May 3, 2023
In the Tyrol
Kochel am See to Achenkirch
Finally a good forecast, with no rain and plenty of sunshine. We stayed in a virtually empty hotel run by a delightful German woman who did just about every job in the place with aplomb. We filled up on the lavish breakfast and headed out into the fog.
I’ve become much more adept at direction finding since John got me to download google maps. That and a determined effort to concentrate harder has resulted in my strike rate improving markedly. Conversely Johns map reading abilities seem to be faltering which he blames on his proximity to me. I prefer to call it directional osmosis.
The fog hangs around for a few hours but eventually lifts and we ride in sunshine for the rest of the day.
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We’re heading for Austria and the Tyrol. We’re on bike paths again for most of the morning but generally alongside B roads, so not quite as good as the last few days but a hundred times better than riding the Hoskinstown road.
After twenty five kilometres we reach Bad Tolz. It’s market day so we wander around that for a while before riding along the river and having our picnic lunch. No sausages on bread today. It’s local cheese and ham on dinkelbrochen .
We follow the river for a good hour and then peel off on a boggy gravel path and climb up to a high altitude lake ‘Sylvensteinspeicher ‘ There seems to be a police blitz on hotted up motorbikes, with most being pulled over and checked rigorously by the twenty grim faced policemen on duty. They took one look at us and wave us through. Thank god for that as I have performance enhancing gummy bears in my front bag.
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The afternoon was punctuated by a steep climb up a gravel muddy road that in truth we walked most of the way. After that we had a good run on a cycle path all the way to Achenkirch a ski village set in the Austrian Tyrol.
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Tonight we have a 2 bedroom apartment with views over the mountains. There’s a supermarket just down the road so we cook up a mass of vegetables with chicken breast in an arabiata sauce that we ferociously devour, washed down with a Grüner Veltliner .
Just one more day to go before a well needed and deserved rest day. All we need to do tonight is to book a nice apartment for two days in Innsbruck. I pass on one whose chief selling point is a recently renovated corridor and we settle on an apartment in the centre of town.
Today's ride: 70 km (43 miles)
Total: 791 km (491 miles)
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