The End Is Near

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Well, these are the last two days of our adventure. Lady and the Tramp are tired and in need of cleaning and maintenance. They have served us well. Other than the broken shifter on Lady and the broken front rack bolt on Tramp, the bicycles held up well. Both are Cannondale touring bikes; Lady a T1 and Tramp a T2. They rest inside tonight in a little pavilion next to our tent.


Tomorrow it is just a 45 km ride to Langen, Germany, where we will once again spend a few days with Manfred and Maria Haase, our hosts in Grimentz, Switzerland, and now at their home in Langen. The final day will be bittersweet! We so enjoyed the trip, but we are ready to go home. I think you can probably understand that feeling of wanting to continue but knowing that the adventure is over.


Not much exciting happened today unless you count the little mouse that ran across the road between our bikes. I don’t know but that his tail may be a little shorter; he was mighty close to going under my front wheel. Then a little later a rabbit ran across in front of Gerri. He had room to spare, not quite as suicidal as the mouse. Other than that, we were headed north on the west side of the Rhein for most of the day with some rain in the morning giving way to just clouds in the afternoon.

There were a number of campgrounds to choose from Saturday evening. The first few seemed a bit, well, uninviting. We chose one slightly off route near Altrip, Germany, and, naturally, we got lost trying to find the place. We'll blame that on the road construction. Finally, we were headed back to the Rhein Route when, lo and behold, signs for the campground appeared on our left. Go figure!

This campground was certainly not the nicest one we've stayed in, a fact we remembered from our trip through here in 2006 when we spent a night in the same place. That night we slept (or tried to sleep) next to a large group of partying college students. Last night we placed our tent a bit farther from a similar group. Though the campground was just as noisy as we remembered, the cliental were a bit friendlier, offering us a couple of cold beers, which we realy appreciated as all we had was warm water to drink with our bread and cheese for dinner.

This morning we left the campground and headed for the Rhein Route only to be blocked by the same construction that had thwarted our attempts to find the campground yesterday. Not realizing we were at the route and supposed to turn left (apparently the workmen had temporarily removed the signs), we turned right and went back into Altrip. There we had to take another detour and eventually arrived at the exact same intersection where we made the wrong turn. This was a six or seven kilometer mistake. Gerri says, “This is part of the adventure.” Me, I get frustrated!

Later in the day we crossed to the east bank of the Rhein at Worms, Germany. The clouds looked threatening, so we bagged the idea of going all the way to Langen and got a site in a campground near Biebesheim. Again, no WIFI (in fact, the campground had no electricity whatsoever, even for those year long residents that lived there), so we could not enter a blog or send any emails. Oh well, we’ll catch up when we reach Langen tomorrow morning.

Respectfully submitted,
Bill

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