May 30, 2014

We sense a change in the weather as soon as we stick our noses outside the tent this morning.  It is still grey and cloudy, but now it is cold and we need our thick jackets on for the first time in a long time.  We’re soon packed up and on our way.  Just down the road from the camp-site we come across a supermarket and so we completely restock our supplies.  At least we’ll eat today.  

A couple of kilometres down the road and we’re back at the Rhine.  As we turn to start to run south with the river we feel the wind on our backs – wow, a tailwind, the first time we haven’t been battling into the wind for nearly two weeks.  We’re absolutely flying with no effort at all.   A tailwind stays with us all day, a first for the tour.  Another first is that we spend virtually the whole day on dirt tracks. We are right at the side of the river on the east bank (up until this point we have been on the west bank) which gives us a great view of the river all day. Normally I would be a bit dismayed to have to ride for 80 kilometres off-road, but today with the wind behind us it was no harder than riding into the wind on tarmac.  

There is much less river traffic now than we saw on the upper Rhine, there are still barges and river cruisers but not many.  We were hoping to catch up with ‘Vera’, a barge we raced all day on Day 49 of the trip – she had a cargo of Ford cars from the factory we passed between Düsseldorf and Koln but we saw no sign of her; I expect she has delivered her cargo and gone back downstream by now.  When we stop for a drink a German cyclist asks us if we have any chain oil with us.  He tells us that he has been looking for a cycle shop for days.  We give him our bottle, which he promptly empties on his chain and gives us back the empty bottle!  Now we’ll be looking for days for a cycle shop.

We can see mountains looming on the horizon and when we come to the approach to the camp-site we’re going to stay at tonight we face our first hill since we started out from the Hoek van Holland.  It is a bit of a shock to the legs and a worry given the climbs we face over the next week or so.   It is amazing that we have cycled between 5 and 6 hours a day, every day for the last 13 days but the first hill we come to makes us struggle.  It just goes to show that if you want to climb hills, you have to climb hills, nothing else prepares you for them.