One of the great things about traveling through Austria and Germany is that the breakfasts are amazing! As a cyclist, you need protein, fat, salt, and enough calories to fuel you through a good deal of your day. Every hotel I’ve stayed in has had a buffet with sliced meats, cheese, fresh bread rolls, muesli, boiled eggs, and lots of other things to fuel your journey. Today also included a pitcher of strong coffee that normally would be shared between two people, but I got the whole thing! That was fantastic!
For this trip, these are my last few miles on the Danube, and I appreciated how beautiful it was that morning. The river looked like a luminous hammered silver sheet in the morning light.
I took the path on the south side until I had to take a ferry over to the north side to take me into Linz.
On the ferry crossing the Danube, there was a lovely older French couple that I chatted with. It was super nice to be able to speak with people in their language!
They marveled at how little I was carrying, and took pictures of my bike! I reminded them that it was impossible for them to carry less since they are French. I challenged them and asked if they were carrying a glass jar of jam and some butter with them and a coffee pot, and they nodded yes enthusiastically as if to not do so would be paramount to a crime against humanity. Case made.
A few miles from Linz, I started to turn in a long hook towards the north, heading for the Czech Republic.
The beginning of the ride along the Danube was flat, and I had a bit of a tailwind, but as I turned up towards the north, it became a pretty strong headwind. I fought the wind most of the rest of the day, along with a pretty substantial climb to Bad Leonfelden.
I crossed a variety of landscapes on my way up to my final destination of Bad Leonfelden. The terrain was rolling, with some consistent long climbs near the end, making the second part of the day a lot tougher than the first. And yet the views were beautiful: open landscapes of cropland, and some interesting small streets through villages. Some of the time I was sharing a road with quite a few cars and trucks, but drivers were very courteous and considerate.
I arrived in Bad Leonfelden and found my hotel. It seemed deserted, and as I checked in and then chatted with the lady at the front desk, I found that I was basically right. It is a dormitory for a school nearby and all the kids had gone for the summer. The dorm converts to a hotel for the time students are gone. Just by chance I had booked the very first reservation for the period when it is open in the summer so I was in fact the only guest in the whole place. This evening a few people from Berlin will be joining me, but the place is basically completely empty.
The cool thing is, that meant there was plenty of room for me and my bike, and a place in the courtyard to dry out the tent since it was still wet from the last time I used it.
After getting myself settled, I went into town and had a lovely meal in another Middle Eastern restaurant. It’s kind of amazing to be in a really nice restaurant with good food, hearing the staff bounce between rapid Arabic, flawless German, and pretty good English too. I complemented the owner about his lovely restaurant and he beamed.
With the help of Google maps, I found my way back to the hotel, using a little footpath sandwiched between houses in the neighborhood.
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