Worms --> Speyer

July 10, 2023

Eating Some Weird German Food

I woke up early at a hotel in Worms. My parents and I were trying to get an early start to beat the heat of the day. We made it to the breakfast buffet by 7:00am sharp, and were the first ones there. We ate breakfast on the hotel's balcony overlooking the Rhine river. The morning was cool, but very humid. It had rained overnight, and a low ground fog hung over the river.

As we ate, I planned the day's route on Komoot with my parents. We decided to deviate from the EV15 book's description of the route to avoid more urban riding.

After a quick breakfast, we were out on the bike path heading South from Worms. We rode through some small towns, along with forests and agricultural land. In the forest sections, a low fog was hanging in the air that made my sunglasses fog up. About half way to Speyer, I had to stop for a bathroom break. I found a beer garden on an old Oxbow lake along the Rhine where I relieved myself. I then went for a swim in the lake as it was already getting hot.

We were able to make it to Worms by about 11:30 and beat the heat of the day. The hotel staff was nice enough to let us check into our room early, and gave us an indoor location to store our bikes. It was a Monday, so there were not many other people at the hotel. Just a side observation about bike touring the Rhine: the overwhelming majority of bike touring traffic seems to be people doing weekend trips, things really clear out on weekdays.

After checking into our hotel, we made our way into the "Altstadt" part of Speyer. We found a nice shady biergarten to have lunch at. I decided to be adventerous and order "Saumagen", or pig stomach, along with beef liver dumplings. I would say these specialty items are more of a "check the box" type dish. Not something I wouild eat regularly.

We then walked down the entire length of the town square and got ice cream at a cafe. My dad and I then decided to check out the largest Romanesque church in the world: the "Dom Zu Speyer". We paid $6.50 each to walk up 60 meters to the top of the church spire and got an incredible view of the Rhine valley. You could see hills to the east and west, but the Alps were still not in view, especially with the humid haze hanging in the valley. The church was impressively large, but fairly plain inside for such a large cathedral.

After checking out this church, it was now getting unbearably hot, so we headed back to our hotel. We stayed inside our hotel room for a couple hours to cool off during the hottest part of the day (which by the way, did not have AC).

Around 7:30, it started to cool off to a tolerable temperature, and we ventured out for dinner. We could hear the "Bretzelfest" street fair happening a few blocks away, but we instead decided to eat at a riverside biergarten on the Rhine. My mom and I tried another local specialty, "Maultaschen", similar to a pan fried chineese dumpling. My dad ordered a schnitzel.

After eating, we decided to head down and check out the Bretzelfest. It looked almost identical to an American county fair, except the food was way classier. Instead of over-the-top unhealthy food (deep fried bacon-wrapped twinkies and such), they had stalls selling broetchen, soft pretzels, sausages, candied almonds, and corn on the cob. They also had a not-so-great live band performing. We walked around the fair and admired all the food we were too full to eat, wishing we had eaten here instead of the biergarten.