18 June, 2015

Our plan this morning is to wake up to blue skies and sunshine so that we are tempted to stay for a day and laze about reading books and doing a few jobs.  The reality is black skies and the pitter patter of rain on the tent.  So we go back to sleep for an hour or two to see if is going to clear up.  It doesn’t.  Plan B;  we’ll pack up the tent and move on to the next biggish town, Melk, about 45 kilometres away, by which time the sun will be out and we can set up camp and laze about and read books for the rest of the day.

We are going to ride on the quieter south shore today to avoid the noisy traffic and hustle and bustle. It is a good choice, we hardly see any traffic or other cyclists.  We are missing out on some of the towns along the way, but actually we get a better view of them from the far side of the river.

There is a howling wind as well as the black skies, but the rain has stopped and the wind is a tailwind.  It only takes us 2 hours to cover the 45 kilometres by which time we still have black skies and a howling wind.  No, it’s not tempting us to stay.  The problem is that we have about 3 full days cycling left before we reach our destination and 10 days left before our flight home.  We will either have to start taking some time off or ride in loops once we reach Bratislava.  Nevertheless, we carry on and do our average kilometres in super quick time.

Along the way we often see signs like this one:

Now I know that in 100 metres I need to watch out for the “stromgewinnungsanlage”, what the **** is one of those?  My 4 week crash course in German last year isn’t helping at all.