Story 1 of a series.
Biking the Danube River Valley takes training, skill, patience and intuition. I have none of those. So how does someone who would be considered elderly on a life insurance demographic chart survive such a journey? I’d like to say fortitude, strength of will or some other self aggrandizing wonder term. The real reason I made it the 400+ kilometers from Passau, Germany to Vienna, Austria, on a bicycle was much simpler: fear of failure. Yeah, let’s get it right down to the basics. I didn’t want to return to the US a biking failure.
Being a runner helped, but cycling uses different muscles. Body parts you would not think of hurting, suddenly hurt like hell after a day in the saddle. Shoulders for one. Of all the body parts I considered might hurt, that wasn’t one of them. Hands were another surprise. Hands are in a perpetual death grip and shoulders are hunched forward so that by the end of the first day’s ride, I’d developed a pain the size of basketball in the middle of my back and had no feeling left in my hands. Shins had bike pedal marks that resembled zipper bites and my beard had a bug collection an entomologist would have envied. Abandoning the adventure seemed like an acceptable option that first day.
We picked up our bikes in Passau, Germany, overnighted and started the next morning for Sankt Agatha. The tiny village on the map was only a 50-60Km ride. We had plenty of time. After all, what was that in miles, 30 or 35? We could do that in our sleep. Seemed simple enough.
Since we had all the time in the world, we rode into the Old Town of Passau to look around a bit. Passau, in eastern Germany, where the Ilz, Inn and Danube rivers meet, was in its prime some 400 years ago and has a giant white wedding cake of a Baroque cathedral, all curlicues and gold leaf, to prove its rich past. The town’s riverside, then as now, was lined with ships carrying passengers and freight, generating lots of cash. But rivers, as anyone who lives near one knows, are fast changing chameleons. One day they are as calm as a sloth, the next day, as violent and unpredictable as a banshee on steroids. A city like Passau with the convergence of three major rivers has experienced everything. Near the waterfront painted onto store fronts are high and low water marks from the past 5 centuries. From these markings, it was clear that sometimes the river was so shallow it could be crossed on foot, other times it flooded up to the third story of apartments and was so deep the Queen Mary could have floated by.
I glanced at the river. There was no grassy bank, in fact the water level was near the sidewalk where we stood. The bike path, parallel to the walkway but further out, was under 2 feet of clear, shining Danube River water. No mention had been made in our guide books of the possibility of such a problem nor did the high water show on any Google route. I ducked into a shop and asked directions to get back on the bike path to Vienna and the shopkeeper looked at me as if I were daft. “High water? You’re complaining of high water here in Passau? That’ll be along the river at least to Vienna.” The word ‘fool’ was implied if not said. I lied and told him I understood, but all I wanted right now was how to get out of Passau. He told me.
We took his detour and, on the other side of a bridge found the ‘R1’ path, the main bike path that connects southern Germany with western Austria. The unpredictability of detours and closed roads had not dented our naivety, even now as we lost another hour. Wistful ignorance is hard to let go of.
Somewhere after lunch in a little village remembered more for its thundering traffic and namelessness, we became separated. A couple had gone into shops, more lingered over their beers and we all pedaled at different speeds. The plan was to end up at the same place at day’s end since, we thought, there was only one R1. No one could possibly get lost.
A couple hours later, I reached the hydro electric power station, one of about three dozen on the river, stopped and looked around me. I saw no one in my group. I figured everyone would catch up to me soon enough, assuming they were behind me. It was a cloudy, cool day, the Danube sped, brown and swirling, next to me on its way to the Black Sea, hundreds of kilometers to the East. I sat on the grassy bank and listened to the silence. I hadn’t done that for a very long time.
