Another warm day: Another ride

April 9, 2008

The sun is shining! We must be having "Föhn", a warm, dry wind which blows from the other side of the Alps and can bring balmy days, even in the middle of the winter, and fantastic visibility. When you get a view of the Alps, they look close enough to touch even though they are 80 km away. We decide to take the car with our bikes mounted on the bicycle rack to the south of Munich where we hope to be treated to splendid mountain panoramas.

Dressed in bicycle togs and armed with map, water bottles and a little picnic we go to the car. There only remains the one task of adjusting the bicycle rack to accommodate our new bikes. Janos soon discovers this is going to take more time than he had anticipated. So much for plan A.

Do we have a plan B? The Munich S-Bahn, city train, is also a good way to get to a more distant starting point with your bike, but by now we don't have a lot of time to spare since we have to be back by 3 pm. We decide to cycle from home as we have done so often. We know some nice paths out of Munich, it's just that after a while they get a little boring.

Shared bike path on the way out of Munich to the west

We head for Dachau, approximately 20 km northwest of Munich. Many don't realize that Dachau is not just the town where one of the most horrendous Nazi concentrations camps was located, today a memorial and a must for visitors to Munich. However, it is also a small town in its own right, with a historic center and castle.

Off to a late start, we vary our usual route and lo and behold, we find ourselves following a pleasant bicycle path to Dachau along the Würm*, a small river flowing to the west of Munich. (*A note on those two dots over an a, o or u: if you don't have ä,ö and ü on your keyboard, the transcription is ae, oe and ue. If you leave that out, it changes the pronunciation and possibly the meaning of the word. For example, the Würm becomes a worm.)

Riding along the Würm: On so-called bike streets cars are allowed but bikes have priority

The bike path is not perfect as it is well signposted in the beginning but somewhere along the way the signs peter out. Nevertheless, we have bike paths for almost the complete ride. If you wanted to cover any great distance, this kind of route would be too pokey but for our little outing it is just fine.

The old town of Dachau is located on a hill and the ride up is on cobblestone streets. This makes for an unacustommed bumpy ride on our new bikes with thinner tires and no shocks. Cobblestones are some of the worst kinds of surfaces for a cyclist.

Located at the top of the hill is the Dachau Palace and Court Garden where we enjoy our sandwiches in the sun.

The name Dachau is mainly associated with the concentration camp once located there; There is also an old town and a palace on top of the hill

This sunny morning was a just a teaser - for the return trip it again clouds over.

On our way home: A nice lake for swimming - when it gets warmer

Trying out unsealed surfaces: We now have thinner tires but we have no problem with this kind of hard-packed dirt path

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