Today's journey: Aschach-Linz
11.11am, On the road (well, the bike path). Today was a bit of a mixed bag.
We started off quite early this morning, bidding a sad goodbye to the amazing campsite and starting our 60km-ish journey to Linz. With coffee and pastries in our bellies, we had only been going less than one kilometre when we stopped at a Spar. As the past two days have been public holidays, no supermarkets had been open so we were pretty excited by the opportunity to load up on snacks. Even more excited to find out you can buy white wine spritzer for 80c a bottle...no need to fill our water bottles up with anything else!
With our panniers packed with fruit, bread, cheese, ham, crisps and some random Austria treats, we got our pedal on once more. Today's ride took us slightly away from the river and through some amazing farmland, with crops growing high on both sides of the path. The sun was shining at this point and we were all loving the hot weather! We were joined for a little while by a local 70-something man who spoke to us in German about the potato plants while staring at Ruth's legs as she cycled. We left him behind and joined the river again, cycling for hours along a long, straight path.
Our track took us past a big play park so we stopped for a rest and a go on the slide and the swings, before joining a main road. We were nearing Linz and it was definitely not one of the most beautiful tracks as cars and lorries thundered past us. We were pretty hungry (although we were getting used to long lunches) so decided to off-road it for a bit and find somewhere to eat our picnic. The boys came up trumps as they managed to a find a beach (albeit with pebbles)! Cue an hour of scoffing, relaxing, skimming stones and rescuing most of our belongings as a freak wave made its way up the 'beach'. Refuelled for the rest of our journey in to Linz, we carried on, expecting only another 10km or so.
Unfortunately, as we approached Linz, the heavens opened. We had to get through the centre of Linz to find our campsite (which was on the outskirts) so carried on, leading to our first casualty of the trip as one of the girls fell off their bike thanks to some slippery tram tracks. With only dignity hurt though, we all carried on, then took shelter in a big bike shed.
We thought we must be getting close so, even though we were all pretty tired by this point, decided to keep going through the rain. How wrong we were. Around 45 minutes later, we were still cycling and starting to lose our excitement at reaching Linz, when we saw a sign saying we had now left Linz. Hmmm. Andy and I went in to a nearby bar to find out if our campsite actually existed and found out, with some relief, that is was 3km away. Weary and wet, the eight of us just wanted to get there so found ourselves ploughing on up a huge hill with more lorries thundering past...when the thunder and lightning started. Somehow, we managed to keep our smiles on and actually started to find the situation quite funny.
Like a mirage, our campsite appeared in the distance. It was still raining so so hard, the most rain we'd seen so far, but we didn't care because we'd made it. Luckily we had a half-hour respite from the rain, which gave us just enough time to put our tents up, before the storm started up again. On any other night, this would have been pretty miserable, but next to our tent was a big wooden gazebo with picnic tables underneath, so we all huddled in there while Andy went off for provisions (wine). Sitting at our schnapps to keep us warm, Andy returned with wine and the bad news that all the food shops were closed so we were facing the prospect of only wine for dinner (after a 60km ride!).
Luckily, our campsite had a restaurant, so we asked if we could have pizzas to take away. After what could have been a really miserable night, we ended up having a brilliant one – a pizza each, loads of wine and games of Trivial Pursuit, and the rain stopped just in time for us to crawl in to our tents. Today really was a testament to how awesome our group is; no one got grumpy or complained, despite some testing times, and we saw amazing things, covered a lot of ground, and went to sleep with smiles on our faces (and wet clothes).
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