To Colmar

June 10, 1996 to June 12, 1996

So we're off the end of the original journal now. what follows reflects whatever I can glean from captionless photos in our album, reasonable best guesses about the route we followed to get to Paris; and Rachael's and my poor memory of what happened during this last week of the tour. Pretty pathetic, but this is all we have to work with.

This entry is for the three days we took to get from Donaueschingen to Colmar. To the best of our memory, we spent a single night in the Black Forest in Lake Titisee; biked the short distance down to Freiberg the next afternoon, after a morning hike; and then to Colmar the next day. I don't have any specific memories of biking across the Black Forest at all - just some vague recollection of villages with a lot of shops featuring cuckoo clocks, and in general a vague sense of disappointment. I'm certain we took some sort of hike, and I think we added a biking loop further south of the lake but I'm not positive. I'd been pretty excited about going there, but for whatever reason the region didn't live up to our expectations. Maybe it was the weather.

So, other than that all we brought back was this lone excellent photograph, which I assume is from our hike above Lake Titisee:

The rest of this entry gives us a bit more to work with. First, there's Freiburg, a city both of us fell in love with. We have some photos of it, as well as some fairly clear memories. The photos show that we had beautiful weather while we were there, so that contributed of course. I remember being enchanted by the narrow channels of water running through the core of the old city, something I'd never seen anything quite like before. Our strongest memory of Freiburg though is of leaving town, and getting quite lost (this is in that far-off age before GPS, or course), and being rescued by another biker - he went out of his way by several miles to personally escort us through town and to its outskirts, an act of kindness that still touches us when we recall it.

The ride from Freiburg to Colmar lives in our memories because of an incident we hopefully will never forget. After crossing the Rhine into France (which, surprisingly, I have no photos of), we were racing to Colmar trying to beat a thunderstorm that was welling up ahead of us. Perhaps seven or so miles from town it was obvious that we were going to lose the race; and with nowhere to hide in the open fields ahead of us we turned tail and raced a mile back the way we came, to a small chapel. We arrived more or less in time to avoid the worst of it and hid out inside of the chapel while the skies opened up. We felt lucky, looking out the window as an electrical storm and strong winds blew through the valley - lucky to have noticed the chapel when we biked past earlier, lucky to have arrived dry, lucky it was unlocked. Ever since this day I've kept the habit of keeping an eye out for plausible shelters when the weather looks uncertain.

Sadly, there's no shot of the chapel either. I would certainly have taken one if I were reliving this experience now. We did come away with a few decent shots of Colmar though, another town that we thought was very beautiful.

Vineyards along the German side of the Rhine, near Freiburg

Today's ride: 130 km (81 miles)
Total: 1,345 km (835 miles)

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