some seem to have few real grounds for hanging together. Cycling along many parts of any of them is interesting as we know (largely by chance, e.g. Andermatt to Rotterdam). Within the UK we know that there is interest in that part of the North Sea route (Eurovelo 12) which runs along the island’s east coast and continues after a sea break in the Shetland Islands. However, perhaps Eurovelo 5, London to Brindisi (3900 km) might lack a defining raison d’etre?

At the Travel Show Part 2

Many German cities like Frankfurt, Leipzig or Cologne have huge, purpose built exhibition halls for trade fairs or shows that are held regularly like the Book Fair in Frankfurt. In Cologne the RDA Workshop ‘only’ occupied two floors of one of the halls, but we entered via another, up imposing steps then over shiny granite floors through empty enormous spaces out into courtyards. Finally we reached the RDA building, completed the formalities and suitably identified with badges, descended onto the floor. The giant space before us was filled with a multitude of stands, information leaflets by the million and, this being Germany lots of people in Tracht (traditional dress - Lederhosen and Dirndls were favourite). He who hesitates in a trade fair ends up with aching feet and armfuls of irrelevant bumf, so we pushed on, heads up to find the Romantic Road stand first. Our cycling guide to this route from Würzburg to Füssen is being updated and revised (see www.bergstrassebikebooks.com for details) so we were anxious to check in with Jürgen Wünschenmeyer, the CEO of the Touristik-Arbeitsgemeinschaft-Romantische Strasse to hear how signposting of a few minor route changes was progressing. A mixed message, some good some bad news, which is not unusual with individual towns being responsible for local stretches. Some eMails and letters have since been fired off to encourage action.
However, working nearby were staff from both Rothenburg ob der Tauber and Augsburg, both stopping points along the approximately 450 km Romantic Road cycle route. One of our latest ventures is to whet potential cyclists’ appetites by publicising the many networks of local and regional cycleways around the towns between Würzburg and Füssen. Some of these are easy to find on the web and are partly or wholly in English. Others are obscure. Knowing that cyclists could spend a few days exploring well-signposted routes from a base in Augsburg or the Pfaffenwinkel villages we think may appeal to those who don’t want to pack up and move on each day. The Rothenburg odT connection had to admit that they were working on the idea, possibly for next year, whilst the Augsburg folks have promised us some more definite information. Within 30 minutes our meetings had achieved results that would have taken far longer with phone, fax or internet.
Now we had time and interest in making a few more connections and discoveries about cycling possibilities in other parts of Europe. Our feet were still fresh and fragrant, our rucksacks ready to gobble maps and cycling information.
Useful websites: www.romantischestrasse.de and www.romantic-road-coach.de

Transport Show in Cologne Part 1

On July 28 we visited the RDA Workshop in Cologne, Germany. We travelled by train and had the first interest of the day as we waited in Mannheim for our Intercity northwards. A long train en route for Basel drew in across the platform and the last two carriages had strikingly different liveries. They turned out to be the Minsk-Basel and Moscow-Basel sleepers. Although in summer we would not have expected bits of snow encrusted here and there, we later heard reports of searing temperatures and forest fires among Russia’s forests so perhaps there had been a few whiffs of singed paint work. From one of the carriages a party clearly wearing Eastern European fashions, stepped out, then shook hands with a large jolly blonde woman, as we tried in vain to catch a glimpse of a samovar within. Mannheim railway station, a prosaic workaday place disappeared as Anna Karenina, steppe and taiga seeped from films and books into our mind’s eye. Then the doors slammed, Minsk and Mocba disappeared down the track towards Basel and Switzerland.
Our journey to Cologne was protracted by technical problems, the wrong sort of rain or a landslide or two so after a cup of dreadful DB coffee we returned to thinking of Russian trains. It had always been possible to get to Russia by train from hereabouts, even with the Iron Curtain still in place. Commuting daily from Weinheim to Frankfurt in the early nineteen nineties Neil had occasionally observed dark green, very old-fashioned rolling stock three times a week, which linked Berne with Moscow. It was an interesting, though not a particularly enticing, thought at the time, with the hostile wastelands of East Germany and Poland to cross. To us island born Cold War children it also hinted at romance and impossible distances. Imagine an Edinburgh to Istanbul Express stopping at Wigan North West!
You could easily get a couple of Bromptons in those wagons we thought, even if carriage of bicycles is officially forbidden. One of our minor forms of what some cyclists call ‘soft anarchy’ is to quietly travel with a bike in a bag on some of Europe’s more exclusive trains. Does one still need a visa for Moscow or Minsk, and where on earth exactly IS Minsk? (Capital of Belarus, some distance west of Moscow itself.) Research has revealed that just boarding the train and hoping to set off in either place for the other by bike isn’t that easy since many travel restrictions still exist and individual journeys by cyclists are regarded by the authorities as dangerously eccentric at the least.
However we were on our way to a Workshop, aka Trade Fair about bus and group travel but with increasing interest in cyclists. Who knew what ideas and information, what routes and fantasies, we would have by the late afternoon?

