#45 The Vennbahnweg and the Moselle

The plan was to go back to Karlsruhe where I left off a week ago and continue on to the Loire River on the Eurovelo 6 cycle route all the way to Nantes, but I had some bike mechanical issues and only got as far as Nancy before having to return to Aachen to get the bike fixed. 

Responsive map: click on the ‘expand’ icon (top right) to view full page, or use mouse or fingers to zoom in or out.

I didn’t want to retrace my previous journey up the Rhine River (as nice as it was).  There is an alternative route through parts of the Eiffel and Ardennes forests skirting Luxembourg, and then up the Moselle River to Mulhouse.  That sounded nice.

So I bought some basic camping gear – just a tent, sleeping mat, sleeping bag, torch, and, as a touch of luxury, my favourite Helinox brand of lightweight camp chair – and puttered off out of Maastricht bright and early on Wednesday, July 18, towards Aachen, making a bee-line for the start of the Vennbahnweg, or Fenn Rail Trail.

Wednesday 18 July, 2018.  Maastricht to Wiesenbach |135km|  

8.45am at the Shell servo, 20km out of Maastricht on the main road to Aachen

It’s a pleasure cycling along the cobbled winding streets of downtown Aachen.  Pity I didn’t take any snaps though.

It was still early enough to ride some more by the time I reached the pretty village of Sankt Vith, but the GPS wasn’t working in Belgium because I hadn’t uploaded the Belgian maps, and the REVel rail trail signs I’d been following after they suddenly started to appear were a little confusing, so I decided to pull into a camp ground that a retired Dutch cyclist-couple mentioned they were heading towards.  It cost only €11 for a pitch with a power outlet right by, and I had a nice swim in their pool and a shower in their scrupulously clean facilities and recharged the bike batteries overnight.  Their free WiFi was excellent too.  I did blow the budget somewhat on dinner though, in their restaurant across the street – the endive and lardons in cream sauce entrée would have been enough, as I could only eat half of the jaeger schnitzel main course.  €35.  kerchink!

There were 4 other tenting cyclists there besides the Dutch couple and myself.  Loved my little tent and had a great sleep, though the rough family on the other side of the hedge, who looked like they were established in camp for the whole of summer, kept screaming at their dog (called Michael) to shut up until 11pm.  The tent was wet with dew in the morning and I was in no hurry to rush off, waiting until 9am for the sun to burn off all the moisture.   It turned out to be the only time I got to use the tent on this trip.

Thursday 19 July, 2018.  Wiesenbach to Trier|120km|  

Things got vastly more complicated, navigation-wise.  With no functioning GPS or maps, I was reliant on the bike path signposts, but these proved to be largely unreliable as I’d start off on one path and end up on another one because the signage was focussed only on the micro-detail for the most local of journeys and not the through-routes for tourists.

When I did finally establish that I was on a through-route – to Bitburg – I decided to stick with it, but no sooner had I done so when, just past the hamlet of Pronsfeld, I came upon a backhoe operator finishing off a causeway around a collapsed bike bridge who simply refused to let me pass.  It was perfectly safe to do so and there was plenty of room to get round him but he refused to allow it and, behaving in a totally schizoid and demented manner, he viciously swung the machine’s bucket around and plonked it right down in front of where I needed to go past him, and just sat there in his cab glaring at me with his arms folded.  What to do!  His offsider was sympathetic (to me) but not much help and just vaguely indicated that I  should backtrack into the village and follow the main road out of town and rejoin the bike path further along.   This I proceeded to do.

I shouldn’t blame the recalcitrant digger operator really, but in a moment of preoccupation I managed to crash the bike (I’m blaming him, alright?).  Heading out of Pronsfeld, I found myself on the verge of a busier road than I felt comfortable with, but there was a footpath alongside so I decided to mount the kerb to keep me off the vehicular thoroughfare itself.  There was just a tiny little step between the road and the footpath, no more than an inch, but I approached it at too shallow an angle, with the result that the bike skidded and tried to do a summersault – and so did I but with more success, using my knees and elbows for braking when I hit the ground several meters past the bike.

