It rained most of the night as I slept in my hotel room and I woke to gray skies and drizzle. Well, I had been expecting that!
One of the few cool things about the place I was staying is there were three supermarkets within one minute of the hotel, so I made myself some coffee in the hotel kitchen, and then went to the supermarket and bought some lunch meat/cheese, bread rolls, some nuts, yogurt, a couple apples and a couple bananas. That should hold me for the day!
As I started riding, I could still feel the residual effects of that cramp a couple days ago, but it certainly was better. I stopped two or three times in the first half an hour to stretch, and it felt better. There was a pretty steady rain from the moment I left until early afternoon.
That morning, I had made some new routes to get me where I planned to go. They were on more major roads, all paved with less elevation gain, but I figured since it was Sunday, and it was raining, I would have neither trucks nor holiday traffic and my gamble worked out. Most of the day was quite calm until I got to the bridge under construction and had to reroute again around it.
I’m riding parallel to and sometimes over  the dramatic gorge cut by the Vltava River, with high bridges that cross at periodic intervals. I got to an intersection that was detouring traffic away from one of those bridges, but it seemed indicate that bicycles could cross the bridge and go in any direction and still be fine.
And the EV7 route indicated that I should go across that bridge. But when I rode the mile down to the bridge it was certainly under construction, and it was clear that no one was supposed to cross. Yes, there was a way that I could have gotten across, but I thought with it being a Sunday and me being all by myself and me being basically an old man that it was probably a pretty stupid idea to try so I accepted the 10 mile detour around the bridge under construction and went over a new bridge, along with the rest of the traffic. A younger man would maybe not have been as wise. 😉
From there, I rode towards the campground that I knew about, but also began looking for a hotel since it had been a long day and it was kind of crappy weather. I succeeded. I booked a room in a pension, got a beer and a room and then had dinner served on the deck overlooking the clearing sky. Life is good!
I have not looked at the weather forecast for tomorrow yet, but I believe that I will make it into Prague tomorrow night.
Leave a Reply