From Riesling to Pike-Perch

New cycling routes tend to spring up in Germany rather like unwanted garden weeds, so after reading in our local paper about a route combining wine and fish eating we decided to hop on bikes and trains and investigate. The von Riesling zum Zander route links Bad Bergzabern (a well known wine centre on the far west of the Rhine Rift Valley) with Neupotz, a tiny village set in the old ox-bow lakes of the Rhine. Our train journey there was enlivened by many Sunday cyclists crowding the bike compartment, plus a young father and daughter (about 9) with bikes and a huge trailer. By squeezing and breathing in everyone managed to get in AND more importantly get out at the correct stops. The worst weeks of the heat wave (36°C) lay behind us and we detrained into a sunny but cool morning in Kapellen-Drusweiler, one of the wine-growing villages a few kilometres east of Bad Bergzaben. We were a bit early for a Schoppen (a small glass) of wine, though the vintners were setting out their stalls by 11 o’clock. Their half-timbered yards bedecked with geraniums and petunias were most inviting, prices too much lower than in downtown Mannheim. The Riesling-Zander route links a series of existing cycle routes and we had no difficulty following the white signs with a green bike symbol from village to village. We had downloaded a map from the internet link before leaving home. On reaching the little town of Winden, thoughts of a coffee and cake lured us into a shady courtyard. At the entrance a man wearing a protective apron was just removing the first freshly smoked trout from a large black oven, the fish dangling on wooden staves, skins glistening and golden. Cake was abandoned, a smoked trout brötchen (open sandwich) ordered instead with our coffee. Quite delicious. Later the fish farmer explained that he came from Hinterweidenthal close to Pirmasens further west. Another of our favourite bike routes runs from there to Wissembourg in Alsace, so we’ll remember to eat smoked trout on our next visit.
More cyclists were appearing so we continued on across a gradually changing landscape, up and down gentle slopes, through stands of mature trees, leaving the line of the Pfalzer hills behind to the west. Each village was delightful, a few cobbled streets, farms and churches dozing in the sun, half-timbered houses more than 300 years old with new modern dwellings dotted in between and on the outskirts. Steinweiler offered more vintners and a maize labyrinth whilst in Erlenbach we enjoyed a cool mineral water at a potter’s shop without too much pressure to buy a giant plant pot. From time to time there was a glimpse over the forests close to the Rhine to the northern Black Forest hills beyond, dark blue shading into black.
We cycled into the long village of Rheinzabern, where the tiny houses have their gable ends to the street and long gardens at the back. Here we were enticed into a wonderland leading from a narrow yard between two restored half-timbered cottages. A series of outdoor rooms, a la Chelsea Flower Show had been created with flowers and bushes whilst behind a planted screen a round table had been set for tea. Most impressive, since it is still unusual for people to open their private gardens to the public here in Germany, though it seems to be catching on in nearby Alsace. Across the road was another delight where a farming family had turned their stables into a collection of implements and carts, together with clothing and articles in daily use from the beginning of the last century. It does come as something of a shock to see things my Grandmother used to have, in a museum! Tempus Fugit, once again.
By this time, the effects of our fish sandwich in Winder had long since worn off so we were pleased to reach Neupotz and signs to the Otterbachhofladen (an enormous timber framework barn, set out with long tables, decorated with bundles of wheat and wild flowers). Normally there is a farm shop here. A Radler (literally a cyclist but meaning a beer/lemonade shandy) and a sizeable plateful of German potato salad, a substantial Bratwürst and a crisp bread bun each, soon restored us. Unfortunately neither of us had room to sample some interesting confections, looking like giant jam and cream scones, being tackled by several local senior citizens... perhaps next time? Observing preparations for speeches and music on a stage in the middle of the barn, plus various individuals dressed in local costume and the promise of the appearance of a Tobacco Queen and South Wine Road Princess we gathered our plates and glasses and left town.
We still had about 20 km to ride northwards along the main Rhine embankment cycleway to reach Germersheim. As we entered the water meadows, lagoons and stands of massive willows bordering the Rhine our tempo increased along smooth tarmac. These are service roads alongside the flood embankments, with occasional pumping stations or access to the river bank. For cyclists they are a great boon and in high summer give superb stretches of every shade of greenery. Shortly before Germersheim we reached the riverside, where people and dogs paddled in the shallows or snoozed on a bench. The town is lovely with vast fortifications, partly intact and built too late to be any use. We cycled past the old moat and towers to the station and our train back to Mannheim. Back home our speedos displayed distances of around 76 km, mostly on trails unknown to us before. Another great day out in Rheinland Pfalz.

