OTR

August 6 Route Map

After a dry day yesterday, it started raining last night at 8:30 pm and it continued all night long and into this morning. But unlike a few days ago when it did the same thing, it did not let up at all today. The clouds were into the treetops with a dark sky in all directions, with the rain coming down hard. My plan was to ride 120 kilometers today to Monte Kaolino, but the weather killed my motivation. So instead, I resorted to Plan B – ride 10 kilometers to the nearest train station and take advantage of my Eurail Pass. I found the train station in Plauen, and after much examination of the train schedules and experimentation with the automated ticket machine (which was in German only, no English) I found that the closest I could get to Monte Kaolin via train was to the village of Wernberg, 13 kilometers east of my destination. I couldn’t use my Eurail Pass at the automated ticket machine, so I had to go to the ticket agent. She gave me my tickets and informed me that I had to change trains in Weiden in order to get to Wernberg. There was one minor problem though – the train didn’t go to Weiden; it went to Nurnburg instead, about 100 kilometers west of Weiden. So I purchased a 17 Euro ticket to go back the way I had just come. When I finally got to Wernberg it was still raining hard but at this point I was only 13 kilometers away from Monte Kaolino so I put on the raingear and rode as fast as I could. Fortunately the road I had to take was flat all the way, which made for a quick ride. My riding distance today was only 23 kilometers, but the train detour added another 335 kilometers to the distance traveled today.

This entry was posted on August 6, 2010 at 8:54 pm and is filed under On the Road. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.