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This last year I've done a lot of reading about folks on serious bike treks, though deserts, mountains, snow and ice. I read about Barbara Savage getting pelted with rocks by Egyptians on the road to the Pyramids. I've read about Dave Stamboulis surviving the Karakoram Highway, with endless climbs and suspicious natives. And I've read Matt Cazalas' great journal "Long Haul Truckin'", which documents his 2+ years of crusing around the US on his bike, pulling 120 mile days through some of the toughest biking terrain that there is.
So it is with great sadness that I report today I let the weather get the best of me, when the obstacles I had were nothing compared to the things these other folks faced. I started out at 6:00 AM, mentally and physically prepared to go my first 100 miles, all of it completely flat, along the Danube. A few miles into the ride, the rain began and didn't stop. The last week the weather had been fairly easy: a little heavy rain, a lot of drizzling and sun breaks here and there. This day was the first time it simply rained heavily all day without a single break.
On top of rain, it was also cold: around 50 degrees. And the roads were extremely bad. At one point, the mud got too thick to ride anymore. I got off my bike and was trouncing through the mud in the poring rain, having gone through about 5 hours of riding and thought to myself, "I have the time, the money and the desire to go to a hotel right this moment. I think that's what I'll do". I spent the rest of the afternoon watching the German version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" and catching up on my celebrity news (the pictures from the Sex and the City premiere are great, by the way).
Not much else to report from Duggendorf beside the fact that it has a really neat looking, oddly-shaped center of town (it's pear-shaped) and that I'm really happy to be warm and inside for a few hours...
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