Yet more hire bikes in Rhineland Palatinate

The heat recently (35°C) has put us off doing any serious cycling though we did have a day out on Sunday cycling the new Vom Riesling zum Zander route from the Deutsche Weinstraße just north of Bad Bergzabern across to the Rhine. There were wine fests, farmers offering local produce and restaurants with Riesling and Zander dishes along the route's 35km. Zander is freshwater fish known as pike-perch in English and has a firm white flesh. It tastes excellent.

We also discovered a local bike hire company called fahrradverleih-suedpfalz.de. The company offers the full spectrum of bicycles apart from tandems: Road bikes, touring bikes, city bikes, trailers, MTBs and pedelec electrobikes at very reasonable prices. If you are thinking of going cycling starting in or around Speyer or Karlsruhe and don't wish to transport your bike to the Fatherland then check it out. The company has a free telephone number: 0800 22 88 440 (in Germany) or drop it a line at Fahrradverleih-Suedpfalz.de, Mühlweg 2, 76771 Hördt, Germany

The local bike shop

Like most of us I am all in favour of local bike shops (LBS), as are the national cycling clubs of Europe. When I write local I mean the kind of shop where the owner stands behind the counter, rather than the big sheds out on the bypass. Although all of these guys face serious competition from the Internet shops. I think we are slightly more logical than some of the national cycling clubs who profess to support their LBS, but offer a link to a major online shop on their websites.

Neustadt-Speyer Route

Last year we began our exploration of day excursions by bike in Rheinland Pfalz, the next province over on the west bank of the Rhine. We cycle into Mannheim (12km) then take a local railway usually to Neustadt an der Weinstrasse. Our over 60 ticket, which costs around 1€ per day allows us and our bikes to travel at no extra cost after the morning rush hour. Often we take other connections from Neustadt a.d. Weinstrasse to reach further into the Pfalz but this time we cycled out to Speyer (about 35km). Neustadt is a vineyard town on gentle slopes at the edge of the fault line marking the Rhine Rift Valley. Though they often moan about prices and problems, caused by anything from hailstorms to droughts and EU bureaucracy, most vintners make a reasonable living and the small towns have attractive buildings suggesting prosperity for centuries. Despite the media gloom-makers, true to form Neustadt's downtown area was marked by several major building projects, necessitating the removal or destruction of bike route signs. Away from the station we headed off in the general direction of Speyer and soon found ourselves trapped in pleasant countryside on the wrong side of an expressway (see first picture). After the usual cursing we found a bridge over the expressway (there nearly always is one in Germany, if only for the local farmers) and after a little thrashing in the woods on very local trails we soon hit our required NW-SP cycleway. The surface was hard gravel and led us through mixed woods, beloved by a wide variety of birds according to display boards put up by the local bird fanciers. The birds themselves trilled and sang, light winds kept us cool as we exchanged woods for fields and moved gradually eastwards. Occasionally we had to cross proper roads but traffic was sparse. A wooden shelter came in handy for our picnic stop and we had just finished as a tractor appeared to turn rows of cut grass ready for baling. We continued along the southern margin of the extensive strip of woodland lying east-west between Speyer and Neustadt. Approaching Dudenhofen we passed by a major supplier of wood for stoves and then into the little town itself, quietly dozing in the lunch-break. The fields around Speyer grow potatoes, sweetcorn and sugar beet and the open view revealed the towers and spires of its cathedral and numerous churches. A short distance beside the expressway, then a sharp left turn brought us beneath the highway and into the little city perched on a slope above the Rhine. Speyer is delightful, lies on the pilgrim route to Santiago de la Compostela, has a lovely main street with all the restaurants, ice cream parlours and historic buildings anyone could wish for, but on this occasion we just headed for the station and the S-bahn back to Mannheim. The clouds were gathering for a storm.

