I thought I’d better do a quick trip up the Rhine to get used to my new bike, so I packed a few essentials into 2 Ortlieb rear pannier bags and took off for a week.
Click on map to zoom-in or out, or click on ‘expand’ icon to go to full page view
[The black line on the map represents my return from Karlsruhe to Aachen by train – not accurate!]
The all-up weight was 125kg, made up of bike (26.7kg) plus batteries (5.8kg) = 32.5kg; cargo = 7.5kg; myself = 85kg (soon-to-be 80kg, I hoped 😀.[Ed. I did get down to 81 kg!]
Of course, I had already read a lot about the famous Eurovelo 15 cycling route that traverses the length of the Rhine River, with one of the most praised sections being between Koblenz and Mainz, so that was something I’d been keen to do for a while, and I headed off to that section.
My plan was simple: to cut straight across from Maastricht to the Rhine River at Cologne (Köln), then point the bike upstream towards Switzerland and see how far I could get before having to return to house-sitting duties in Maastricht in about 6 days’ time.
My new bike is a Riese & Müller ‘Supercharger CX’ model, with Rohloff 14-speed internal hub gearbox, Gates carbon belt drive and two x 500Wh Bosch tube batteries. I went for the Supercharger over another Delite (that I then owned in Australia, unfortunately now stolen) because for me the price differential and utility trade-off between rear suspension versus Gates belt drive favours the Supercharger, and I do not regret this decision.
[Over 28 days of cycling every day in Europe with a full camping load (not partially loaded, as above), I achieved an indicative full-charge range of 190 km on average, with me supplying 77% of the effort. Therefore, the daily minimum amount of travel I can now plan for, at my realised average speed of 22 km/h without needing a break to recharge, and within a realistic time frame of 8 hours of saddle-time spread out over 10 hours during any given day, is 160 km. That is not to say that there weren’t quite a few days (about 1 in every 3, actually) when due to wind and/or hills I had to stop for an hour or so to add some charge in the middle of the day.
Monday July 2, 2018. Maastricht to Cologne |116 km|
So, setting the bike’s Nyon GPS/computer to take me to Cologne’s main cathedral – not by (a): the Fast Route or by (c): the MTB Route, but by (b): the Scenic Route – I set off from Molly and Kathy’s house in Maastricht at 8am on a warm and gusty Monday morning, scrupulously following the GPS instructions for the route it selected.
That worked out OK, and it didn’t take me too long to work around the many foibles of this style of navigation, the main one being: just make sure to look at the map screen’s bigger picture before blindly doing a sharp left or right turn in 30, 20, 10, 0 metres as the count-down on approach directs – all it’s (usually) trying to tell you is that there is a little kink, or roundabout, or just a footpath-mounting manoeuvre required in what is otherwise a straight-through intersection. I had to go straight on in the illustration on the left ,for example.
Oh, and the other thing: strangely for a bike’s GPS device, it seems dead-set on avoiding any signposted bike route whatsoever, and absolutely refused to put me onto any signposted bike path. So I managed to get lost heaps of times by ignoring the GPS’s suggestion and trying to follow marked bikeways (which invariably petered out or diverged off to some little hamlet), then had to reset the GPS navigation to get me back on track. But provided I could input a specific destination, the GPS (almost) always took me to it via a safe route.
Not to worry though, on later reviewing the track I actually followed, I saw it was a more-or-less wobbly direct route from A to B anyway, through pleasant-enough countryside on paved and unpaved bike paths, farmer’s tracks, MTB nature trails and quiet rural roads.
It is quite a delightful ride into central Cologne for the last 10 km or so along a green beltway, exclusively for cycles! Well, and for pedestrians too of course.
I headed straight for the Tourist Information Office and got there just before it closed, and they politely and efficiently found me a reasonable hotel reasonably close by. Reasonable in this case being €73. Dinner, around the corner, consisted of the most local of dishes I could imagine – Rheinischer Sauerbraten, which in its most authentic expression is slow-cooked pickled horse with red cabbage and potato dumplings in a red wine vinegar and raisin sauce. Yummo! (though I suspect I may have been given the tourists’ ordinary cow version).
And hey, a world record for me – smallest ‘loo space I’ve ever had to ‘go’ in, and with the toilet wedged so tightly in between the shower cubicle and the wash basin there’s not enough room for shoulders, so you have to stand up to wipe your bum!
Tuesday 3 July, 2018. Cologne to Koblenz |113 km|
A good hotel breakfast in Germany is very good indeed and worth writing about – the Cerano’s fully-optioned hot and cold smorgasbord was indeed such a one and is the yardstick against which all others will now be measured.
I checked out at 8 am and visited the impressive cathedral, then headed down to the wharf to find my starting point of the Eurovelo 6 route heading southwards up-river.