Two women coming the other way in a BMW saw it happen and rendered assistance by fishing out their first aid kit and proffering a couple of sterile pads and some compression bandage.  To be fair, they did want to call an ambulance or otherwise get me to a doctor, but since I knew it wasn’t all that serious and that the pain would shortly kick-in, I decided it best to just patch up a bit and get back on the bike.  The bike was fine.

I got some better bandages and some disinfectant at a pharmacy in the picturesque little village of Waxweiler, and it was after that, when I thought I might grab a bite to eat and a cool drink, that I met the backhoe operator’s mother, or maybe it was his grandmother –  or at least someone with the same genetic predisposition towards intense misanthropy.  Boy, was she crabby!  Her hoarding advertised fresh sandwiches and her display cooler had some nice-looking salads in it, but no, unless I took a roll with two bratwurst sausages I was getting nothing.  But I did at least buy a beer – and got an earful of muttered curses when I put the empty bottle in the bin – she wanted it returned because she hadn’t charged for the deposit.  Unlike with the digger operator though, she was so preposterously ludicrous in a Basil-from-Fawlty-Towers kind of way that I actually got a kick out of encountering her.

I’m not complaining.  Sure, it was painful – my skinned knees and right foot (my sandal got ripped off and gouged a piece of flesh off near the big toe) are still hurting as I write this 6 days later – but the fresh experiences and pleasant riding made any such minor tribulations recede into the background.

The cycle trail along the valley of the River Kyll makes it all worthwhile…

….and the Altes Pfarrhaus bar/café in the little village of Auw an der Kyll is a great place to sit down and relax off the bike for an hour or so.

From Auw, it was then an easy run down along the Kyll River rail trail to the Moselle and hence 10 km on down-river to the city of Trier.

I was still very tender in the skinned knees department and chickened out of camping for the night, booking into the first decent-looking hotel I came across, which was the Hotel RömerBrücke located on the western (non-city) bank of the Moselle and, as the name suggests, right next to the Roman Bridge.

Did you know: Trier (formerly “Treves” in English) is the oldest city in Germany, established by the Romans in 16 BC, and is the birth place of Karl Marx?  Neither did I.

On my way down the Kyll, I had noticed an awful squeak coming off the rear tyre every time I went over a bump.  On close inspection I found that the two bolts attaching the top bracket of the rear rack to the frame had worked loose, allowing the loaded rack to collapse down onto the mud-guard which in turn squeezed down onto the tyre, so I re-tightened them.

But then on closer inspection in Trier, I realised that the left-side bottom bracket of the rack itself had started to crack around the weld, so I thought I’d better get it looked at.  I spent all the next morning (Friday)  visiting bike shops but could garner no interest whatsoever in anyone helping me out by either supplying a new rack or welding up the old one, so I had little option but to continue on to the next big town and hope for the best.

---

Friday 20 July, 2018.  Trier to Metz |143 km|

So once again it was a late departure, and I  didn’t get moving out of Trier until 12 o’clock.  It was still frustratingly difficult to keep to the proper route just by following the signposts without any maps, but the scenery in the following snaps speaks for itself what a nice ride it was:

And pretty soon I had crossed out of Germany at Perl and into France heading for Thionville, but it seemed no one there either had any clue about where to acquire a hose-clip  (collier) or a cable tie (revsan) with which I could bolster the threatened weld.

But the scenery and tranquility of the ride were magic, and so on I plodded…

until I arrived at the city of Metz…

where I made directly for the municipal campground right in the centre alongside the river.  Except they (very rudely) wouldn’t accept me because I wanted a power outlet, even though I offered to pay for a powered RV site (no, for RVs only, and no, tents don’t get power and no, you cant use our power or the camp’s facilities’ power either – bad luck, move on, we’re full).  That left me with only hotel options to try for.  I guess they haven’t read the brochures extolling Metz as an ebike-friendly stopover.

