7th May (sunny and hot 22C) 46km

I’d only just woken up when Pete walked in the bedroom with a cup of tea for each of us.  It was great to finally sleep through the night and not be the first one up for a change.

On the agenda today was a bike ride up the Danube with our hosts Katja and Stefan and their son Tamino.  We loaded all the bikes into and onto their Volkswagen van before hitting the road to see a special church in Obermarchtal.  It was about a 40 minute drive away and as per usual my body had soon forgotten it had a full night’s sleep and my eyelids began to droop and my head to nod.  Thank goodness I don’t get the same way on a bike!

Obermarchtal was another baroque church but this time there was a lot of wood carving inside and again lots of gold paint and incredible detail.

Ju suits down to wait while Pete confesses
his sins - might be a long wait Ju!

However there was a beautiful day beckoning outside so it was time to head to the Danube valley for our bike ride.  This started at a town called Neumeule and the rock formations in this area gave a dramatic look to the valley.  We unloaded the bikes and started off down the mostly flat ride with plenty of shade alongside the river.  It was by now quite hot in the sun so the shade was very welcome.  We stopped early on for our picnic as we were all pretty hungry, and the scene was reminiscent of something out of the Sound of Music.

There were a couple of old castles perched high on the rocks dating back from 1500.  

You can’t imagine how they even went about building these castles in these seemingly inaccessible places.

In the town of Beuron we stopped for a delicious iced coffee and shared an ice-cream sundae as well – delicious!  Then we pedalled another 6kms before turning around and heading back to the van.  

Radler stop where we saw two kids almost get run over

We stopped for a Radler (citrus flavoured beer – delicious!) at an old farmhouse and watched as some old guy backed his car up, slowly bearing down upon two kids who were oblivious to what was happening.  We all thought because the guy was driving so slowly that he had seen the kids but he just kept getting closer and closer to them until we all shouted and screamed at him to stop – which luckily he did when he was about 20 cm away!  We all knew that had been a close one!

Monastery in Beuron

The rest of the ride passed uneventfully until about ten mins from the end when a thin four foot long black snake writhed across the path in front of me.  I couldn’t be sure but I think it had a white diamond on its head.  I described it to Katja and Stefan and they hadn’t heard of any such snake in Germany so Anne, please feel free to google it and report back!

We checked our speedo and we’d done 46km when we got back to the carpark and it felt good to be exercising again.  The drive home saw me napping most of the way and I missed the downpour that came over for about five minutes, 

We were much later than we had anticipated so we stopped in Vogt at a lovely old restaurant where we had a very traditional and delicious German dinner.  Katja and Tamino also gave me a taste of their dinners which were also delicious!  Finished the drive home and had a cuppa while I uploaded the blog and we all sat round chatting until midnight.  A wonderful end to a great day and a great day to end our stay with a lovely family.