Most days are filled with the noise of radios, cars, talking, music, audio books, and whatnot, but it’s rare we have only silence to listen to, or at least rare for me. Silence is the mother of daydreaming, and daydreaming is much underrated. But it wasn’t pure silence. Frogs were having a cocktail party in some bog nearby, crows looked at me, cawed, then spoke to one another about idiot humans on contraptions, falcons’ wings whip-whipped as they soared overhead, and the river gurgled and burped. It was such a serene moment I lost track of time. Why I never took out my phone to check for messages from the group is beyond me. In such a leafy green wilderness, there were no phones, no stress, no time. If this is meditation, I’m all for it.
A floating log smashed into the embankment where I sat and I glanced at my watch. 40 minutes had passed in a moment. I’d seen no bikers so figured that somehow my people had gotten ahead of me and I was now terribly late. I pushed on as fast as possible.
2 hours later I arrived at the Old Danube Guest House, one of our meeting stops. It was from here we could take a transport bus up to the Hotel Kocher in Sankt Agatha, a further 17,5Km. No one was there. By my reckoning, the group had already taken the transport and were by now clinking glasses of chilled white wine in the hot tub of our hotel. I had no clue if they liked white wine or even if the hotel had a hot tub but it was the image in my head of what I was missing for getting lost, or at least separated. I had missed the transport so decided to just ride the final distance.
It didn’t take long to realize why a transport for this stretch had been recommended by the bicycle company. The bike path ended abruptly and only a narrow road with traffic led up the hills, in twists and turns, switchbacks and double backs. Up and up endlessly. At every turn I was sure it was the last. It wasn’t. The temp had dipped to 47 but I sweated with the strain. I thought about walking some of the way when my breath got short but knew if I did that I would not reach the hotel until after the bar closed. Unthinkable. Unacceptable.
The transport was recommended for the final ascent because this section was like pedaling up a black diamond ski run, meant only for 30 year old professional athletes, Lance Armstrong and idiots who were being punished for getting lost. I clearly fell into the final category. The ride was long and painful, my legs were on fire, my buttocks ached, my hands were numb, my beard was filled with tiny field flies and I looked like the Hunchback of Central Austria. Cars rolled past, drivers looking curiously at the mentally deranged guy on a bike. A motorcycle flew past and he gave me a fist in the air. No other bike rider was in view and I now knew why. 17,5 tortuous kilometers later, I puffed into Sankt Agatha. It was beautiful.
Here was a tiny, remote Austrian village perched on the top of a high hill surrounded by thick fields of green and clusters of forests. In the middle gleamed the golden Hotel Kocher, long, low, and elegant, with a sweeping driveway to the entrance. Not being much for weeping for joy and, after a day in the saddle, being unable physically to jump for joy, I settled for a cow-like contentedness. I might have even moo-ed.
“I’m sorry, but no one has arrived. You’re the first of your group,” said the receptionist to the disheveled bike rider standing, stinking and sweat soaked, in front of her. The first to arrive. I pondered that for a moment. I had pedaled my buns off to catch up with them, yet arrived first. All this time I thought I was behind the group when actually I was ahead of them. I had no sense of triumph, quite the contrary, I felt foolish. I’d struggled up 17,5 Km of a black diamond ski hill only to realize it hadn’t been necessary, that I could have waited at the pickup spot for my people. In fact, at that moment, the transport bus was on its way to fetch the group and bring them up to Sankt Agatha. I planned to be soaking in the hot tub with a glass of chilled white wine when they arrived but settled for a cold beer and blazingly hot shower instead.
We met about 6:30 in the restaurant and they remarked what a shame it was I had missed the transport but moved on to plans for the next day, poring over maps and searching for possible detours. Dinner was excellent, what I remember of it, but I have no clue what I ate. Exhaustion dulls memory. Somewhere during that time was more beer, a shot of Willy (for effect, appearance and taste it rhymes with vodka) and ibuprofen. Sleep was like a mini death. Yet even with the aching butt, the exhausted quads, the bugs in the beard that took a half hour to comb out, and getting lost, there was a sense of triumph, small, but enough to make me look forward to the next morning’s ride.
