November 1, 2013
A relatively pointless and yet somehow completely worthwhile personal endeavour: Kind of like this whole trip
The next day I left Munich and cycled to Rachael's house in the small town of Heimstetten in order to apologise. Some of her friends were also there that I had been rude to and so I apologised, meekly and with great embarrassment, to them too. There was also a post office in her town with a woman who spoke English and so my passport and Russian visa application began its journey to England as I began mine to Switzerland. On the first full day of cycling it rained quite a lot and I was going into a headwind with my head still hurting from the events of the previous Friday. It was the kind of hangover which lasted for days and felt like it would last forever. I ate lots of fruit and promised myself that if I got better I would never be so stupid again. I passed by a point where the previous year cycling south out of Munich towards Italy I had run over a snake. Then I cycled down by Starnbergsee, a lake where I had once laid in the sun and kissed a beautiful girl that I liked. I was criss-crossing the map again on this too-small continent.
The weather improved by afternoon and the Alps came into view across the bright green fields. A long line of snowy peaks from one side of the horizon to the other, a blue sky, a thin layer of cloud glowing golden from the firelight of the setting sun - it was the most beautiful moment of the trip. The contrast from the terrible wet morning was incredible.
The next day, Monday, was much nicer too, with a bit of sunshine and more mountains visible to the south. I had planned to keep going west, skirt around the mountains and turn south along the upper Rhine river to make my route to Liechtenstein as easy as possible, but the magnetic beauty of the mountains drew me in like a moth to a flame. So I cut south-west, diagonally through the peaks, through the town of Immenstadt, and by days end I was, to my surprise, at the Austrian border deep in the mountains. Now, in my previous experience of cycling in this country it had rained almost non-stop, and I promise you that as I arrived at the 'Austria' sign post, exactly at the border, it started to rain for the first time all day. As I had just passed a village I went back and hid in a bus shelter and finally decided to camp in Germany. The reason for this was that I saw that the next day I had an opportunity to cycle for the first time in four different countries in one day, a relatively pointless and yet somehow completely worthwhile personal endeavour.
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01/11/13 - 17km
02/11/13 - 29km
03/11/13 - 102km
04/11/13 - 98km
05/11/13 - 95km (2km in Germany)
Today's ride: 248 km (154 miles)
Total: 9,103 km (5,653 miles)
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