A short breakfast with my hosts followed by thanks and well-wishing, immediately followed by a second breakfast in a cafe near Hauptplatz Linz. The sun was out and shining and the Hauptplatz was filled with an open air bazaar where bright and shining people sold and bought eccentric bric-à-brac.

While crossing over the ever-wider Danube, my mind was on Melk, the small town roughly halfway between Linz and Vienna that was my goal for the day and the final staging ground for the final push to Vienna the following day. But, upon reaching the other side of the river, I saw for the first time a sign with the distance to Vienna written on it: 239 km. And I knew it was time for the metric Dub Cench* (term coined for 200 mile bike day. My travel buddy on the TransAm trip finished the trip by biking 200 miles in one go from Charlottesville to the Atlantic Ocean and I wanted to emulate such an epic ending).

So I stocked up on groceries at a Billa (And I was so happy to shop at a Billa again, as it’s my cheap grocery store of choice here). Salami, cheese, bread, canned tuna,orange juice, a head of broccoli and a GORP of peanuts, raisins, chocolate, raspberries and blue berries would fuel the venture. My bags were stuffed.

Ironically, deciding to bike twice the planned distance in one day actually made me much more laid-back and casual. When you know it’s going to take all day, why rush? I had a first-lunch or third-breakfast in the park of forest and running trails extending from Linz down the Danube.

When it was a reasonable hour, I phoned my next CouchSurfing host to say that I wouldn’t be stopping in Melk. She was glad for the call, wished me well and was understanding…though I don’t think she understood why someone would voluntarily bike such a distance.

The wind was against me for quite a while. This was overcome by enthusiasm and energetic music. There was some cognitive dissonance when “Funky Town” was playing as I realized I was passing the Mauthausen Concentration Camp.

After a week of gloom punctuated by all-too-brief sunshine, the weather was perfect. Everyone else knew it. After having the Danube virtually to myself for a week, suddenly everyone and their Onkel was out riding today. Twice I ran into cycling groups (not carrying bags, of course) and I drafted off their peleton for as long as I could manage.

After 110 or so km, I got to Melk.

The Monastery at Melk marks the entrance to the Wachau, which lived up to its reputation this day. The 30km valley extending from Melk to Krems was bursting with color. There were hills terraced with vineyards. Ruins of castles perched atop hills.

Blossoming Apricot Trees.

I would love to go back in the fall.

My favorite church along the whole route might just be this one in Duernstein.

Somewhere in there I had my second or third lunch or first dinner.

The sun started to set near Krems.

Despite feeling the need to get as far as I could before the sun went down, I took some time to revisit Krems. I’d visited last year, briefly, after seeing Aphex Twin perform there.

Even found the bench where I’d spent the night by the train station between the concert, which ended around 3 a.m., and the 7 a.m. train the next morning.

Got lost trying to cross to the southern side of the Danube. Ended up on the Autobahn for a bit. Asked an old lady for directions only to find that she wasn’t even sure where her own house was on the map. I wanted to give her a big hug.

Finally got out of Krems. Took this picture from the bridge to the southern side of the Danube, the side on which I would stay for the rest of the trip.

Hard, hard riding to get as much distance as I could while the light lasted. The wall of tiredness had already been passed and I now pedaled the way I imagine bacteria’s flagellum operates: pure, unthinking impulse.

Somewhere near Traismauer, it was clear that the sun was all but gone. I stopped to use the last of the light to put on warm clothes, double-up my socks, queue up talks on Zen Buddhism on the mp3 player, have a last snack, finish up the orange juice and, most importantly, tie my front light to my helmet with bungee cords. This was the last picture I took before wrapping up the camera in a dew-proof bag:

There were still about 60km to go at this point but you have to go slower in the dark.

Listened to this.

I wasn’t sure how much battery my light had left, so I only used it when necessary. For the most part, I kept my bike on the thin, relatively greyish line extending out in front of me and kept it from the black sections on the side. Especially the side to my left, which would be the river. There were strange noises. Sleeping ducks were awakened, flying off in splashy alarm across the unseen river.

Got seriously lost near a power plant and, when the way I was on turned out to clearly not be the right path, I considered just stopping and setting up my tent in the dark. After losing about 40 minutes, too tired for real panic, I retraced the path and finally found where I’d gone awry.

Scared off a family of deer around Zwentendorf.

Caused the amusement of children playing hide and seek on the street in Pischelsdorf.

Near Tulln I found, rather implausibly, another person riding in the dark. A guy named Siegfried (the names used on here are all fake, btw) was heading my way, so we rode together in the pitch black for about 30km to Greifenstein. Turns out we had a lot in common. He’d bike toured in the US when he was my age. He was about 55 years old. Used to be a mountain climber until he broke his leg in Switzerland. Married his nurse from the accident. The conversation in the dark was perfect and surreal. Just our voices, the soft hum of bike chains and the ambient noise of the nightscape.

Knowing that I’ll be leaving Austria soon, I’ve been worried that I haven’t learned enough German. Talking in the dark with an unseen Austrian interlocutor, talking about things that I really cared about with someone I really wanted to understand and somehow managing to both understand and be understood, well, this event took on symbolic importance to me. I wouldn’t have been able to do this one or two years ago. It was an organic test arising from life’s weird curriculum and, somehow, I’d passed.

Around midnight, we had ‘dinner’ at a bar along the river near Greifenstein. We both parted ways near the hydroelectric dam.

Well now I was in familiar territory about 20km or so north of Vienna. I often bike this path in the light of day, so it was genuinely fun to do it in the dark and I got to Klosterneuburg quite quickly. When I saw the lights of Vienna, the blinking red light on the Donauturm and Millenium City and just the glow of the city itself on the Danube, and when I passed by Leopoldsberg and Kahlenberg and Doebling, where I used to live, and then got on the Donaukanal, which is part of my daily commute, and smiled at the Spitellau incinerator and even the familiar graffiti covering the underside of the Autobahn and it all seemed like a graduation ceremony or a homecoming or the final transition to the final song of a great album…well, I’ve only felt that way a few other times in my life.

The final count was 229.5 km and around 11 hours in the saddle.