Seems like a nice lively town though, Metz, and a couple of guys drinking at an Irish pub gave me directions to the Ibis hotel and suggested I try it, which I did, and found it to my liking and at €65, within my budget.  The rooms are plain but they do have an actual bath in the bathroom, which is a big bonus as far as I’m concerned, and breakfast was included.

Saturday 21 July, 2018.  Metz to Nancy | 82 km| 

No reason to tarry any longer in Metz, so I chuffed off towards Nancy with not a little trepidation that I might come unstuck regarding a failed luggage rack any time soon.

And it wasn’t long in coming either.  The other rack strut (not the one with the noticeable weld crack) completely sheared off just a few kilometers out of town.  Not good!  After nearly slicing off a piece of my nose trying to untwist some barbed wire I’d liberated from a fence to effect a running repair to no avail, I bit the bullet, staunched the bleeding nose with a plaster and wheeled the bike about 1 kilometer on to where a concentration of river-side shacks afforded more possibility of finding help.

I got lucky too.  There were 3 people enjoying a few beers on their patio (at 10.30 in the morning) at the first shack I came to and I asked them if they had any wire (fil de fer).  They (Serge and Juliette and their friend Jean) were trying to be helpful but they didn’t have any wire, so I elaborated my requisition to include a collier and/or revsan. They got the picture alright, and sat me down for a large snifter of brandy while Jean went off to his place to rustle up something that might be useful (I actually thought he was going off to the ‘Wave Actisud’ shopping centre nearby to buy hose-clips and cable-ties, which I’d mentioned I was aiming towards).

Anyway, good ol’ Jean reappeared after about half an hour with 2 hose-clips, 6 cable-ties and a coat-hanger from his own cabin, so I guess they understood my French alright. In pretty quick order I was then able tie up the broken strut with one of the hose-clips (as an anchor point) and a couple of the zip-ties and bid adieu to my new friends.  I kept the rest of Jean’s offering in reserve in case the other strut failed too.

And fail it did too. I moved on gingerly towards Nancy and within 20 km the other strut went – which I repaired under that bridge in the photo above – and about 10 km after that the weld on the top bracket also broke clean through and I had to use a piece of the coat hanger on that.  I’d been emailing Fabian at Velo bike shop in Aachen where I bought the bike, to send me a replacement rack to the nearest R&M dealer (which happened to be in Metz where I’d just been, as it turned out), but wasn’t receiving any reply (he actually had replied with exactly that solution but my system didn’t deliver the emails for 3 days).

Not knowing whether R&M were going to honour the warranty, or even whether they were still open over summer (many businesses, including my local Maastricht bike shop, shut down for a few weeks in July/August), and by now pretty certain I’d have trouble finding a competent aluminium welder in France, I decided I’d better abandon the trip and head back to Aachen by train as quickly as I could.

After a long and exhausting day in the heat, with 3 unscheduled stops for more repairs and many missed turns – both the bike track and the route signs had completely deteriorated by now – I eventually reached the outskirts of Nancy and went through some pretty grim looking suburbs into the centre.  Nancy is ugly and inhospitable in my opinion.

I found accommodation at another Ibis and set about organizing a train ticket for the next day (Sunday).  No chance of buying zip-ties or hose-clips in all of Nancy on Saturday, so I resigned myself to an early dinner at the restaurant next door to Ibis.  It was surprisingly good, and the waiter, David, a real comic.  Helpful too, as he suggested I try the markets on Sunday to get more repair supplies (I’d used up Jean’s already).

Sunday July 22, 2018.  Nancy to Maastricht |mostly by train; only 65 km of cycling|

So as per David’s directions, early Sunday I got on the trolley bus to the main station and then took the No.2 bus to Le Marché du Haut du Lièvre way out in the ‘burbs at Maxeville.  These predominately Arab/African markets had what I needed, and by 10am I was back at the Ibis with a reel of baling wire, a packet of zip-ties and a set of hose-clips (bought from 3 different vendors at extreme ends of the vast market-place for no more or no less than exactly €1.60 each – making me think that €1.60 is perhaps the universal price of everything that is sold at that particular market).

