Trip Plan – Leg 3 – The Danube

In my mind, this is where my trip really starts. The first two weeks are about getting my head on straight and learning the ropes about what it takes to bike tour in Europe. I’ll have any gear and equipment problems sorted out and will have gotten a bit fitter as well.

Leg 3 starts in Donaueschingen the (disputed) source of the Danube and the ancestral home of the Furstenberg family. I chose this town as a start to this leg primarily because it’s the western most point on the bike maps that I purchased through Esterbauer. These maps are a work of art, with each 10-15 km having insane details on all the various trails, amenities and sites along the way. Here’s a shot of the area around Regensburg, for example.

The length of the Danube that I’ll be riding takes me 700 km all the way into Vienna. From the western part of Germany, through Bavaria. I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently about the area, but not nearly enough to have any kind of insight about it yet. It sounds like a conservative region of Germany. It only became part of Germany in the late 1800’s, and only in response to an impending war with France. Obviously, there’s the infamous Munich Beer Halls and all the Hitler associations. I’ve learned recently that Germany, as a country, is a relatively new invention which was crafted by the Prussians (coming in the from the Baltic Coast and Northeast Germany). It was a crapshoot for a while whether Germany would unite under Austria or under Prussia. Prussia won and dominated the politics of the country for a long time. Some would argue that the Prussia military temperament had something to do with World War I and II, but that’s for people who know a lot more than me. It’s all a lot more complicated than that, so I’ll just stop embarrassing myself here. There’ll be lots more fascinating history about Prussia during my trip in Poland, but that’ll have to wait.

I’ll be leaving the Danube at Regensburg for a side trip down to Munich. That town just sounds like too much fun to pass up. I’ll spend a couple of days in Munich, then return to the Danube and head into Austria until I hit Vienna.

Vienna used to be the capital of an insanely large and powerful empire, run by the bizarre Habsburg empire. A hopelessly imbred lineage with jutting, misshapen jaws, this family married their offspring into every major royal family in Europe, allowing them to slowly accumulate royal titles and hereditary claims over a huge swath of Europe. In the midst of their decline, they made the mistake of triggering World War I and paid for it by having only the current borders of Austria to show for it. Here’s the Habsburg empire at it’s height in the 1500’s

Here is where my family history and my trip start to intertwine a bit. Austria-Hungary, along with Russia and Prussia, participated in the Partitions of Poland in the late 1700’s. The Partitions was the very diplomatic manner in which these three countries dismantled and destroyed Poland, simply annexing the entire country because they could. Austria-Hungary got the part which included Krakow (where my last name comes from) and Lublin (where my grandmother’s family came from). After the First World War, the chastened Austria-Hungary was forced to give back it’s chunk of Poland, and my grandmother’s family, presumably, lived in a free Poland from 1919 until the Germans and Russians came storming in once again in 1939. Here’s a good map of the partitions:

Also of note is that the 700 km I’ll be riding on is nearly completely devoid of any kind of hill. Because of this, I’m going to attempt my first 100 mile day (called a Century, in biker parlance) along the Danube.

Next up: Vienna to Prague!