There’s two parts to today’s cyclemeter map:

1. Down the hill from the hotel to Grein itself
2. Along the South bank from Grein to Melk. This map isn’t quite complete and the overall time is dead wrong because jPhone 4’s battery ran out just before we reached Melk.

I’m writing this in the courtyard of tonight’s hotel because, despite it being nearly 10pm, indoors is stickily warm. This might be to do with the washed cycle clothing hanging in our room and humidifing the atmosphere.
What do I remember of today?

• Stopping for drink at ‘Andy’s Drive-in’
• A cycle museum at Ybbs. This was the size of museum you might want to see while travelling: cutely small and informative, with a penny-farthing style bike to try. There’s a comical video of me trying to pedal it.
• Stopping for a picnic lunch opposite Gottsdorf, a typically pretty village
• Visiting the Oskar Kokoschka museum in his birthplace in Pöchlarn. He seems to have been all about his affair with Alma Mahler. Amor fati rings bells from my early escapades: I wish I’d been able to draw out some of these, rather than let them fester. We were guided by a young woman: it was the first time she’d given the tour in English. She was  nervous about her English (far, far better than my German) but with a few giggles on both sides, and some pre-existing knowledge of greek and roman mythology, we got on fine. It turned out our guide was a school student, just doing this for a summer job. I’d thought she was about 20. Yet again, one shouldn’t assume!
• Reaching Melk, then trying to navigate to our hotel. (Postcode areas in Austria are large because they only use 4 digits, unlike the UK’s 6- or 7- alphanumerics.) By now, jPhone 4’s battery had run out and navigating in a completely unknown town by hand-held jPhone 3GS wasn’t much fun.
• Walking through Melk’s high street looking for vegan food. The jackpot was an Austrian form of pasta cooked with cabbage, followed by a plate of salad including the ever-wonderful Austrian potato salad. Here’s some potentially amusing emails:

Bruce: Pasta with cabbage for tea. Elly will suffocate from my fumes!
Dad: Cabbage should not be eaten boiled. It should be shredded & rinsed with cold water then, while still wet, gently softened in a fairly hot saucepan, adding a little oil & spicing with caraway seeds as in Mum’s Austrian method. The other acceptable way to eat cabbage is to have it as Sauerkraut. Neither produces antisocial aromas.Bruce: Useful phrases for travelling: Ich furze wie ich ein totes Schwein auf meinen Hintern habe.
Dad: I imagine that eating cabbage could have antisocial consequences. I translate your sentence as ‘I fart as if I had a dead pig on my back.‘ Did you mean up your backside? That would be ‘Ich furze als ob ich eine totes Schwein in meinen Arschloch hatte.‘ Tiny pig – humungous Arschloch! Lay off the cabbage unless you have it as Sauerkraut.

I’m saddened to report that there have been no posterior reports. Perhaps it’s the vaseline. Whatever, it’s now nearly 11pm so despite the continued heat in the room (the hotel, in common with most of Austria, shuts at 10 so I was gently hinted out of the courtyard) I should sleep. Goodnight!

Today felt rather long and tiring. I know that I slept for two hours straight after tea and that some unmentionables are quietly glowing. Today’s map might explain why.

We started by shopping in a nearby Backerei and DM (think of UK Boots amalgamated with Holand and Barrett) for lunch items, retrieved our bikes from the hotel’s underground garage and sett off along the north bank. I don’t remember much about this (photos will remind me) apart from the joy of seeing our first crossing-point, a hydro power station at Abwinden.

Our route then meandered us through farmland, back to the riverbank, then slightly inland to Enns. This is apparently Austria’s oldest city, having been giving a charter by some king or other. Quite why a place needs a charter to be a city is beyond me: I’d make the distinction based on relative or absolute size and/or population density or possessing certain characteristics or governmental functions. Anyway, leaving behind my ignorance, Enns’ history includes being an important roman settlement, quia nomine erat Lauriacum.

There’s an extensive museum: we’ll worth a look, especially if you can read German better than I can. The city also has a more recent tower (built 1565-1568) which ‘served as a clock tower and was a distinctive symbol of the city’s pride’. There was a magnificent ‘Boris and Boris’ (doubled-headed eagle) mural on it: photos to be posted later. (DocM, I hope you don’t mind me extending the name from the Romanovs to the Hapbergs. Aarrgghh! I’ve just thought of a double-headed Boris Johnson. Shudder!

