a small fe

After the first few weeks of riding through towns reading signs about festivals on well after we’d gone, we finally managed to line up a few: The Jazz and Blues Festival in Luxembourg;
a medieval festival in Bitche, France (funny how folk dressing up in middle ages garb is a lot more interesting when you have a real live castle as a backdrop) ; and Das Fest youth festival in Karlsruhe.
Nice. At the last one the John Butler Trio were on the bill. As well as a great group called Charlie Winston. Viel spass, as they say over here!

Bikes get a well-earned wash so that the hard-nosed Australian customs will let them come home!

We’re enjoying a fantastic last day riding. We spent slightly more time in France than planned after a wrong turn, but no matter as the forests and valleys were beautiful.
And we still ended up in Wissembourg for lunch. We’ve been here before but I love it. How this isn’t on France’s most beautiful towns list I don’t know…

This trip I have two front panniers in addition to the back two. I still kept the packing the same (OK, I admit I went wild and brought an extra pair of shoes for town since we had so much socializing planned), so the extra panniers meant everything fit a lot more easily and I don’t spend each morning jamming stuff into every available space.

The extra space has proved handy the last few days when I have been carrying all this extra stuff! The boxes are a result of visiting the Villeroy & Boch HQ in Mettlach, and the wine is from the oldest Luxembourg vineyards on the Mosel. We’ll be drinking the wine back at Karlsruhe in a few days, but the boxes are coming home with us – I think getting them on the plane will be trickier than in the panniers!

The front panniers have an extra benefit in that I can get the bike up stairs more easily. Also, they haven’t affected top speed adversly – I hit 53kph the other day, no death wobbles!

So, yesterday it was a 3rd century roman UNESCO monument, today it’s 19th century industrialisation UNESCO monument. We spent 4 hours inside the HUGE iron factory at Voelklingen. The self guided round tour was 6kms long!

We rode 35km in the drizzle to get there by lunchtime, through an increasingly industrialized river valley. On another day it might have been dreary, but on the way to Voelklingen Ironworks it seemed appropriate.

Saarburg! Ours did too, albeit only briefly.

OK, we’re due for rain. And as usual it’s so humid I can’t put my rain jacket on!

This morning, I emailed my friend Simone with all the bad things about cycle touring – most particularly having to leave camp without breakfast as we did this morning.

Less than 5 mins up the river and we find a bakery, and a 3rd century roman funerary monument to eat it next to. Something great like this happens every day. Even a day which contains all the bad things will have an amazing moment that for me negates all the crap. That’s what I love about cycle touring.

By the way, this is called the Igeler Saeule, it’s UNESCO listed and it’s only still here because the early Christians didn’t know what it was and so didn’t destroy it.

European sky is different from Australian sky…vapour trails.

…and we have 3G again. Apologies for the extended silence, we spent rather more time out of the country than we had planned. But what’s new?

Here’s a pic of the amazing rock formations in the Muellerthal that I mentioned in the last post.

Climbing friends should note that these rocks were crap candidates for climbing – wet and slimy and soft sandstone. Don’t go there!

For the LP readers, we did all the Luxembourg highlights from the book (the Muellerthal is one) and they were all top notch. We gotta get those highlights on the website!