Cycling is booming in Germany

We are neither of us keen shoppers. Maybe it's the Northern English folk memories of the Depression in the 1930s - before our time, but we knew plenty of people who had lived through this. It is difficult to say. However we go to our local shopping centre (mall), Rhein-Neckar-Zentrum most weeks to visit Aldi and Bauhaus, a DIY store. The Zentrum does attempt to draw visitors in by having special exhibitions from time to time. Yesterday we visited an exhibition of the tourist attractions of the city of Schwerin, capital of the federal province of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. One of the principle pillars of this campaign is cycling. The tourist information package for the city comes with a cycle touring map giving suggestions for four cycle tours between 30 and 75 kilometre long and details of a bus service that will carry the tourists' bikes when they do not feel like cycling on.
It would appear in the economic crisis more and more Germans are turning to cycling for holiday and leisure activities. The bicycle touring business is booming. In 2009 in Germany alone cycle tourists generated 22 million overnight stays and spent around 3.87 billion (thousand million) Euros (Deutschen Tourismusverband DTV). The ADFC (German Cycling Club) has noticed that cycle tourism is bucking a declining trend for holiday making in the popular cycling regions and on long distance cycle routes. As an example, hotels on the Ruhr Valley Cycle Route showed a growth in bookings of 13% in 2009 whereas hotel bookings declined in the rest of the Ruhr by 2.5% in the same period. Biking is popular for group, bus, and club excursions, as well as for business and club events. This interest is being matched by the willingness of the local authorities to invest in cycle ways and information. (The top photograph shows a group of tourists relaxing in the town square of Feuchtwangen during on of the celebrations to mark 60 years of the Romantic Road. The lower photograph shows a new information table on the Danube Valley Cycle Way. )
This trend has not gone unnoticed by the organisers of the 36th International Coach Tourism Federation Workshop in Cologne from 27th to 29th July 2010. Its major theme is Cycle Touring. Exhibitors include bus operators, regional tourist authorities and the ADFC.

Tal Total

We visited the car free day (Tal Total) on the roads on the left and right banks of the Rhine last Sunday between Rüdesheim and Koblenz. It was good fun especially after 15:00 when all the football fans had left to watch the game. For much of the day we were cycling on fairly empty roads with all sorts of exotic machinery. We are normally no great fans of these open days as you can walk or bike on the participants' heads.
We could have picnicked in the middle of the road. We took a train from Bingen to Worms and cycled home. We were told in Mainz on the HBf over the loudspeakers that the German team had won, but even so where somewhat surprised in Worms to find ourselves mixed up with a parade of honking cars and idiots who remonstrated with us for not flying a German flag. However once out the town centre life quietened down so we could return home on quiet roads and paths through the forest to Viernheim.

High Noon

Germany too has been hit by waves of the patriotic flying Black, Red and Gold flags on their vehicles. There are those who wish to hedge their bets and so fly a German flag on one side of the vehicle and a foreign flag - Swiss or Italian on the other.
Personally we are not bothered by football, but have noticed that the streets of Viernheim before a big match resemble the small town in the film of "High Noon". Everywhere is empty. Nobody stirs. Then the match starts and we are able to work out the course of the game by the groans and cheers, If the German team scores a major goal there are rockets and other fireworks too.
What this has to do with cycling or even cycle touring, you may ask? Well, there is a new 800 km cycle route in North Rhine Westphalia called Die Deutsche Fußball Route (The German Football Route) running from Aachen to Bielefeld visiting the stadiums of some of Germany's best known clubs.

Gradient or gravel? More pictures

Left picture shows bikeway being relaid with cobbles - in Belgium, after heavy rain.
Other picture - deep sand on canalside trail - Belgium, very hard work

Gradient or gravel?

