My cousin and her husband celebrated 25 years of marriage this month. How did they celebrate? A bike trip through Europe. (Pictures from backroads.com and the Phillips)
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Here is a 4-day recap from emails Laura sent out to the family. The pictures, except the last one, are from the company's website and may not be congruent with the daily post, I'll have to get the experts to help me out.
Day 1-Tuesday
Today we rode 38 miles (from Alenina Lhota to Tabor). The temperature was nice. We had a little rain--just enough to be refreshing. Our hotel room is awesome. Very spacious with an excellent view of the town square. In an hour we'll have a group dinner and then, hopefully, a good night's sleep before we start again tomorrow.
Mark posted a couple of pictures on Facebook. There are 19 people in our group. Two other couples are also celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary.
Each day we have 1 support person on a bike and 2 in vans. We're at about the same fitness level as the rest of the group. We don't ride in a pack but it's still nice not to feel like we're holding things up.
The Czech Republic is much hillier than Abilene. I was, not surprisingly, more comfortable with the up part of that than the down part. :)
We saw a large herd of large deer with large antlers (in velvet). Also, several deer blinds. Someone told us they "farm" them; then hunt them.
Day 2-Wednesday
Today we rode 41 miles, much of it in the rain. The temperature ranged from 54-57 degrees while we were riding. About 2/3 of the way through the ride, the whole group stopped for lunch at a little town that was very old and that had almost completely been abandoned twice. In 1990 it was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site and since then it's been restored. Lunch was great. Highlights were goulash, potato and mushroom soup, and cauliflower pancakes.
This may or may not surprise you... We are not the fastest riders in the group. In fact, we regularly have people in our group zoom past us. We are, however, above average at following directions. This afternoon, I was stunned to find out that we were the first ones back because we'd seen numerous group members go by. They'd all taken wrong turns at different points. Mark said we're like the tortoise in "The tortoise and the hare." :)
For the next two nights we are staying in cesky krumlov. We'll have tomorrow afternoon free so we can go to the castle here, wander around, etc.
Day 3-Thursday
Today
we stayed in cesky krumlov. This is the first day we haven't shuttled
to the start of the ride. We checked the hourly forecast (several times)
and the forecast was for low 50's with 80% chance of rain for every
time period shown. There's a lot to see in cesky krumlov so we just did a
27 mile ride. It rained the whole time but the ride was beautiful. We
were on a bike path through a forest much of the time. The hill up
through the forest was VERY steep and about four kilometers long. (Not
all of it was super steep.) We, and several of our trip friends, stopped
at a little town on the way back down for tea, coffee, hot chocolate.
We looked like a bunch of drowned rats. The picture is where we stopped
to catch our breath at the top of the really steep part.
This afternoon we toured a Baroque theater and cesky krumlov castle (which is the 2nd largest castle in the Czech Republic). Tonight we meet with a historian and take a tour of the town before dinner. Should be fun!
Day 4-Friday
This picture is in Durnstein, Austria. It's a picture of the abbey steeple taken through a window of the castle ruins. You can see the Danube behind it and the vineyards beyond.
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Yesterday we rode 47 miles, mostly along bike route #6 which runs along the Danube. That brought our total for the five days to 201 miles. We rode to Melk, at one end of the Wachau Valley. We toured the abbey there, ate lunch, and then rode back. Yesterday was the first day completely without rain. Hooray! Today, when we are not riding, it is calm and sunny. :) We had a blast in spite of the weather. It was sad to say good bye to our new friends. It was kind of like summer camp for adults.
In case you haven't seen it, mark posted some video of us riding on Facebook.
Now we are in Vienna. We'll take a train to Budapest this afternoon. Love you. LP
