Day 30: The Century
Today was a very long day on the bike. 161km, or just over 100 miles. We've now done that. And hopefully won't have to do it again.
We knew we had a long day coming, so left the campsite outside of Heidelberg promptly at 9:00am. We followed the Neckar River west to Mannheim, where we biked north along the east side of the Rhein. (After about thirty minutes of figuring out how to cross the Rhein, and where the bike route actually went.)
About 10 minutes after crossing the Rhein, trying to make up for lost time, we ran into a river. Turns out, the bike route has a ferry.
So we waited on the shore for the ferry to come across the river, carrying another group of bike tourists in the other direction, and paid 50 cents for the ferry. Thirty minutes later, we were back on the road heading down the Rhein towards Worms.
At Worms we crossed the Rhein back to the West side, and headed due North up to Mainz. The trip was beautiful, through lots of small towns. On the way, we stopped at a bakery, and everyone ordered at least 3 different pastries to eat (we had a small breakfast.) Needless to say, it was delicious.
After the bakery, we were just crushing kilometers. Nate absolutely killed the day, leading for the entire 100 miles. The entire day felt as if we were biking into the wind, and although I'm sure that's not true, it felt like it.
We finally rolled into our finally city (Bingen) at 5pm, and went into city to get dinner and breakfast at the local grocery store. Nate, much to his delight, found a 5L keg for 7 euros, so we rigged that to Matt's bike. Not only was it cheap, it was also cold!!! True to the theme of the trip, he made Matt carry it back to camp.
On the way back to camp, we heard someone say "Keg on a bike, nice!" Whoa, someone was speaking English! We stopped and talked to this guy for a little bit. He was from Pennsylvania, living in Bingen and working near buy. He was a chatty fellow, and was very happy to talk English with some people for awhile instead of German. After chatting with him for 10 minutes or so, we said goodbyes, and biked back to camp. Along the way, we got a ton of looks and comments from people pointing at Matt's mini keg, and when we arrived at camp a cheer rose from a bunch of Germans hanging out at the front. I would of loved to understand what they were saying.
After paying for the campsite, we cooked dinner, drank beer, and took showers. We talked with another U.S. group bike touring (they had traveled around 10km today) but they left because there is no WiFi here. There are a few other bike tourers here, including one guy from France that talked too us for a little while, and a loud family next to us.
Tomorrow should be a much shorter day. Only 80km north up the Rhein, then we start heading up to Luxembourg City. We're told this route is beautiful, so we're looking forward to it. We also plan tomorrow to find a beer garden to stop at and get Radler's, and beer mixed with Sprite for bikers, so they can drink and keep biking. For now, however, we're all just hoping for a long nights sleep.