Many cyclists, especially those new to the game or returnees after a break get excited or alarmed about slopes or steepness, often regardless of whether these are uphill or down dale. Of course gradient is relevant when planning a tour and sometimes it pays to consider a route in two directions. Steep short climbs followed by long dreamy descents may be much better than riding the route the other way round. However, in our opinion riding surfaces are almost as important, to speed, general comfort and enjoyment. Even the simplest of bikes can cope with very different surfaces, when need be and mountain bikers relish bunny hopping over boulders, however when on tour most of us want to reach our destination safely and in time for a beer before bed. With provision of designated routes for cyclists growing and the costs of laying and maintaining these routes clearly important for local authorities, we’ve put together our experience of different types of surface. Though there is a school of thought that suggests that we cyclists should be grateful to be allowed to exist at all and to ride along the cast off shoulders of roads thanking our lucky stars, we always hope for improvements.
In the best possible world, top of our list comes the high speed metalled surface we’ve encountered along the upper Rhine, where the cycleway is combined with river flood protection work. At the bottom comes loose sand, an unfriendly surface that often tips the rider off as the wheels stop. Our local woods, growing on glacial sand dunes, feature several of these Sahara practice runs though only for short stretches. In between is a whole gamut of broken or decayed metalled surfaces, bouncy runs across tree roots and the various problems associated with Messrs. Gravel, Pebbles & Co. Over the years we’ve ridden touring bikes and Brompton folders across almost everything including freshly blasted rocks, high in the Swiss Alps, especially interesting after rain and long distances on rounded river pebbles newly dredged out of the nearby Scheldt in Belgium. The latter are frustrating and wearing on legs, seat and arms despite shock absorbers or springs and can slow speeds down as much as a headwind. Another horror concerns maintenance when pea gravel or small stones can be dumped on trails to a depth of several centimetres and simply flattened with a grader and lightweight roller. Without warning the cyclist passes from hard old gravel to unconsolidated track, on which headway is very difficult. In wet conditions some of these gravel surfaces become sticky or glue like so the rider’s thighs bulge to achieve a measly 8 km/h. So it was for us along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in the wake of the rains of Hurricane Fran some years ago.
The original Paris-Roubaix race was rightly feared for the hazardous cobble sections, now the organisers have difficulty in finding a few kilometres of motor roads with cobbles to include in the route. However the cyclist on the Flanders bike route may find plenty of these surfaces to relish, including some being re-laid when we were there some years ago. At the top of the Gotthard Pass in Switzerland a sign warns of the danger of riding down the section of cobbled road, designated a National Monument, unless your bike has front shocks. Ours hadn’t but we made it without real problems.
Roads too have many hazards from the much documented grids to cracks and potholes and beyond to kerbs that topple unbalanced riders and even melting tar that dapples with black spots. A new version of this was a thin layer of tar sprayed on roads in Bavaria one summer. It was designed to seal old and new surfaces together and allowed us to leave our tread impressions to be fossilised but resulted in our sticky tyres collecting many small stones, extremely hard to dislodge. Most of the surfaces mentioned are just cause for delay or exasperation but some are dangerous and possibly fatal. We’ve rarely been defeated, thanks to determination and low gearing, and have even made headway over the dirty ice remains of avalanches lingering over remote trails in the Alps until late summer. We thought we’d coped with most vegetation problems, like overgrown hedges where roses and brambles try to pluck bicyclists from their saddles to high grasses from which the rider emerges like a figure in Monet’s paintings, growing out of the trail. However, a farmer along the Leinetal had clearly delighted in arranging his swaths of drying hay directly along an already narrow clay path. Our Bromptons triumphed, as ever, but it was a drag.
A quick glance at the Internet has not revealed any standard surfaces for bike trails in either Europe or North America. A recent wet day on new cycleways along the Danube in Germany suggested that the preferred gravel chip’n mud left much to be desired and most it was left on our gear. Bikes, packs and riders needed hosing off at the end of the day. Is it beyond engineers/road makers to suggest cheap materials that function well in wet and dry conditions, that give reasonable traction and don’t inflict too much damage in a tumble? No doubt other cyclists have their own stories of horror surfaces or perhaps solutions to offer?

Instructions

We find it is a good idea to take instructions for items like hub or derailleur gears, because at the critical point we forget the vital step to fix a maladjusted gear. We pop photocopies of the instructions in a sealable plastic bag to take with us on tour. Something that is worth not forgetting in our experience are the instructions to recalibrate the cycle computer after a battery change.

Karl Drais

Karl Drais was the inventor of the Laufmaschine or velocipede, the earliest form of the bicycle, initially without pedals. His first reported ride, from the Schloss in Mannheim to the "Schwetzinger Relaishaus" (a coaching inn, located in what is now "Rheinau", a district of Mannheim) took place on June 12, 1817.
The city of Mannheim in cooperation with the ADFC (a German cycling club) has laid out a new cycle route from the centre of Mannheim to Rheinau and onwards following Karl Drais's original test run. On Saturday June 10th 2010 the ADFC is organising a cycle event to open the cycle route starting from the Schloss in Mannheim at 12:00 along part of the route and finishing at the Stadler cycle shop in Neckarau, another district of Mannheim. The route has yet to be equipped with signposts, however this year is the 225th anniversary of his birth and 10th June is a Saturday.
We will be there (DV) and will report.