Sunny skys, flat through the river valley

September 3, 2023

Beautiful day for biking

Today we rode through the Inn River valley crossing and recrossing the river many times. The valley is pretty flat with steep mountains forming the sides of the Valley.

In the valley we rode by many farms. The farms here are somewhat larger than the small farms we saw in Switzerland. The farms were growing a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. We saw apple orchards, tomatoes, radishes, corn, lettuce, pears, and berries to name a few. We also ran over some purple grapes on the trail. We also saw lots of small farms with livestock, we saw a horses, ponies, a horse with zebra coloring, goats, sheep, and of course cows.

We saw some weird apple trees that were pruned to be tall and thin and laden with fruit. The trees were labeled with the type of apples they were, we saw gala and topaz apples. These apple trees were covered with a fine mesh fabric.

The fabric covered structure on the left in the picture is where the apple trees were growing.

We stopped for lunch right along the trail and had some wonderful food. Huge salads with lots of great surprises lurking under the lettuce and a goulash made with local mushrooms.

There were so many people out on their bikes today. The cyclists ranged from three year olds out with their families to speedy road cyclists. There was so much traffic on the bike way that we had to be very careful to look up and back to know what was around us at any point.

The ride today was mostly flat with a gentle uphill grade that really wasn’t noticeable. However, we did have a few hills near the end of the ride. There was one 18% grade that we went up and down. The bikes we have this week are e-bikes but they are not as powerful as the e-bikes we had in Switzerland. Hopefully we won’t have as much climbing as we did in Switzerland.

We rode through several small towns today and one thing we noticed is a real difference in architecture. In Switzerland the were a lot of the typical wood chalets. In Austria so far, the homes are more likely to be stucco.

Today's ride: 38 miles (61 km)
Total: 516 miles (830 km)

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