May 6, 2022
The Tour Intro
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.” O.W.
Way back in PPT (pre pandemic time) Kirsten and I came through Salzburg as we were getting near the end of our three month modified EV6 ride (read all about it here). It was mid October 2017 and we had just finished what was probably the most spectacular section of our trip - the Ciclovia Alpe Adria Radweg, aka the CAAR route, from Grado to Salzburg.
We were headed back to Frankfurt for our eventual flight home and were making up the remainder of the trip in almost day by day increments. Our thinking at that time was that we had more or less seen everything we wanted to, so we changed our flights, brought them forward by a week and spent our final week meandering back to Frankfurt. It was a wonderfully chilled-out end to a great trip. We were at peace with ourselves.
It turns out though that we had suffered from Rumsfeldian thinking … the dreaded curse of the “unknown unknowns”.
Turn the pages forward a few years to September 2021. Team Anderson is winding their way south through Germany, doing in reverse portions of our trip from 2017. We’re reading along, vicariously traveling. Ahh, Dinklesbuhl… yes we remember that … beautiful. Now they’re in Salzburg And about to start the CAAR route. This will be good.
But wait. They didn’t start the CAAR right away. Instead they headed a few km’s east of Salzburg to this funny sounding region called Salzkammergut….. and it looked stunning!
Now we were suffering from the even worse Rumsfeldian affliction of having Known Unknowns. This beautiful area was right beside us in 2017, we could have easily spent a week lapping it up, and we just blew right through, knowing nothing about it. Aaaarrrggg!
Well, the pages turned a little more to the present. I had a seminar that I needed to attend in Munich during the first week of May. Munich’s only a couple of hours from Salzburg by train so we decided that K would come along, we’d add a few days onto the trip and take a ride in the Salzkammergut.
We could only afford a week due to other commitments in late May, and our timing was tight for planning and getting our logistics sorted out. That’s when the brilliant plan (or lame and lazy, your pick) was hatched to more or less (and as you read it will lean very heavily to ‘more’) … do what Team Anderson did.
We arrived in Munich on Wednesday, 4th May, seminar’d away, and then on Friday, got a ride to Salzburg with Rado, a Slovakian IBU colleague who was also at the event. Super sweet .. thank you Rado! A day of logistics awaits on Saturday and then we ride!
We ended up booking a hotel that was recommended to us by another IBU colleague who lives in Salzburg , Hotel Hofwirt. It was a block away from where we stayed in 2017, and from the look of the Team Anderson GPS breadcrumb trail, we think it’s the same hotel they were in. Pure coincidence. We can’t say the same thing about where we ate dinner 😬!
To paraphrase what Oscar said in today’s title ……. We are flattering them!
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1 year ago
It’s so good to be back in Europe on a bike, even if only for a few days. We almost certainly have another copy-cat tour brewing in the Grenoble area. We bypassed that in 2018 and stuck to the Via Rhonda. Once again you’re showing us what we missed!
1 year ago
We’ll be watching for quickly rising water. So far so good even though it’s been raining the last few days. So green, so rural, so dramatic … and we’ve just started!
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