AT Day 1 – May 6th – Everyone has a plan

I planned meticulously my trip, talked to a number of bikers and ended up with version 8. But as the boxer Mike Tyson said: Everyone has a plan till the first punch into the face. My punch was the weather. The first two days heavy rain. Mentally locked in my plans, I was desperate imaging myself going up the hills till 1800 altimeters, on lonely biking trails, wet and close to freezing. Luckily my daughter suggested I should do a warmup around the Bodensee / Lake Constance instead. 

So today, I passed through Austria, Switzerland, and Germany on the southern bank of the largest West-European lake. Half of the journey in a heavy rain but with such amenities as coffee shops and restaurants 🙂

Switzerland, as always, was double incomprehensible to me. 

First, I really do not understand how this country can be so well maintained, so clean, so “Swiss watch like”that even, Germany cannot cope with. (I beg for pardon here with my German friends.)

Second, though my understanding of German is next to perfect, my understanding of Swiss German is next to zero.  Waiting at a railway crossing I was eavesdropping on a conversation of  a large Swiss family speaking their “Schwytzerdütsch”. My intake was 20% max.

When setting off today in the morning, I met another cyclist in the hotel in Bregenz. He could barely walk down the stairs.
I asked him: “Oh, you are injured?”
He replied laconically: “No, just not in shape”

Having managed 101 km today I still can walk the stairs but also feel very exactly where he had his pain resided 🙂

101 km from Bregenz to Schienen

 

The old Rhein flowing into the Bodensee / Lake Constance in the East

 

One of the Swiss sceneries

 

Sigismund street in Constance. Sigismund was the emperor who in 1414 granted a fair trial in Constance to Jan Hus, the Czech religious reformer. Instead, Hus was burned alive on at the stake for heresy. 100 years later, Martin Luther had more luck with the same ideas

 

Jan Hus street in Constance is much nobler than the one of the treacherous Sigismund. A post-mortem justice?

 

River Rhine leaving the Constance Lake at the Swiss market-town Stein am Rhein…

Posted on 06.05 2024 at 21:14