Then it was a delightful and easy ride, mostly hugging the left (western) bank of the Rhine, on to Koblenz:
Although it did get very industrial for 10 or so km leading into Koblenz. That’s OK too.
Koblenz is a nice-enough rustic little tourist city situated at the confluence of the Rhine and Moselle rivers. I stayed at a small hotel called the Kornpforte for €68. Better value, overall, than the previous night’s offering, but not at all competitive on the frühstük (breakfast) front. Dinner was a more meagre offering too – jaeger schnitzel, while perched on a bar stool drinking beers and watching England squeak through against Colombia on penalties.
Wednesday 4 July, 2018. Koblenz to Mainz |111 km|
By this time the bike computer was refusing to acknowledge my hard-earned kilometers, so I went to a local bike shop, Fahrrad XXL, to have it checked out. They called in their tech guy, who quickly sorted the problem without having to do a hard reset, and I also bought an Ortleib handlebar bag from them.
So it wasn’t until nearly midday that I finally got away from Koblenz under threatening skies to continue my journey on up-river. The Rhine valley narrows to almost gorge-like proportions in this section and I was treated to the grand spectacle of several bouts of rolling thunder reverberating off the valley sides, and was on the receiving end of a couple of good lashings of heavy rain to boot. But it dried out soon enough and the rest of the afternoon’s ride was in dry overcast conditions.
Lots of castles along the way…
….and some pleasant well-kept medieval-looking towns on both sides of the river. Not that I’d know what medieval looks like, coming from Australia.
Then it was into wine country, with all those picture-perfect postcard vistas you’ve heard about:
And so on into Mainz where it was quite a struggle at first to find any hotels at all, let alone one with vacancies – and none of the locals I asked seemed to have any idea either. Eventually, I wised-up and GPSed myself to the main railway station, where of course there were quite a few of them cheek to jowl, and so ended up staying at the very friendly Hammer Hotel. It is about 1 star up on the previous 2-star establishments of the past couple of nights (and at €89, some €10 dearer too – but it did have air-conditioning!).
Thursday 5 July, 2018. Mainz to Karlsruhe |182 km|
This was a long day of cycling for me – one of the longest I’ve done I think. But it was flat and it was interesting, and I was just downright bloody determined to make it to Karlsruhe. And I even took time off to get a haircut!
I got lost quite a few times too. The countryside I was passing through for a lot of the way comprised river wetlands protected by a series of dykes, with a network of bike paths going every-which-way. The crossroads sign in the photo above provides a prime example of the confusion. Three of those directional arrows all point to Speyer – well I’d just come from Speyer, and I can tell you it was from the only direction that didn’t say Speyer! And then I picked the wrong option for moving on, not once but twice: the first mistake lead me to a dead-end ferry crossing without a ferry service after 3km of cross-country slogging, and the second to a fenced-off factory about 500m down the track. Should have looked at the sign more closely and chosen the Ludwigshafen option in the first place, (because of that all-important blue 15 tab, and once I twigged that – later, from the photo – then it all made perfect sense).
So when I finally did get to Ludwigshaven I was on the lookout for a cold drink, and in a residential street I spotted two people having coffee on a patio outside what I took to be a café. Turned out to be a frisseur (hairdresser!), so I got a haircut instead. From Hubert, who was just paying a social call on the lady who ran the salon, but who just happened to have a set of scissors in his car and went and got them and clipped away in a professional manner. Go figure.
Just after the onion-picking field shown above, that I could smell from a mile away, near the town of Germersheim, I developed the feeling that I might not make it to Karlsruhe on the remaining battery, so I pulled into a Biergarten and had a steak and a couple of Radlers (low alcohol beer) while engaging in a strange conversation in Spanish with two women who were pretending to the other customers that they were Portuguese for some reason to do with racial prejudice, apparently. Maybe they were illegal immigrants from Latin America, I dunno.
Well, I eventually made it into Karlsruhe alright (and probably would have done so without the charge top-up) , though it was rather late when I got there and I didn’t manage to find the hotel where I ended up staying, The Ambassador, until well after 9 pm after futilely trying a few others that were full.
Friday July 6, 2018. Karlsruhe to Maastricht |42 km| + 400 km by train
My presence was required back in Maastricht to house-sit and mind the cat while Kathy and Molly went back to Ireland, so I purchased a Karlsruhe-Mainz-Koblenz-Köln-Aachen ticket for €118 and cycled the 35km from Aachen to Maastricht. This took up the whole of Friday.
The transfer at Koblenz was particularly nerve-racking and I made it onto the train with only 30 seconds to spare after pushing and shoving and begging and apologizing my way onto the platform bike elevators in rush hour foot-traffic.