We thought we’d escaped today’s promised rain because it had poured down while we were in the museum but no, we got severely wet while negotiating our way back to the cycle route and out of Enns.

The route then took us through some industrial areas before guiding us through more rurality away from the river on to Wallsee. We had a very quick lunch-stop there because we didn’t want to miss the 5pm pick-up. (Tonight’s hotel is 5 km from Grein up some very steep slopes so the tour company has arranged for the hotel to transport bods and bikes. I’m slightly nervous about cycling back down to Grein.) We then pushed on through more rurality along the south bank before crossing a fairly busy bridge and getting to Grein itself.

The hotel transport seemed full, so for a moment I thought I’d be perched on the bike-trailer going up through the hills. Bit of a shame that there were enough seats after all. Anyway, tonight’s dinner was a treat for carb-lovers: a salad-bar including Austrian potato-salad (nothing like the mush that passes for PS in the UK), then a huge platter of roasted and boiled potatoes and other vegetables, washed down with earl grey tea and and a light local beer. Then two hours of post-prandial torpor to recover from 45 miles of saddle-interaction. I may need to vaseline my posterior before setting off tomorrow.

First, here’s today’s cyclemeter map. I needed to look back at it to remind myself what we’d done today:

• Stopping in St Agatha to photograph the Gemeindezentrum.
• An exhilarating downhill ride from St Agatha to Schlögen. Somehow it seemed longer and steeper going down.
• Then pushing on from Schlögen to Aschach. Of course I just had to play this (lyrics here) while having drinks at Kafe Roma Eis.
• I’d have liked to see around a museum about traditional Danube barges but it wasn’t open. Here’s its website.
• Crossing the bridge to the north bank was, ahem, interesting: we ended up on the opposite side from the pedestrian/cycle path, sheltering from traffic thundering past. Anyway, once we got across the bridge, the route took us away from the river and through quiet rurality. All of the farming I’ve seen so far has been arable, so where do the huge amounts of meatvAustrians eat come from?
• The route also took us through Feldkirchen an der Donau, the capital of the local area. I’m only noticing this because of my current research.
• Back at the Donau, the path ran along the top of heightened banks. I guess the river levels might be raised due to the  number of hydro power-stations along the river. There were lots of canoeists gently paddling downstream: most seem to be carrying wheels for when they would need to move their canoes on land.
• It’s a bit confusing at the approach to Ottensheim: the path splits, the correct branch goes inland around a backwater that was set up for skulling and canoe races.
• We stopped in Ottensheim so that Elly could buy a sandwich. (I scoffed more of yesterday’s rye bread.) We saw other cyclists taking the ferry across the Donau to Ufa. We wanted to stay on the north bank because we had read that the south bank route was along a busy road.
• Our route was along was on a dual-use path at the side of a busy road and railway: an introduction to Linz’s business (a great change from the rurality we’d been through so far). This final bit seemed quite hard, against wind and certain aches.
• Once we got to Linz, it was fairly easy to find our hotel and collapse for a while. We then went for a wonder through Linz’s Altstadt. Elly’s eye was suffering so we called into an Apotheke for some drops. These were forthcoming but we were firmly told that Elly should see a doctor if the condition carried on for more than a day.
• We went back to the hotel for some drinks (here’s a relevant email: I’ve just drunk wine! Some people at the table next to us we’re drinking something the colour of Irn Bru. So I had to try one. It turned out to be an Aperol Spritzer: white wine, soda and bitters with ice. It’s the only form of wine I’ve ever had which wasn’t a waste of grapes! PS accents here (Linz) are very far from Hochdeutsch: fast but slurred and elided. ‘Nar’ instead of ‘nein,, zb) and for Elly to rest her eye, then bimbled into Linz’s ‘Oberösterreich Cultural Quarter’ to find a veganoid restaurant called Gelbes Krokodil. Tofu curry for me and ricotta/spinach-filled tortellini in gorgonzola sauce for Elly. I had a chink left so tried to order some bread and hummus but ended up with a full plate of dolmades. So much for losing weight!
• Now we’re back at the hotel, gently steaming and listening to traffic going by…

I know my prose is turgid. Here’s looking forward to adding photos!

