Tandem down the Danube

The car demanded oil today. It's never done that before, so slightly worrying. But we have put it through its paces. Long hot drives with some big hills. The car isn't far off reaching 200,000 miles so it's getting on a bit...  Anyway, enough car talk. If it gets us back to blighty, that would be nice. We left our 'place in the Black Forest', and returned to Schömberg, partly to buy oil, partly to buy some food and partly to return to the bakery that we enjoyed sitting in for a cuppa, yesterday. It's funny how quickly you can feel an affinity for some places. This bakery became our local. For 12 hours. The chances of us visiting our local again, ever, are more or less nil... The beginning of our journey took us through more black forest. It was impressive. Big swooping curves, as we climbed hills and dropped down into wooded valleys. Well, the car did. But enough about that.  Eventually the land flattened out and the roads became Autobahns again. We have been ve...

We spent our last morning at Gertrude's air bnb and our last morning in Austria. We did our best to savour the view one last time, Kate dodged another egg at breakfast and we said our goodbyes. Gertrude is one of those people who takes being a good host very seriously. Our thanks to her was heartfelt.  The first hour or so of driving kept us in the alpine scenery and off the big roads. We have noticed that, whilst in France, every village has at least three hairdressers, in Austria, every village has a fire station! There must be a lot of call for their services. I suppose the houses do involve plenty of wood in their structure. Either that, or cats are continually getting stuck up trees... The inevitable happened at 11am. I needed coffee. We spotted a great big coffee shop. It was closed! At 11am! Is that even a thing? Then we hopped over the border into Germany and coffee shops abounded. What's more, the coffee was half the price.  And what's more, we stopped at a service...

 We seem to have ignored the thing that's been staring us in the face for the last week. The lake, which has dominated our view from the moment we wake up.  If we don't do something about that today, then we're too late. Today is the last day of our holiday. Ah, but I shall continue to blog for the next three days as we journey home. Don't think you've got off that lightly.  We knew that today would be the hottest day of the whole trip. We had to think carefully about what we could cope with. What came up tops? A bike ride of course. At least, for the first half of the day.  We still haven't actually cycled round the lake - probably the thing that most people do first. A ride round the lake is just nine miles long. We set off 'on task' but kind of went off at a tangent, half way round. We decided to head for a little town called Taxenbach. Only because we reckoned that by then, we would be happy to turn round. We made it to within a couple of kilometres ...

Wow. Today's blog had to start with that word. It started at breakfast with the usual words of wisdom from our Gertrude. We told her that we intended to go up the nearby mountain, called Schmitten Hohe. Ah, she said, today you will find a thousand line dancers at the top. We thought either Gertrude's pretty good command of the English language was letting her down or this was going to be some spectacle.  After breakfast we donned our walking boots and filled the rucksack with clothes to deal with the drop in temperature and walked into Zell am See. It was so ludicrously easy. A big notice at the cable car station said don't bother to queue if you have a voucher, just get straight on. There was no queue, so we got straight on. I was mildly surprised that there was no hint of a line dancer when there were supposed to be a thousand up there, but I decided that there was a logical explanation for this. There was. We took the wrong cable car. This one finished a quarter of the w...

 To continue the theme established yesterday, we did tomorrow, today. Putting it another way, we switched today and tomorrow.  We had planned to go up somewhere high today and walk round a bit. The factor which caused us to rethink was, as ever, the weather. I understand that there is some very hot weather happening in the UK at the moment? Here, the very hot weather is predicted for tomorrow and the following day. It seemed sensible, therefore, to ride the tandem today and go up high on the hot days, when we should be able to enjoy some cooler temperatures.  The thing is, we'll both find any excuse to cycle. I can't quite believe I'm saying that of Kate as well as myself. Nor can she... Once again, a chance remark to Gertrude at breakfast saved us a lot of bother. Never mind 'ask Jeeves', ask Gertrude! I told her we intended to take the train to Crimml, and cycle back. She told us the train currently only went as far as Mittersill. That sort of scotched that idea b...

We did yesterday today. The cycle ride that had to wait a day. We set off for the train station just in case it was easy enough to put the tandem on. It was. It was absurdly easy. We cycled to the station, put the tandem on a tandem shaped lift to convey it to the correct platform and waited four minutes for the train. (We hadn't bothered to look up any times) we wheeled the bike straight on to the train where there was ample space and showed the ticket inspector our voucher, meaning the ride was free. The idea was that we take the train to St. Johannes, and ride back home - well, to the air bnb.... I plotted the ride in my cycle computer, but when I tried to write Johannes, it insisted on Johannesburg. So today we cycled from Johannesburg to Zell am See. We had made a fairly early start and arrived at Jo'burg by 10:15. Good, we thought, we'll get some riding in before the heat really gets going. But the heat had already got going. It was intense. It was the sort of heat wh...