Train Travel with a Bike in Germany: A Mini Adventure

Yeah, we've made it to Lübeck, we beat the heat, the road works and diversions, the  tricky surfaces that slowed us down and after 1100km we have arrived!

The route today was tough because we were always on or next to big roads, including a major but quiet road next to a motorway.  Around Ludwigslust the bike lane was being renovated and we had to share the road with lorries, this was not funny. The saving grace were the flat roads making cycling really easy, maybe the odd 2% incline, but nothing too sweaty. Talking about sweaty, the weather was a lot cooler so we could really push the kilometres and cycled 120km on this day,  not because we wanted to as I will explain in a moment.

After Halle we left the Saale and made our way to Magdeburg, the capital of Saxony-Anhalt, located on the Elbe River, southwest of Berlin

For the next two days we travelled roughly 160km, following the Saale through Thüringen  to Halle where we changed direction leaving  the Saale to head towards Magdeburg, where we joined the Elbe, the third  river we follow for some distance on this trip.

Onto the Medieval town of Bamberg as our first port of call today and we luckily arrived before the mega amounts of tourist buses did, leaving as the groups started to pour in. This city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and really pretty, like something from a story book and I want to go back and visit it again because our short visit didn't do it justice. The timber buildings, the painted facades, decorated bridges, the Altenburg castle, as well as the cathedral and medieval rose garden with its view down to the city,  just captured my imagination, unfortunately our fly-by visit didn't do it the justice it deserves, we sadly did not have enough time to really explore.

After a mystical misty start from the Dennenloher lake we cycled along a cycle path that ran along the motorway bringing us into the Franconian town of Ansbach in Bavaria where we had  a relaxed breakfast and did a bit of sight seeing. Ansbach is famous for its Faience porcelain,  its Margravial Residence and court gardens, its also very proud about its own Bratwurst which apparently is coarser and longer than its rival, the good old Nuremberger.  However, being vegetarians we didn't do any taste testing. Instead, we took a cheeky peek into St. Gumbertus Church, home to the Wiegleb Organ—a Baroque marvel and the largest historical organ of its kind in Franconia. It’s a cultural centerpiece of Ansbach, and honestly, something my gran would’ve loved to play on, probably in her Sunday best with her old friend Mazel singing along next to her.

Another mega hot day, roads and streets seem quiet and deserted... is it because of the heat or because we are finally away from a main cycle route?  It doesn't matter because today gave us  a really pretty route of about 70km that took us along  shady forest trails that past a historical boundary marker near Finningen called Drei Stein - Three stones and then onto Nördlingen and the Öttinger brewery town.

Day three, (85km) we breakfasted in Ulm, a gentle city that takes you back to the middle ages. After breakfast we cycled around the old city through the charming Fishermen and Tanner Quarters, past the town hall with murals on the walls and visited the Gothic Ulm Minster with its fantastic carved wooden choir seats, with men seated on the left and women on the right of the alter. We didn’t climb the church spire which is the tallest in the world, it wasn't open at the time. 

The second day (87 km), was amazingly hot and windy as we followed the Danube further and headed towards Ulm, we didn’t quite make it to Ulm and stopped at Erbach-Ersingen for a cool down swim in a small lake before deciding to stay at the nearby Hirsch guesthouse that offered camping possibilities. The campsite was really cute but I have to add, from all the placed we stayed on the journey this one was the worst, not because of the facilities, which were really basic, we’re not fussy, it was the fact that they had a group of Dutch travellers staying that behaved really badly and loudly until the early hours of the morning when they kindly left at 4.00 a.m thank you very much! The thing is,  it’s also a working farm and on this day they had tractors with mega lights, rumbling around and doing harvesting things right next to the site until past midnight. It was a pretty bad night and the mood the next day was not the best. 

The first day (105km), started with our normal chaos of checking things, misplacing things, nerves, stupid questions, not finding the route on the Garmin, internet connection problems, a dropped device that sent accident alerts to emergency contacts who then called to ask if everything is ok. Just the normal pre-holiday nerves and stress. Then finally we are on the way and I realise that I have still forgotten things, all my charging cables and plugs, super!… too late to go back, I decide I will manage by begging, borrowing and buying new things as I go.