Source of the Danube

What can I say about today? Weather perfect; blue skies, temperatures upper 60's to mid 70's and road surface great. The roads in California are getting pretty rough to ride on. California generally has not resurfaced their roads in years, however in both France and Germany, generally the roads (including the rural ones) have been pretty nice.

Take a look at the Garmin plot below and you will see that we had a climb to about the 32 km mark and then generally down hill from there. The climb was pretty challenging, with some spots hitting 13 and 12 percent grade, but most of the time it was about 11 percent. It's during these long challenging climbs that you just need to find your pace. It will take time to reach the top and other riders may be faster or slower than you, but you need to ride your own rate. Go too fast and you might "burn out your legs" for the rest of the ride, ride too slowly and you'll just use too much energy.

I hope the photos from today capture the beauty of the ride, the green forest, the mountain stream, the blue sky.

We hit the lunch spot at the 42 km mark, and after some sandwiches and bananas, we were off to the final stop 18 km away.  The four of us; Jim, Steve, Lori and myself zoomed into town after following a bike path for about 10 km and decided to head to the "source of the Dambue", a spring in the center of town. Well, the GPS headed us in the correct direction, but when we got there, it was undergoing restoration and we couldn't get close because of the construction.

We then headed back toward the center of town, found an outdoor cafe and parked ourselves there for about 2 hours or so, waving down other riders as they went past.  We must of generated a lot of business for the cafe today!!

It was only a couple more kilometers to the campground along some bike paths where we set up our tents and had a couple of cool ones.

Tomorrow promises to be really fun as we start to follow the Dambue along the bike paths. They say the we'll be on the  path all the way to Vienna.

Well that's all for today, Happy Biking,

Brian