Boy, what a whopper!

Toughest hill of the trip today, especially after biking already 45 miles 🙁 Straight up 1300 feet the Strava elevation says it all:

The ride from Zurich to Donaueschingen started with riding through vast construction sites before the airport, very reminiscent of when I visited Dubai! After the airport it turns into a gorgeous cycleway along the river with many covered bridges and you get to visit the Rhein Falls if you want to part with 5 chf.

It all changes when you cross the river and reach Schaffhausen (which is interestingly still in Switzerland, so The Rhein is not the border.  I made some mistakes and nearly ended in a tunnel heading to the motorway 🙁 However a did a U turn and eventually navigated around the station and into the country again. Eventually reaching Germany atop the foresail long grind.

How can you tell you have left Switzerland:

• The gorgeous HUGE visible cycleway signs disappear and are replaced by occasional ‘tasteful’ small signs in white with pale green text.
• Suddenly a huge number of very fast artics. and motor bikes appear.
• What you think is a cycleway ends after a mile in a crash barrier 🙁 where you have to oik the bike over. Or cycle back and take your chance with the artics.
• Open Street Map suddenly loses a lot of detail and main roads are not correctly identified
• Oh. A bonus the hotels are cheaper 🙂

So it is totally possible if you are flying into Zurich with your bike to cycle to the start of The Danube Way, bit hairy in places but still an excellent ride. I will put my corrected GPS gpx track up on bike map.net eventually.

The first hotel, thankfully, was full and I’m now at the really quite nice Hotel Linde, the manager offered me a double room at the single rate and the restaurant has been very good.

Tomorrow is the big one! First day on The Danube Biketrail, will I use all those bike line books I’ve been carrying for the last 1000 miles or so 🙂

Todays Strava:

And the picas are here