Today the forecast was hot. Apparently temperature records were broken in some parts of France and Germany. We had over 120km to ride and the major climbing was later in the day.
Luckily we had the vans if required…
it was a hot night, so a lot of us were a bit sleep deprived and pensive about what lay ahead…
We left Lindau around 8am…
we followed backstreets and paths along the north side of Lake Constance to Friedrichshafen, where the Zeppelin museum is, and on to Hagnau on Bodensee for morning tea.
our initial average speed was quite high as we were trying to get as far as possible before the heat really hit us, so I headed off on my own after morning tea. I slowed my pace to something quite reasonable and tried to enjoy my surroundings knowing I would be caught eventually.
a lakeside sculpture of a boat sinking?
It seems to be quite a lush and wealthy area…
lots of pretty villages…
Scotty took this stunner of the same place…
lots of water activities…
we were given Hammerhead navigation systems with daily routes to follow… an invaluable piece of kit that saved me a lot of tears!
There were even people walking their pets along the paths…
I finally got caught with near the end of lake…
then some of the crew decided to stop for a swim…
I decided to get to the lunch stop instead as the last time I had a swim in my bike pants I had ended up with some ‘issues’
Sarah preparing an awesome lunch, as always…
This fella loves his tucker…. I think Paul went back for seconds!
Beautiful old oak tree
Eventhough it looks lush and green the temp after lunch was climbing into the 40’s… we had a very steep climb into those hills in the distance.
Thankfully we found a lot of troughs to wet ourselves. One wonderful local told us not to drink from them and filled our water bottles for us with cold water…
The view from the top… uptown 14% climb in 44C heat, that was the toughest climb ever!!
Luckily there was a pub at the top and we were able to cool down and rehydrate a bit before talking the last 25km into Donaueschingen…
Donaueschingen is renowned as the source of the Danube and the Royal Fürstenberg Brewery which has been brewing since 1283!
The aftermath… I fell asleep soon after.
After our debrief and History lecture on Richard Lionheart’s final years, we headed to the Fürstenberg Bräustüble for a genuine German experience.
Peter enjoyed the evening…
This was a brutally tough day in terms of the heat as it got over 44C on the road, but we coped pretty well and we looked after extremely well by our awesome support crew.