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.

Day 9 Ingolstadt, Germany. More Big Climbs

Joan's View

The plan for today was 36 miles, but it turned into 45 miles. Our first added mileage was backtracking into Donauworth to the bike shop that our airbnb host recommended for getting our disc brakes repaired. We had been there yesterday on our search already. Yesterday, however, I failed to read the sign that they are on vacation this week. Drat, I definitely could use more German language skills. You can see the sign on the picture to the right. The other bike shop in town thankfully was open. 







There, we were greeted by these friendly German customers who wanted to share their knowledge of the area and practice their English. They even got their map out on the hood of their car. It's funny how I like to practice my German, but they like to practice their English just as much. The young owner that helped Tony with the brakes kindly worked on the bike even though he was super busy with other customers. 







Somewhere after leaving Donauworth for the second time, we found this couple studying a field of Silphie. Not knowing what it was and with them speaking English, they explained that this crop is used for electric energy. Now we know because we have seen it many days and it just looks like a field of flowers.

Further down the road, we gained extra mileage several times when we followed the Donau bike path instead of Tony's mapped out plans. Somehow, some way, we ended up in this remote forest. There we no other people around, just the sound of some screeching birds. We not only packed on extra mileage going that way but also extra climb, and I mean seriously climb. The sweat was rolling off of Tony and the chain fell off several times probably because of shifting so much in gravel. Obviously, we took several breaks in the woods. We could see the Donau river way below, but Tony wasn't exactly sure how we were going to get back there. He even walked over to the cliff to get a picture of the Donau. You can see the bicycle path along the Danube way down there if you look close. It was one of those times in an adventure that tests you.

I think Tony can smell the sauerkraut.

Safely out of the forest and back on farm roads, we discovered this field of plump cabbage. Looks like somebody is getting ready for Octoberfest?! 












We took another snack break near one of the many shrines at a crossroad. It also conveniently had a corn field nearby which is great when you need to go in to inspect the corn or for other reasons. 😉














Our bike trail also took us by Schloss Grunau, a huge old castle in the middle of fields. The roads near there were lined with massive trees that provided lots of cool shade as we pedaled on them.

 We made a stop for food again at my favorite grocery store, Aldi's. Tony got a fresh pretzel this time from their vending like machine for bread. So cool!
















This next picture is a goat playground. We showed you a chicken playground a few days earlier so now it's a goat playground. The goat is barely visible to the left of the picture. 

We also stopped to watch a young guy training his horse for jumping. It looked like he was just practicing teaching the horse to respond to him before he started jumping with him. 

Tony's Extras

 What a day!
It started out being an easy ride to our next place. Then the hills showed up. My thought is Joan down played it a little. We climbed over 1500 feet again today on a flat day. I was super frustrated, tired and full of complaining. When I walked to the cliff and realized there was a trail down there, I sounded like my Mom when she was without her filter the last year or so. Sh*$ 😉. Love you Mom and sure do miss you.

The picture above is a cool bridge. There was a bicycle path on both sides and it went up and down like a roller coaster. It is very unique how it was constructed. Maybe just geeking out about bridges again. For dinner we went to a Spanish restaurant thinking it would be like Mexican. Wrong again, the menu was in Spanish and translated to German. Well, that didn't help me. Joan asked about tortillas and they said it wasn't Mexican. I asked, looking at the menu, what is this and is it good? The server said yes, so I said I will take it. It came out in a pig with flames of burning grease. I had to cook it myself by turning the tiny spit. In the picture, they were showing me how. It did come with lots of bread though. After cooked, the spicy sausage was excellent. Must have been the cook. 😀 We went in to the old city to get gelato and visit an ATM machine. No problems, just send the bill to Choice One. While in town we visited another beautiful church that was a Basilica. Also while walking downtown, we saw this cool bicycle to haul your kids around in. I can see Nick taking Luke and Todd on GOBA next year on a bicycle like that. They would have  a great view. See below for both pictures..