The Beautiful Blue Danube flows through some of my favorite lands. The foods remind me of Grandma, whose mother came from Bavaria, and good memories of Ed! I'll put links to the places we visited so you can visit them, too, online.
We met our Backroads group at the Hilton in Prague on Wednesday morning, July 29. After a 3-1/2 hour bus ride, we had lunch in
Museumsdorf Bayerischer Wald in Tittling, an open-air museum on the south edge of the Bavarian forest. Then we started biking! Here's the process for every ride: Miguel (in this pic) or Martina (our other leader) post a map of the day's route, and hands out instructions showing turn-by-turn kilometer readings, highlighting easy-to-miss turns. He talks us through it, and we put it into our clear plastic handlebar bag so that we can refer to it while we ride. Don't worry, we still got lost! The sweep chased us down.
The other support people, Karem and Kevin, parallel us in the two vans, stopping at good places where we can refill our water bottles and get some snacks. This went so well that it was hard to believe that this was the first summer with this route for
Backroads.
Our first glimpse of the Danube!!! It's really happening!
In
Vilshofen, we boarded the
Amasonata, our floating hotel for the next week. You
must click on the Amasonata link and see the luxury we lived in! They had set up an Oktoberfest on the dock, where we started to get to know our Backroads group. By the end of the week, we were apologizing to the other AmaWaterways guests for being so rowdy! There were 29 of us, with no twenty-something macho males. We had a complete range of biking skills from nearly first-timers to accomplished trekkers.
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| John, Cris, Jill, Jay and me. Prost! |
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| Lots of corn fields and distant views |
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| Some killer hills, worth walking up |
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| Rest stop with Karem. Whew! |
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| Cris takes a Kodak moment |
Cris and I had paid the extra for electric-assist bikes. I would have blown out my knees without it! During the whole week, I never hit the ground. I dropped the bike a couple of times, but managed to stay upright myself. Unfortunately, we did have one serious accident. An inexperienced rider tumbled over her handlebars in front of a truck! The driver stopped a couple of feet from her. She broke her bridge and her jaw. The Backroads leaders took her to a dentist and a maxillofacial doctor. She wanted to stay on the trip, and did, for a few days. We all made a big get-well card for her and bid farewell on Friday. She got into her personal doctor on Monday.
Lunch was at a castle or someplace beautiful three times, and on the Amasonata the other days.
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| With my new German friend, Jay and Jill, holding the "forever love" keys |
I met an older German man on a bridge over the Inn River. He tried to explain where the Bavarian forest and Austria ended and Germany began, and I tried to understand his German. I asked him to take our picture. He thought we wanted his picture. So here he is! The bridge was draped in chains full of locks that lovers put on to show that their love will last forever.
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| Arrived in Passau |
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| We had a walking tour of Passau |
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| Over-the-top Baroque St. Stephen's Cathedral. The organ has 17,774 pipes! |
Passau, the city of three rivers, sits on the confluence of the Inn, the Ilz, and the Danube. You can actually see the three different colors of water flowing together! This was on the border between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the German tribes. They are proud that Sissi, or
Empress Elisabeth, stayed here. Sissi is everyone's favorite Habsburg, all the way into Hungary!
For you genealogists, check out the inbreeding in these charts:
Habsburg through the centuries, from the 1300's to the end of World War I. Coin collectors will recognize the huge chin that meant they did not eat in public. The rate of stillbirths and maternal deaths was even higher than the already high rate for those centuries.
Passau was fascinating. This is only the end of day 2! Tomorrow will have more biking and walking.
The other support people, Karem and Kevin, parallel us in the two vans, stopping at good places where we can refill our water bottles and get some snacks. This went so well that it was hard to believe that this was the first summer with this route for Backroads.
In Vilshofen, we boarded the Amasonata, our floating hotel for the next week. You must click on the Amasonata link and see the luxury we lived in! They had set up an Oktoberfest on the dock, where we started to get to know our Backroads group. By the end of the week, we were apologizing to the other AmaWaterways guests for being so rowdy! There were 29 of us, with no twenty-something macho males. We had a complete range of biking skills from nearly first-timers to accomplished trekkers.
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