OTR

August 7 Route Map

The rain from yesterday continued unabated all night long and into this morning. The clouds were still low and the sky was a dark grey color in all directions – it didn’t look good. I was seriously considering riding the 13 miles back to Wernberg in order to catch a train all the way to Munich today. But at 8:30 am it stopped raining and I could see some definition in the clouds, so it looked like it could at least stop raining for most of the day. I packed up my wet gear and headed off toward Munich. Fortunately, about an hour into my ride, the clouds lifted higher into the brightening sky and all chance of further rain for the day disappeared.

I called Walter Welsch on the phone when I got to the town of Amberg to let him know that I would arrive in Munich soon. Leaving Amberg on the south side of town I had the great fortune to ride a wide, smooth, mostly flat road that followed a river valley downhill, with a bit of a tailwind, and no rain! Talk about all the elements finally coming together in my favor. I was able to average 25 km/h on this section of road for about 50 kilometers, making it the most enjoyable ride so far. At one point however, my GPS wanted to route me on the shortest distance to Munich, which would have taken me away from the nice road and up into the hills. I was enjoying my quick ride and wasn’t too keen on taking a much slower route, so I switched plans and decided to go to Regensburg, which is slightly out of the way from a direct line to Munich. But it’s been six days since I was able to check my e-mail and post updates to OTR, so I figured I could get a hotel room for the night, check e-mail, post updates, recharge GPS and computer batteries, and dry my wet gear.

I’m now about 140 kilometers from Walter Welsch’s house in Munich. I’m going to try to make it all the way tomorrow, but I’ll need more flat, fast roads like the one today in order to do it.

This entry was posted on August 7, 2010 at 9:34 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.