Today was about getting from Zürich to the start of the Danube at Donaueschingen.

While Mom prepared for the long flight back home by sleeping in, I was downstairs in the hotel’s restaurant “making the buffet breakfast count.’ On a bike trip, ‘making a meal count’ is a euphemism for eating until you can’t eat anymore and then topping it off with a few more hundred calories.

As I huntergathered dried apricots and slammed petite glasses of juice at a corner table, the other guests drowsily chattered in French and Swiss German. When you hear a foreign language you don’t speak, it can sound mysterious and sophisticated and this aura adheres to the speaker. Once you speak one, though, you realize they’re just talking the same small-talk mundanities as everyone else.

Mom joined me downstairs. We shared one last walk through Zürich before we arrived at the Hauptbahnhof. When her train pulled in, we hugged goodbye.

Mom in Vienna: Early morning; Ready to go; Pre-Old World Overload

After two hours of double checking my gear and scribbling out directions, I turned in the hotel key and the tour began.

A slow and steady climb through clean streets and past steepled churches brought me out of the gentle basin that cradles Zurich. As the bike path ended at the city’s outskirts, a plane flew overhead. Checking my watch, I mused it might be mumsey’s.

A warm sun lit sheep-filled hills. Many, many hills. The weather gods, it turned out, bookended the trip with sunny days around a week of intervening gloom.

Political signs were everywhere. Shining happy Swissiards. After living in Austria, I assume the most handsome candidate is also the most xenophobic.

Somewhere along the way I got lost. The Swiss only seem to mark roads you might turn off onto but not the one on which you currently drive. Thus, the surest sign you are on the wrong road is if you see a sign for the road you want.

Luckily, a white rabbit named Hansjörg raced past. I caught up with him and, since he was going the same way, he took me to the Rhein.

Drafting Hansjörg: First glimpse of Rhein in valley below.

We parted ways near Eglisau and I crossed the Rhein.

This may or may not have been a border crossing into Germany. The borders are rather willy-nilly in these parts.

After a long stretch, I came to an official border station (Out of Germany? Back into Switzerland?) but ended up circumventing it by taking a dirt sheep path to it’s left.

After an hour of listening to such things, a growing roar began to soundblind me.

The Rheinfall at Neuhausen.

Ate lunch there watching an industrious heron catch his lunch from the clear water.

A few kilometers up the Rhine brought me to Schaffhausen. It’s medieval inner city was nice enough to send the Old World Overload that Mom and I had caught a few days earlier into remission.

Festung Munot: Castle after a design by Albrecht Dürer

After exploring Schaffhausen, I quickly found my way back onto my directions and, just as quickly, found my way off them again. Thankfully, there were other bikers out to point me on the way.

Next came a valley running alongside the eastern side of the Black Forest. The Black Forest, it turns out, is about as black as Kentucky Bluegrass is blue.

At the top of the day’s one big climb the Alps were visible to the south. But it was getting late so I didn’t marvel too long. After screaming back down the hill, I was lost again.

Two guys says my lostness. They came up and asked me “If I was searching for something.” I said I was. They said they could help me. I thanked them. After a few seconds of confusion, I realized they were Jehovah’s Witnesses seeking to give me directions of a more metaphysical kind.

Eventually they sent me in the right direction.

Vaguely heavenly.

I got to Donaueschingen just as the grocery stores were closing. Then I remembered that tomorrow was Sunday, which meant all stores would be closed. With the combination of a ravenous hunger and an intent to stockpile for the morrow, I bought way too much food.

It got ate.

Well, hotels were too expensive. I found a campground with the help of a nudist biker (who was clothed at the time). Though the campground owner warned me about the nighttime temperature, I set up my tent as the sun set.

Exhausted, I washed my face with warm water, put on every article of clothing I had with me and bundled up in my sleeping bag for the coldest night of my life.