In which Doris takes a boat and Sid rides on the Danube bike path.
The day is made dramatic by the Melk race (or re-creation of the Blue Train – D.) between Doris in the good ship Passau and Sid cycling down the Danube towpath to the town of Melk.
Numbers for Sid’s day: 116 kms and 273 metres
For Sid this is a day off from the panniers, just taking the back box of spares and a precautionary jacket. It reminds me of walking in the hills when we would put down our packs at a col and run up to a summit, bouncing along without the customary 36 or 40 lbs. What’s more this is as near flat as makes no difference.
Sid sets out at 8.45 and the boat leaves Linz at 9.00. (I thought you might enjoy these pictures, which remind you quite how good the human eye is at picking out tiny detail in a really big scene. I could clearly see Sid on the bridge. D.) (Oh and it also shows you just how huge the Danube is. And, by the way, not at all blue.)
Early on Sid, saw this strange sculpture. It is a memorial for prisoners who built the railway to Gusen camp.
Soon after 10.00 Sid has decided on a coffee stop at Mauthausen and is suddenly taken hostage. PIC when it arrives from dudes. The villains are a pair of brothers recceing a bike route for the Austrian cycle organisation. One has on a Eurovelo cycle top. More, he has developed a route from Ironbridge in the UK Midlands to Bologna Italy with the theme of industrial heritage. So I gave him both barrels on the subject of Eisenach and the Wartburg Museum. Sid was held in his chair and forced, forced I tell you, to enjoy the local cake and coffee. Before I leave I am told to follow the R1 and to cross the river at Greim.
(With the assistance of the current, the GPS said we were doing 28kph, and I thought that with Sid usually doing around 20kph, maybe a bit more as the road was straight and flat, I would be in with a chance of winning the race. But I reckoned without the locks. It takes the boat 15mins to get through the enormous, automated locks. Our boat is about half the width of the lock – there are some massive cruise ships which are “DanubeMax” – but at 3 stories tall we only just fitted under the bridges. You can have big boats on the Danube but they need to be floating pancakes.)
Sid has never had such a day when you can get into a cadence and just keep turning the legs over as the little kilometres fly by. Sadly this was to be interrupted in Greim. The R1 was signalled straight on through the village and out onto the B3. You cannot cross the river and be on the R1. I expected that the B3, quite a noisy road, would soon lead to a quiet tow path.
When it didn’t after a few kms I turned back to Greim and added to the Epicness of the day taking a bike ferry across the Danube. (I feel a bit bad about this. By now I was talking to Anna and Alistair, Danube cycling veterans who were just ticking all the boxes by coming back to do a section to Greim that they had missed the first time. And when Sid rang for advice they told him he could turn round and get the bike ferry. If he hadn’t, he would have won the Blue Train race. Mind you, if he hadn’t, he would have had a less good time on the scenic but steeply-wooded section from Greim to Ybbs and might have been squashed by a lorry on the main road, so let’s not have any regrets. Also they gave me tons of useful tips for the Danube to Budapest and all the way to the Black Sea, so I am a very happy Doris.)
On the other side is Eurovelo Route 6. By this time I was well behind the Passau but going pretty well despite the route diversions in Ybbs. In the end Sid was about 20 minutes behind at Melk and found Doris reading on the river bank.
(I’d left Anna and Alistair on the boat. The end of their mission, and Alistair’s birthday too – time to celebrate! But they were having mixed feelings about their success in finally completing the whole of the Danube after years of doing it two weeks at a time. What would their next personal Epic Journey be? We debated the merits of other river trips – the Po, the Loire, the Rhine, the possibility of connecting up trips using the Danube-Rhine canal. But then Anna remembered: We missed out a little bit of the Danube in Belgrade when we got public transport… We need to finish that bit too! Happiness was restored. We humans dearly love a bit of pointless purpose in our lives, a self-imposed battle against entropy, and Sid and Doris would be the first ones to cheerfully admit to that.)
The flora and fauna story is limited to this rather sad picture of a slow worm, too slow to get away from a bicycle wheel.
The car story is pretty thin: an Irish Green Beetle being used as a wedding car (it is Saturday) and a Cadillac Convertible seen in Melk that Sid places at about 1959. Further research to be done.
Melk is famous for its abbey. Our visit has been cursory, but did include sitting in the warm shade in one of the monks’ large courtyards and now concludes with drinks in the abbey gardens. My, this touristing is tough.
The battle for today’s #virtualsouvenir was fought at the Topferei Brandl pottery shop on the main street in Melk. Doris favoured the vultures; Sid was more for the strangely bemused fish.
Tonight’s hotel is a very modest affair compared with last night’s Dom Platz Hotel, but what would life be without contrast?
New excitement – Doris will have a go at cycling tomorrow. Krems is a flat 40ish kilometres away down the river. We may be back in cycling mode, though of course Epic-ness has been preserved over the last two days with trains, boats and automobiles.
(PS Anna also gave me the excellent hashtag #betterviewedfrombelow to describe the many hilltop places of interest you might look up to from your bicycle and say… exactly.)