Leaving Holzkirchen
17 June 2010
I had taken some melatonin to help me get over jetlag, and one side-effect for me is vivid dreams. I dreamt I had been fixing a flat after a tire blowout! In the weeks leading up to the trip I had had some pretty bad luck with tires: two blowouts at Cazadero in May, and two more blowouts on the loaded test ride the weekend before we had left. Before we left, I'd double-checked that my brakes weren't rubbing on the tires and applied a new layer of rim tape, but obviously this worry was still on my mind. (I did indeed make it through the whole trip without any blowouts, or any other mechanical failures, for that matter.)
That morning, the weather forecast looked good in Geneva, so we gave some thought to completely abandoning our plan, taking the train to Geneva, and riding south from there to Nice. However, we were unable to buy train tickets with accompanying bike tickets to Geneva. So we decided to head to Innsbruck, where we might have more options and we could assess the situation better. That would take us two days.
Mid-morning, once Cynthia had finished her shopping, we left Munich and took the S-bahn to Holzkirchen, which was as far south as the S3 line would take us.
We got to Holzkirchen, had a supermarket lunch (bread, meat, cheese, and fruit), and started on our way.
The road out of Holzkirchen followed a bunch of farm roads and took us past fields, small towns, and streams.
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At one point Piaw's GPS (or Piaw himself, I don't remember) tried to route us over a grassy (and wet) hill. I made it across without walking my bike, but it required being fairly careful and staying in the lowest gear. I think Cynthia, Kekoa, and I were all apprehensive that we would see a lot more of this "Piaw routing", but overall there was only a small amount of real off-roading on the trip.
Soon we had arrived at Tegernsee, and it was still early enough that we could keep going for another couple of hours. We decided to head onward to Kreuth.
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After a bit it started to rain, but the trail headed into the forest, and with tree cover the light rain was tolerable. Just before we reached Kreuth, though, a real thunderstorm started. Soaking wet, we pulled over at the first hotel we saw in the town.
The owner explained that the hotel was closed, but we must have looked pretty miserable, because she did call to reserve us a room at a hotel just around the corner, the Gasthaus Batznhäusl. We were all happy to get out of our wet clothes. After freshening up, we went to the restaurant downstairs to eat dinner, and I had a delicious Jägerschnitzel (pork cutlet with mushroom sauce). I am pretty sure I had pork cutlets for dinner for approximately the next 5 consecutive nights.
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At dinner the waitress asked us what time we would like to have breakfast the following morning. Piaw, who always wanted to get an early start, asked, "7:30?" The waitress laughed nervously and and countered, "well, how about 8:00?" This would turn out to be a recurring pattern.
After dinner, the rain had cleared up enough that we went for a walk around town. Everything just looked so fresh as the rain clouds were rolling away.