I wasn’t able to book a train out of Nancy’s main railway station because the platforms there are not bike-accessible, but the DBahn website implied that I could do so at the suburban station of Laneuveville-devant-Nancy.  Though nobody I spoke to at the hotel or in David’s restaurant had ever even heard of that station and said I shouldn’t try for it,  at lesst Google maps avowed it did exist and so that’s where I went.  Well, it did take me quite a while to find it and only did find it in the end because I happened to notice a certain minor street called Rue La Gare (Station Street) in about the right place.  This is what I found after passing through a broken gate:

My first thoughts were “this cant be right, surely a train hasn’t stopped here for years. I should have listened to everyone’s advice”.  But then I spotted the spanking new electronic departures board (other side of the ‘tMAX’ shelter and not visible in the photo) which duly listed, in sparkly LED lights, my train, the 1.07 to Lunéville, as per the DBahn website!  A few seconds after this picture was taken, I was stood in front of the departure board trying to decipher whether “prochain train non arrêt” might be referring to my desired train not stopping at that particular station, and was just about coming to that conclusion ….when…. bloody hell!…that next train, a TGV (Train á Grande Vitesse, or “High Speed Train”) doing about 200 kilometers an hour, came hurtling by.  It was in my field of view for of all of 2 seconds and nearly sucked me off the platform as it swooshed by, and indeed I just had time to grab the buffeting bike before the after-wash dragged it too onto the tracks.

Half an hour later my 1.07 to Lunéville duly tootled up and I clambered aboard, and there was no drama purchasing a ticket to Strasbourg via Lunéville from the conductor. At Strasbourg, though, I couldn’t buy a ticket to Aachen, and I’m afraid to say that at this point I started to learn to love to hate the French a little. The ticket clerks were slow and downright rude.  Firstly, they wouldn’t let me bring the bike into the vast and nearly empty ticketing hall, so basically if you have a loaded bike and are travelling alone you therefore can’t travel on a train.  Luckily, a group of Dutch cyclists offered to mind my bike for me outside the hall while I bought a ticket.  Still no good: “within France no problem, but you can’t take a bicycle from France into another country.  It is illegal” (even though the “other country” is only one stop down the line and that same train continues on to my destination, with no border protocols in between).  The Dutch, so they told me later, were on the same trip and had gotten round this problem by simply not declaring they had bikes.

No bother, I simply had to ride the 5km into Germany and catch the same train at Kehl instead, where I  purchased a ticket for myself and the bike all the way to Aachen out of a ticketing machine for €118. But it was a bit hairy because I had no printed itinerary giving the all-important platform transfers and interchange times.

It was OK  in the end, though, because a Dutch cycling couple, Pieter and Dori, were going the same way as far as Cologne and I just followed them as they changed trains.  We had an interesting 3-hour conversation with Vladimir, a Ukranian cyclist, in broken German.  He was totally enthralled with Holland (he went from Amsterdam to Aachen in 4 days and spent a total of €15), somehow got flooded and left his wife and most of his belongings in Bonn to dry out, cycled on to have a decent look round Switzerland by himself and was returning to Bonn to collect his…well, his wife, I suppose.

Europe 2018:  The trip so far | 1,600 km|

The following map recaps the routes of my first two attempts at going to the Atlantic via the Rhine and Loire Rivers and back to Maastricht along the Atlantic and North Sea coastlines.  The distance above is as per the total bike odometer reading, and includes other local trips that were not part of the main journey itinerary.

Responsive map: click on the ‘expand’ icon (top right) to view full page, or use mouse or fingers to zoom in or out.

-ends-

#45  The Vennbahnweg and Moselle River:  Maastricht to Nancy |545 km|