April 18, 2022
Day 6: Muldenstein to Ronney
No Bridge, Too Far
The Pension Am Steinberg in Muldenstein was really good - meticulously clean, large room, ground floor, secure bike storage. But no food. In the evening we were still feeling stuffed from three days in Markranstadt, so no supper was a welcome break. For the morning we had a plan. Dodie had discovered the POI feature of Osmand+, and it was showing her all the food places coming up on the route. 4 km and we would be stuffing our faces with sandwiches in the next town, it said.
So we set out confidently, having reserved a spot near Walternienburg, about 70 km off, and clearly an easy shot. Our confidence took a hit, evaporated actually, when 3 km along we came to a bridge over the Mulde. "Brucke Gesperrt" announced a sign. But this was smack on the famous Mulde Radweg, gesperrt was not an option. This was clearly Dodie's thinking as she asked me to go check out the true bridge condition. We are used to going through road closures, after all.
"Lebensgefahr!" said the next sign, and they were not kidding, this bridge was kaput!
A quick scan of the map showed we would have to back up 20 km for a chance to get back on track. There was really nothing for it, and that's what we did.
Oh, what about that breakfast in 4 km? Ha Ha. Maybe back in Bitterfeld, which we had come through yesterday, because that town ahead was no longer in our future. In fact we did run into lots of the small groceries on our retreat: LIDL, Netto, Penny, Edeka, and most with back stube (bakery department). But guess what - Easter Monday! Every single one was closed! We plodded on.
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Our day then broke down into two basic things. One was the cycling in a very pleasant mixture of small villages and on good cycle paths through farm fields and woodlots. The other was the compounding of our distance covered by taking a series of wrong turns. Wrong turns came about by following reasonable looking cycle track signs, only to later check the GPS and see that we had been led somehow astray by the signs. Or similarly, we would follow the road and later see that there had been a hidden or tricky turn. You might think that this could be avoided by keeping the GPS app running and consulting the screen frequently. But that costs battery and also absorbs a lot of attention. After a time we decided to allow the phone to speak, even though the guidance voice is a really irritating AI. Osmand can be set to follow and speak a given existing track, and I think we will be trying that more.
Lunch suffered the same fate as breakfast, that is, everywhere closed and and in fact almost no businesses of any kind in the little towns we were passing. By the time we finally did run into a place serving food, we were too late in the day to use up time eating! Talk about running on empty.
We had chosen to follow the Mulde because it is a tributary of the Elbe, and the Elbe is what we plan to follow to the North Sea, on the Elbe Radweg. The Mulde meets the Elbe near Dessau, so that is where we finally did reach the Elbe. In fact we found ourselves right in the middle of it, with ferry crossing near Aken.
This ferry crossing was special not only for introducing us to what will be the big river, but in waiting for the ferry we answered our first set of fairly complete UQs (usual questions). Where are we from, where are we going, how far do we go in a day, how far did we go today, how big is that battery, where did you get the neat helmet brims (the DaBrims) and could DaBrim be a German word? All this was handled in baby level German! We must have done ok, because the couple doing the asking then paid our ferry passage!
After 91 km, we reached our previously chosen Pension. It turned out to be Bett und Bike certified, which in this case meant secure bike storage, which we like a lot. However the room is up a steep set of stairs. Dodie avoided those as much as possible.
Looking over the day for Meaning for Living, it would have been nice to have found something like a "sandwich". But as it is, we'll have to settle for the bike paths in the pleasant forests:
Supplementary Quiz
1. Are these Rapeseed, or some form of brassica?
2. Little white flowers adorned the forest floor:
What are the little white flowers?
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Today's ride: 91 km (57 miles)
Total: 164 km (102 miles)
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