August 23 - Finding the Main

Sunday  - Cheb, Czech Republic to Bad Berneck, Germany
This little guy kept watch over us all night. It was very quiet.

Time to stash the Czech Republic map.

The view from our room......the streets are pretty quiet at this hour.

Michael, our host, held our bikes for us while we loaded them....lots of service with a big smile.

You always know the number of the route but, without a map, you aren't sure where it is going next.

We were only 6 miles from the border when we started so really there wasn't much route-finding to do.

A very nice bike path to lead us to the border. 

And this is it, art from kids all over the area.

And two concrete blocks in the creek.

That and the path turned to gravel!

So we think we are in Germany but it doesn't quite feel like it yet.

This is a great way to cross a freeway.

We think we have found evidence of Eurovelo 4 (E4) in Schirdning.

So far, so good.

Nice sign but it is all in German, though we can sometimes make more sense of German that we were able to do with either Polish or Czech. We are not going very far, very fast at this point because so much is on gravel roads. When E4 turned away from Theirheim (the town we wanted to go to for lunch) once again we stopped following it.

 We only had 14 miles by lunch. We ate at a biergarten that was packed with locals. One minute after leaving there we found this sign. Now we have found Route D5 which is the one we think that we want to follow across Germany.

Once again, so far, so good.

The sun really made this pile of glass sparkle.

And Doug just had to touch. He picked up one piece and caused a miniature avalanche. No cuts though (his chain ring has been taking care of that)

This was the last we saw of civilization for awhile. The D5 route decided to be a mountain bike route taking gravel roads off through the woods. We did that for a little while until the road turned left up the hill and the E48  was only 300 feet away to our right. Despite pretty heavy traffic, it was OK because it had a decent shoulder. It was climbing too but the grade was OK. The summit came a bit later at 777 meters. Then is was a glorious 12 mile downhill run to Bad Berneck. It made us almost forget how hard the rest of the day had been. 

Halfway down a bike path appeared. Later we realized that we had found the beginning of the Main River Cycle Route, which is what we really wanted. This is a pile of the sett stones that are used for paving streets in towns..

And we found the Main River, which is just a brook at this point.

We must be close to town now....it has been a long day!

Uh-oh....that car is upside down in the river and the recovery has our intended route to the motel blocked. It took us another 45 minutes to get that last 1/2 mile.

Turned out that the car was in the river right next to our hotel. The guys sitting on the patio told us that the 2 people had not only lived through the ordeal but had gotten themselves out of the car.

A couple of hours later all was normal again.