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Since I'm not writing my travel journal in real time, I decided not to start at the beginning but at the end of our six-day tour, no suspense, no drama as to the outcome.

The tour was meant to be longer. We had planned to leave from the house door in Gauting in Bavaria and cycle to Kassel in Hesse where Janos used to live, for a visit with friends. The route was approximately 600 km and we expected to be gone for at least two weeks. But here we are back home after one week, an aborted trip. It's happened before which makes it all the more... what is the right word - discouraging, disappointing, demoralizing? More words go through my head like quitter, loser, failure. No, I'm not asking for sympathy or reassurance that I'm not any of those things. I know it's not my fault, but it does leave me with that loser feeling. It also poses the old question that I have been asking for the past ten years, am I too old for bicycle touring? So far the question was more or less rhetorical. But I'm not so sure any more.

It's not the pedaling. We loved our rides through the countryside, the day in the rain didn't really phase us, our birthday-in-kilometers ride didn't exhaust us. But darn it, I got sick again, and I'm sick of talking about it. It's the same old problem I had in Belgium in 2017, a urinary tract infection. On our four-week trip in Belgium we didn't go home when I got sick but just kept pedaling and visiting doctors, more doctors visits than I care to recall. That wasn't the solution. I didn't really get rid of the UTI until I was at home. (By the way, it was still an excellent tour in spite of my discomfort, I just posted the journal here.)

Now when we reached Wertheim, about the halfway point of our tour, it was obvious that I wasn't well and the symptoms weren't going away. Not wanting to repeat the Belgian experience, and since from Wertheim we still had decent train connections back to Munich, it seemed that getting a train home was the sensible thing to do. So here we are, feeling very out of sorts, not liking being at home at all.

I was able to see my doctor and everything is going to be fine... Really? We still feel up to touring but if I am prone to this kind of infection while on the road, that is not fine. But we are working on solutions. Not finished with touring quite yet.

Now more or less to quote from Alice in Wonderland, I will begin at the beginning and go on until I come to the end: then stop.

Our route - the recent tragic flooding was further to the west of us.