So just after posting this, I retreated to our room and an hour of dozing. We went to dinner on the hotel terrace where we’d had drinks. Here’s some of my thoughts thereon: Just had another food-gasm: potato dumplings (half-moon shape) filled with herbs on a vinaigrette of herbs, with lovely salad. Elly had turkey schnitzel with boiled potatoes (I helped her with those) and again salad. My vinaigrette was so good I had to ask for some bread to finish it. The bread that came was that lovely rye bread with carraway seeds.

As we were starting to eat, the thunder and lightening evolved into a real rainstorm, so we abandoned the terrace for the dining room, juggling plates and causing merriment. Back in the room: the clothes Elly had washed and set to dry on the balcony had become rain-soaked. Mice & men! Despite the rain’s temporary cooling effect, it’s still somewhat muggy. Oh well: as the evening progresses it will cool. Hmm: how to post photos when they exist only on jPhone? I guess I could tweet them and then add links….

food

arriving St Agatha

part of my lunch

passing through a heavily guarded border

a notice road at Jochenstein

There are more pix but that’s all for now. The rest will go on Digital Evidence when we get back.

And so the bollocks starts with buses to the terminal running late due to ‘an incident at the terminal’.

09:16
boarding our 09:15 flights might begin soon…

Posting this from hotel Revita, St Agatha, Austria:

Bus to Westbahnhof via Meiling bahnhof.

18:00
On the bus to Edinburgh airport.  Elly slightly nervous, Bruce empty in head and tum.

More updates as and when…

18:57
Bollocks! Our 19:40 flight to Heathrow is delayed until 23:00 because the plane is stuck in Manchester. Our flight from Heathrow to Vienna is at  09:15 tomorrow so we’re not going to get much sleep. A good start for a cycling holiday.

Plane took off about 22:50, so we landed in Heathrow about 23:50. Baggage collection was relatively painless but then we found buses to our hotel (terminal 5 Hilton) had finished for the night. The taxi queue moved very slowly: there seemed to be a lot of haggling going on for each set of passengers. We found out why when told our hotel was out of the taxi drivers’ area: they wanted to charge £35. In the end we accepted this but had I been on my own I’d have walked rather than pay £6 per mile!

It’s now 01:38 and we have to get up at 06:15. Bollocks on a shitty stick.

For shaggy-dog-story reasons, I ended up sheltering from pissing rain for over an hour. My mood was lightened a lot by receiving a card from the children on the cycling skills course.

We’ve just done the Sunday Beast: 90 minutes of spinning at medium-hard to hard spinning, finishing with very hard 10-minute sprint. Oddly, I feel much less knackered than after most evening 60-minute sessions. I think it’s possibly because it called for continuity rather than madness – staying in the saddle and pushing, building up resistance and cadence, then coming out of the saddle for extra effort-requirement.

Also, there were very few jumps, and none were less then 8 revolutions out of the saddle, interspersed with 8 in. (Evening sessions tend have groups of 8, immediately followed by groups of 4 then groups of 2, so you’re bobbing up and down like an Essex-girl’s scanties. Also they’re to ridden to much faster beats and more emotionally intense music.)

I should admit I couldn’t achieve the cadences the instructor and other class-members did but they seem to be all serious roadies.The only ill effects I can feel are my left elbow is very painful (but that’s due to my ongoing shoulder problems) and my upper back feels taut. A hot bath should cure those.

I had been dreading this session but I’m slightly disappointed that I won’t be there next week (we’re on holiday in Austria, cycling from Passau to Vienna along the banks of the Danube) to give this session the effort it truly deserves.

I’d been moaning about my TiBook’s screen not working, due to me dropping it during a trip to Worcester. A quick bit of surgery (thanks to Bruce J and iFixit) and it’s back to normal. It turns out the ribbon cable connecting the motherboard to the inverter had come loose.

Doing more literature-review for summer project, currently concentrating on use of internet by nordic municipalities (smallest units of local government). Smallest might be a misnomer: Oslo municipality has 530,000 citizens while Utsira island has 213. (i.e. Oslo seems not to be divided into smaller units, unlike scottish community councils which cover districts/neighbourhoods/areas of cities and counties or complete islands such as Arran.)

Anyway, I came across this which frightens me shitless!