Another easy quick day. It was actually much quicker than I anticipated because I totally missed the lunch stop. It is not clear if I wasn’t paying attention or if I got there before it did. In any case they announced that it would be at 75 K plus or minus so at 70K I started looking for it. At 78K I was thinking I had missed it and was about to turn around and go back to 70 to look for it when I saw Balazs who was putting up the flags and asked him where it was. He told me that they had decided to do it at 56K instead so there was no way that I was going back and I came on in to Koblenz and had a nice sandwich and beer at the hotel. As a result I got in very early with only a little over four hours of riding.
Joan, who has been my partner in aches and pains from falling fell again today. She hit some speed bumps that were not designed with bikes in mind and went over. She said that at least she landed on her other side but was hurting quite a bit in her hip. I suspect that she will be pretty sore for several days. Such a shame since we are almost done.
Yesterday, as we were coming into Mainz we were following the bike path and when we got to Mainz the bike path was converted into a street fair with so many people you had to squeeze through them. It was very long, maybe a mile. Once you got to the end of the street fair there was a carnival with all sorts of rides. Slow going getting through all of that. Then, last night we walked to a restaurant toward the center of town and one of the streets there was covered in food booths with hundreds of people in the street. I don’t know what the motive for all of this was or maybe it is this way every Saturday but there were a lot of people at these events.
The ride today was along the Rhine. At first we were mostly inland from the river and could not see it but then we moved to be next to it for the majority of the ride. The views were nice and there are castles everywhere you look. I took pictures of a few of them. The river had a constant stream of tour boats and barges going upstream the whole time I was riding.
Koblenz is where the Mosel joins the Rhine and we will pass that point as we leave tomorrow as we head to Cologne which should be another easy ride.
