Day 10 Regensburg, Germany. Awesome Places and Awesome People

Tony's View

What a day! We have so much to share, we have to leave some out. The people we met today were awesome! First, we rode to the Ingolstadt City Center. The picture to the left shows just what it looks like. The City Centers are surrounded by walls, and there are gates to enter like the one to the right. Yes, I did get us lost and added 4 more miles to our ride today before even leaving town. This time it wasn't all me. We ran into construction detours.

Then I had to take another picture of the farm barns connected to the houses.
They are actually in town with livestock, but just a small amount of livestock. The farmers here live together in town and ride their tractors to their fields. Every little town we come into just fascinates me. Right beside this farm house was the church in the middle of town. It seems like almost all towns have the church in the middle.

Instead of showing the inside of this church, we are showing you the well manicured grave sites outside of the church. I took about 10 pictures of all thesebeaufitul monuments. The pictures on both sides. Here are two of them. 

 We stopped into this next little town to check out the church, and these two nice guys were right outside of the church selling produce. When I went to take a picture, the older gentleman stood by Joan and the younger one went to stand by his tractor. Reminds me of Puthoff. He would make a good German farmer except that they are nice to bicyclists. Anyway, we spent 45 minutes just talking to these guys. They became our good friends. We bought some raspberries, plums and a tomato from them. I ate the 3 plums right there in front of him and told Joan to get more. The farmer got a bag and just started to fill it up. Joan said sure, let's get more. He started to throw in a bunch because business was slow today. He said everyone is on a holiday (vacation). He said in fact you are holiday too, and we all laughed. Like a true farmer, he said I don't get holidays. I just work. Joan and I talked to them while we went inside the church individually. The church was beautiful again. The four pictures below are the insides of this very small town church. When I was talking to the younger guy (probably 40 years old), he said just don't cross the ropes up by the altar or an alarm goes off. He said it is very loud and annoying 😀 The old guy just talked about the bike. When I opened up my map to get going, he looked over my phone and had to show me where he lived. He was so cute. He went out on the street to watch for traffic and let us know when we could go. People are just so nice.

We then rode farther and ran into this large power plant, as you can see in the photo to the left. The picture to the right is from the bike path showing a small town surrounded by walls and part of a castle. We came upon another Biergarten right on the bike path and just had to stop at this one. We got  good sausage and sauerkraut, bratwurst, a pretzel and beer. While sitting there, we watched a ferry, more like a big pontoon boat, taking people directly across the river. They were very busy.

After having a beer and food, we started riding again. We ran into miles and miles, acres and acres of hops. I had to get a closer look at them. Apparently, this is the prime area to grow hops. It kind of reminded me of when you see miles of grape vineyards, only better😀👍

Later, when we were on this path to the right, heavy grass was piled up in our lane so we were riding in the left lane, and when people would come from the other way, I would have to ride through the grass. Even out here in the boonies, it is amazing how many people are out riding bicycles.

In the picture above to the left, we were out in the middle of no where and came upon this crowd all over the bicycle path. We asked one guy what is going on and he said this is Weltenburg, the oldest brewery in the world. He also said they claim to make the best dark beer in the world. OK, we had to go in at this point. We sat by some people from Cologne, Germany. Joan is showing off her cheese cake with their coaster. To the right, I was enjoying the Barock-Dunkel, and showing off my coaster. It was very good. Must have been made by monks. Weltenburg Abby brewery is the oldest monastic brewery in the world, having been in operation since 1050. 


The other picture above shows how crowded it was inside the walls of the brewery area. The pictures above and to the right are inside the chapel by the brewery. It said absolutely no pictures, but they didn't realized that we were doing a blog and you all need to see it. 👍


The chapel was much better than the pictures show.

Outside the chapel was a gift shop that Joan went into. The pictures above shows how people would come up and examine the bike. You can also see that they would take pictures of it. They would come up to me and start talking to me about it. I would just smile and say English only. They would smile back and just keep talking to me in German. I would think. "Joan where are you?" LOL. People are just so nice. But where were all these people coming from?
We got on our bicycle and saw this big limestone cliff in the picture to the right and thought, "now where?" I looked at my map and it said to take a ferry. Aha,that is where all these people were coming from. We were expecting a small ferry like the one that we saw at lunch, but it was huge and carried large crowds.

 We then loaded this long bicycle on the ferry which took up a lot of room. I was so glad that they allowed our tandem, otherwise we would of been in big trouble. We sat upstairs on the ferry with these nice people. The older gentleman knew English pretty well and was always smiling. The younger two by me were dating and knew English even better so we learned lots from them. The young girl on the right was the only grandchild of the couple, married 52 years, on the other side. We teased her about being spoiled.

As you can see by the size of the crowd, the bicycle was tough getting off the boat.

Leaving the boat, we saw this cool bicycle bridge. It is U shaped, crossing the Danube river. It was awesome how they built and supported it. Joan wondered why they would do that. Great question. It wasn't cheap, but it is definitely memorable. 

 The activity is really starting to increase in the Danube. We are seeing many boats pulling skiers, beaches, canoes, kayaks, swimming, etc. We saw our first of two cruise ships. One was the Viking River Cruise lines in the picture and the other was the Tauck River Cruise lines. Neat to see. Joan and I have thought about taking one sometime. I could probably handle this with my motion sickness.

Joan and I got to this one point, still following my map. when this guy rode up beside us and asked us if we were going to Regensburg. We said yes and he said there is a better way with less traffic. He turned around with us and pointed us in the other direction explaining this better route. It was about 4 miles off of my maps. We blindly followed his directions, but it paid off. We got to cross this bicycle only bridge in the photo to the left. It also cut off about 1.5 miles which kept us at 60 miles total for the day even after I got us lost in the morning. Funny thing, a little way down the road, we ran into that same guy coming from the other direction. He really went out of his way for us. He actually came back from the other way again and made sure we knew how to get to our hotel. We were OK and are spending two nights in another AirBNB. There was so much that happened today, but I cut a lot out because it was getting too long.

Joan's Extras

Today was such a full day of adventure that by 3:00 we were both thinking it was much later than it really was, and we still had lots of riding until we arrived in Regensburg. We texted this picture of me eating raspberries to Wade because he can devour fruit. We downed all of the raspberries while dripping juice on the bag. We not only had a great time talking and laughing with those guys, the food was delicious. 

We tend to see similar faces of people who are traveling long distances along the Donau. One of them, a guy and his son, has a bike that is similar to ours. We crossed paths with them several times yesterday and several times today. We wave and feel like they are  friends on our journey, but have yet to really meet them. 
It's amazing how many families with kids, couples old and young, or friends are traveling with paniers. In the states, we are kind of rare cycling with our bags, but here it is so common. We even use Ortlieb bags, which are made in Germany, so we fit in that much more.

In Regensburg, after Tony finally managed to fit our bike into our room after disassembling several pieces of it, we both just wanted to shower, eat, get the blog done and sleep. We went to the closest restaurant, which was Italian. Tony thought about trying the wine, but he bailed when he saw that they had Weltenburg beer, so he got more large beer.

After dinner we walked to the Donau ,which is almost right outside our door. It is amazing that the wall along the Donau was lined with people for as far as we could see, and it is a Wednesday.

Tomorrow, we rest and check our more of Regensburg.