11 June, 2015

The campsite last night turned out to be even worse than anticipated. The mosquitoes were so bad that once we had put the tent up we had to stay inside the inner tent to prevent us from being eaten alive.  We could not emerge even to cook dinner and had to resort to tinned fish and bread again.

The clouds of mosquitoes are still there in the morning and so packing up is done at double quick speed.  We’d wanted to have a day off today as it has been nearly two weeks since our last full day off, but it was not to be.  We look at the map and decide that there is a campsite about 70 kilometres away at Neuburg, so we’ll head there and hope it is better than the one we have just left.

The route criss-crosses the Danube and is mainly through agricultural fields of cereal crops. Ever since we arrived in Germany we have been seeing strange watchtower things in the fields – anyone know what they are for?  We can only guess that they are something to do with hunting.

We notice that the electric cables over the river have metal silhouettes of birds of prey fixed to the wires to discourage birds from flying into the cables – such a good idea.

We pass through one or two small villages before we reach Donauwörth, a good place for a pitstop.  As we sit with coffee and cakes we see most of the people that had stayed at the campsite last night cycle by.  During the tour we tend to see the same cyclists travelling the route day after day – interestingly, even though some are faster and some are slower, with all the stopping and starting along the way, usually everyone turns up at the same campsite in the evening.  In France we saw the same couple (with a poodle and table and chairs on their bikes which I have mentioned before) almost every day for a fortnight.  We seem to have lost track of them since we reached Germany, but there are several other couples we have been seeing over the past few days since we set off on the Danube Trail.

During the late morning the route starts to get a bit hilly, nothing too strenuous, but what we do find is that as our pace slows when we are climbing we are suddenly engulfed in clouds of mosquitoes again.  We only manage to shake them off when we reach the top of the climb and race downhill.  Looks like our plan to camp again tonight needs to be abandoned.

When we reach Neuburg we find a cheap hotel fairly quickly, giving us time to do a few chores and have a quick look could.  However, we don’t want to spend a rest day in a hotel – we can’t wash and lubricate the bikes in a hotel room.  If the mosquito problem persists we’re going to end up cycling every day and reaching our destination well ahead of schedule.  That would be a shame because we have given ourselves extra time to use during this latter part of the tour to explore the areas we haven’t visited before.