For the first time in my life, I woke up not from a sudden sound or a bad dream. The night’s cold came in stages. My tent was an elevator descending into a glacier and as each progressively colder floor was reached, I would wake up numb, groggily accept that I might die and shiver back to sleep.

So, yeah, it was cold.

Unzipping the tent sent ice crystals from the rain fly flying onto the ice crystal covered ground. A hot shower Encino Man’d me back to life.

Walking back, it was amusing to see the R.V. section filled to capacity on one side of the campground and the dot of my tent alone in the tent section.

Breakfast while breaking down camp. Pedaling to win back some body heat. The gray sky promised rain as I found my way to the source of the Danube. And the forecast on a street-found newspaper promised rain all week.

Though I can’t do justice to the feeling here, despite the cold, the present threat of rain and the future certainty of dreadful weather, somehow because I’d managed to choose the most inauspicious time for a bike trip, somehow that buoyed me up. Most of my travel pictures have blue skies. It was time for a new color.

The Donauquelle or “Source of the Danube”

The statue shows “Mutter Baar weisst ihrer Tochter, der jungen Donau, den Weg nach Osten” or “Mother Baar shows her daughter, the young Danube, the way to the east.” Apparently the Romans considered this spot, where a spring bubbles up from the earth and flows into the Brigach, to be the source of the Danube. That happens here:

Which makes you wonder: why isn’t the river it flows into called the Danube? And, these days, the actual start of the Danube is placed where the Brigach and the Breg meet, which happens about 1 km down from here. If you accept that the Danube is where two smaller rivers meet, then you could just as logically argue the Danube really starts twenty miles from the Black Sea. Shows how arbitrary our labels are.

Well, it was time to bike.

Sprinkling rain through farm fields biking alongside this puny, glorified stream that hundreds of miles hence is the wide, blue aorta running through Vienna, teeming with ships. Did feel like I was riding the tail-end of one long, ever-widening snake.

And it was cold and rainy. But that didn’t stop the Germans. Each small town I passed through had some sort of marching band out in force in their town square. Must’ve been a holiday of some kind.

It was encouraging.

The Danube seemed to be encouraged too. It was already getting wider thanks to smaller feeder streams.

Took a break by the town hall (Rathaus) in Möhringen.

Dug the Valkyrie.

I have this thing about the circumstances under which I first hear a really good album: the time, the geography, the context in my life. I listened to “Pet Sounds” for the first time on a train from Venice to Florence when I had just moved to Europe (and so “That’s not me” was particularly resonant). The first time I heard “Merriweather Post Pavillion” was on a train from Munich to Braunau going through a snow-covered landscape. Well, I first listened to “Astral Weeks” during this stretch. The title song and the whole album in general imbued the passing landscape (rainy hillsides, cobblestone streets and the European-equivalents of Dollar Generals) with a cinematic, enthusiastic gravitas.

Then it was time to enter the Donautal, a winding valley with exposed craggy cliffsides and dirt paths going through forested stretches. The forests were important because it began to hail off and on here. With the stark countryside, the tall trees, the seclusion and the periodic showering of hale from dark skies, it seemed the right time to listen to a ‘metal/heavy rock-ish’ mix that my good friend Will mailed to me days before. The riffs jived with the darkened countryside. Things felt neanderthalish.

You can see some streaks of hail in the picture.

The storm passed.

So there were blue skies over robber baron castles.

The valley ended near the town of Sigmaringen and I decided to end the day there as well. It’s a testimony to the day’s ordeals that my tiredness overcame my cheapskateness and I splurged on an actual room in a guest house.

Fell asleep nearly instantly so that when I awoke randomly at, say, 4 in the morning, I had to get up to turn off the lights.