July 2, 2014
Day 64: Hopfen am See to Rieder
The weather forecast called for rain to begin by ten this morning. Allowing for possible error in the timing, we planned to pack up the tent as early as possible. We did it at 6. The rain started at 7:30. Ha ha!
Although we may have beaten the rain to the starting line, it had another trick in reserve for us - that is, once it got going it drenched us all day long. The rain was strike one for the day. Strike two was the fact that the region we were now cycling turned out to be the real hilly one. Like a rumpled sheet, it was just up and down, the whole way. But even with two strikes, we still had a lot of fun. The first reason was that all that up and down was through extremely beautiful meadow and forest, with mountains in the background, when we could see them through the cloud. Again and again we climbed to nice villages, comprised mostly of giant farmhouses, looked around at other villages on other hills, and descended again.
The second reason for the fun day was the cows. All around were cows of mostly the brown swiss variety, and all were making continual music with their cow bells. I wondered if eventually this would drive either the cows or the farmers crazy, but had to admit if they had been doing it for hundreds of years, it must be ok. For us, though, it was all music, and most evocative of being in the Alps.
I guess I could also say that in a perverse way, battling rain and hills is fun too.We must still be young enough to get some enjoyment out of playing outside in bad weather!
The villages we passed through were not generally market towns, but there were two - Nesselwang and Oy. At the beginning of Nesselwang, not at a car dealer but just at some sort of service station, were ten or more T-5 Volkswagen window vans, all lined up, doing nothing. There are so many of these vans flying around, and though I would dearly like to replace my T-4 with one of them I don't begrudge their owners here the use of them. But to line up a spare ten pack and not be mailing me one, hurts! (p.s. the T-5 is absolutely unavailable in Canada, plus even if I could in principle ship myself one, I no doubt could not afford it - darn.)
The other thing in Nesselwang was a rather nice church, with classical over the top decoration. The ceiling frescoes are generally nice in this style of church, naturally showing some heavenly scene. It's not only church frescoes that are nice here. In the high villages, farm houses often have paintings on them. I made photos of two of them - one showing a cow, church and mountain scene which well represents what we see here, and the other a little girl with guardian angel.
Despite the number of hills we actually did go up and down, our active program of trying to avoid them did sometimes pay off. Looking at the official route, it often appears to us that the planners take to the hills just for our entertainment, or to avoid some stretch of highway that may in any event have a safe path beside it. Laurie, who has made us promise not to die on the road, will be pleased to know that on several occasions we avoided roads that seemed too busy, opting instead to slog over the hillsides. One time we looked down on the road, as it smugly slid along the valley bottom, from our perch way up the mountainside. I said to Dodie "Had we taken the road, you would be pointing way up here and saying "I believe they wanted us way up that mountainside"" "Blah, I would have said, they wouldn't do that to us, would they?"
Approaching Immenstadt was kind of deceptive. Within one km of downtown there was no indication from the bike path that a large town was around. Instead, we circled a rather wild looking small lake. Finally we began to pass some not too attractive buildings, followed signs that pointed improbably to the city centre, .1 km away, or somesuch. Sure enough, though, we popped out in the town. Our plan was to get tourist information to find us a reasonable indoor place to stay. For some reason we could not immediately spot tourist information. Actually, when we later did nail it down, it turned out we had looked right at it but not reacted to green "i", which normally is blue.
Immenstadt turned out to only have three places to stay, and each wanted about 90 euros. Though soaked and chilled, Dodie was not about to pay that much. So she prevailed on the information lady to look for something out of town. What popped up was a B and B in Rieder, two towns to the west. 54 euros. So off we went into the rain, looking for the "Grosser Alpsee" and Rieder Strasse on the GPS. We found the street, and here had to trust our address information and the GPS very much, because the "street" was basically a way to ascend another mountainside. Honestly, I was fairly hard pressed just to push my heavy bike up this slope, at all. The house numbers started at 2, and we wanted number 40. So up we went. We almost reached 40, when the numbers went back to something like 10. So onward we pushed. Finally we stopped to ask some people just where this number 40 might be. Just ahead, 5 minutes, they assured us.
We did, of course, finally get there. Inge, the proprietor, surprised us by ushering the dripping bikes into a downstairs corridor. Then, as at the place two days ago, she took away our sopping coats and rain pants and shoes to attend to drying them. After that she brought us coffee and tea. Hooray.
The weather forecast is apparently better for tomorrow, and we should reach the Bodensee. To do it though, we will apparently have to descend this darn mountain the way we came up. The GPS says the road we are on here will soon dead end. Anyway, we have a great view of the Groser Alpsee from here!
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Today's ride: 50 km (31 miles)
Total: 3,339 km (2,074 miles)
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