Wednesday 13th August

Phew what a 24 hours. The theme which sounds like a judgement from the I-Ching, is: after much anxiety one can fall on one’s feet. I must say the torrential rain forecast yesterday evening sent me into a tizzy but it made me prepare for the day and I think it was worth it (preparing, not the tizzy which is entirely unproductive). I got up early. It had been raining in the night and the tent was wet but it wasn’t raining when I packed up. It feels like it weighs a ton when it’s wet but I had a cuppa and some chocolate cake and was ready to roll out just after 9am, with my waterproofs at hand and liberal anti fog applied to everything required to see where I am going. I made good progress north via Freiburg and it wasn’t till after ugly Strasbourg that it started to rain and after filling with petrol a yoghurt and couple of croissants from Carrefore at a service station settled my stomach. Under some cover I pulled on the huge overall. Traffic was fairly light apart from in Strasbourg with only some trucks spraying huge amounts of water and caravans for me to overtake. The rain got worse after Saarbruken which is when I realised my boots were getting full of water.
Todtnau to Trier at EveryTrail

When I finally peeled my gloves off I could see that the dye had turned my hands blue. I thought it was from cold at first. I finally got to Trier thanks to the GPS and pulled up completely dripping outside last weeks hotel only to be told they were fully booked but they remembered me. He recommended me the Hotel Astoria just around the corner thank goodness and they had a double room (the manageress has just come in to my room to confiscate the extra bedding strangely, perhaps they are worried that I might try to smuggle an extra guest in, strange though as I’ve paid for a double room – the information clearly forbids guests to take visitors into their rooms). This place is strange. It has an English Victorian name but downstairs is definately an Indian style but the wallpaper in the room is rather twee floral print.

Bertha is parked in one of those underground car parks with a steep slope out and an exit card reader requiring dexterity to get out in the morning with a heavy bike. Nice news I was able to change my ferry crossing to tomorrow night so don’t have to linger somewhere I don’t want to be in the rain. It’s a bit of a treck up to Hook of Holland from here, over 250 miles but I have all day to do it and hopefully while the forecast still shows rain, it’s not as heavy as today. Once I arrived safely in bricks and mortar and under a roof here, the rain got even worse. The other nice touch was the greeting that for my €79 I get a drink on the house, it could be a beer a Fanta or a glass of champaign. Dear reader, which do you think I chose, and subsequently sipped with complimentary nuts on the sofa with Indian design cushions feeling very pleased indeed not to be camping? They have a rather natty cocktail bar here.

So now everything is spread out drying including my map of Germany and my boots perched on the just working radiator, also I’ve been trying to dry out my gloves with the hair dryer. I can hear people scurrying about down on the street in the rain under umbrellas. I just realised how tired I am.

After supper of the breakfast I bought this morning and a nap on the lovely bed, I can see some blue sky outside. It’s half past eight. Time for a quick walk to clear my rather thumping head.

Tuesday 12th August

From the campsite bar. Today I rode the few miles up to Todnauburg, the strangely names mountain of death. Once there I used my cunning GPS to guide my walk to Heidegger’s hut or as close as you can get to it. He certainly had a beautiful view. There is no signpost to the hut so you’d need to know in advance where it waS though there is a large signpost about him and his attachment to the area with some photos of him looking rather creepy in his rural costume and funny hat. After that I took the lovely twisty road up to Freiburg about 18 miles away.
Ride to Todtnau and Freiburg at EveryTrail

Motoring and cities never works that well for me but I found somewhere to park and got a coffee and croissant though I didn’t see that much of the town apart from riding through it and platform 8 of the Hauptbahnhof. Back here in the cooling sun with a beer, I worked out a likely campsite to head for tomorrow only about 150 miles north and slightly west from here. So all was looking good but a chance glance at my weather app showed downpours for nearly all of tomorrow starting around ten or eleven. My spirits are rather dampened by this news so maybe I will make a hotel my lodging tomorrow night. I don’t know how accurate these weather maps are but it looks like if I can get a good start and make good progress going north I could keep ahead of the worst of it. So it’s good to be forewarned about that. But as the Dutch campsite owner has just said to me, riding a motorbike in rain is shit. As equipped as ever I have my vaguely waterproof overall and, more important, some anti fog liquid for my specs. I remember driving all day in Scotland in heavy rain with one of my lenses misted up so riding with my head at 45 degrees for about five hours. Usually my trips end up feeling like they are twenty four hours too long.

Monday 11th August

It’s 9.30 am and everything is packed and I’m just waiting for the tent to dry out in the morning sun before heading down south, first to the Touratech shop nearby and then to find the campsite near Heidegger’s hut. Two nights there then I return.

Here I am. Today’s ride was easy. Not so many miles and nearly all on beautiful roads. First stop was the Touratech shop and HQ in the town beginning with N… Niederreschacht. No that’s not right. What can I say. The place had some presence. It had its owns cafe full of Touratech staff having lunch. What’s a hobby for me is the daily grind for them. I could run my fingers over all their lovely aluminium panniers. Interestingly, after a morning with the occasional embarrassing moment of poor control at slow speed I spent some time looking at their BMW 650gs loaded with their kit. It’s about half the bulk of Bertha and looks highly manageable. Even the F800 seems long and high in comparison. Hmm.
Then it was over some high hills and down and up again, through Todnau up to this high campsite where the wind blows occasional strong gusts but I feel really sorted. I have a nice spot with a high view and no one near me, the guy who runs the site is nice and gave me a discount if I didn’t want the freebies of free local buts travel which avoids him paying tax on me. Once I had unloaded Bertha of her bulky luggage I rode down to the nearest supermarket down some exciting hairpins and lovely roads and picked up all the fresh food I had been missing for the last few days including local white wine which will be an interesting experience and some beers, all of which is sitting in one of my metal panniers with a big bag of ice keeping it all cool. Added to that I managed to find a cash machine (after three times trying to get cash out of a night deposit box when I finally looked up to see the proper machine). Todnau is the perfect sized town for trips like this. You can park easily and in one place and get all you need. It is beautiful up here. The sun is shining and the sky is blue and of course the air is so fresh. We are 3400 feet up. No wonder the wind is chilly. Tomorrow I will ride over the Todnauburg – it’s not really walkable – and strike out for Heidegger’s hut. I will take the GPS but still I’m not completely confident I will find it.

Miles 113 average 34.4 mph Max sped 71.4 mph, moving time 3 hrs 17 minutes

It’s a quarter to eight in the evening and it’s twelve degrees. This is one of those camping moments. The recipe is just right well almost, nothing is ever fully satisfying of course. Cooking (inside this huge tent for the first time) fresh produce with chilled local white wine and even some crisps, with a view of the hills of pine trees and sky with whisks of white cloud, my position here is private which is rare when camping (in the previous site, I took down my tent right under the noses of a couple having breakfast this morning barely 4 feet away) and as people staying here walk by on the road just below me I begin to realise this is far from those sites populated by retired Dutch people who seem to come on holidays to watch TV in their caravans in rows of similar white boxes. These holidays are funny! I discover it every year, there are sublime moments but you have to really earn it and work through so much dissatisfaction and anxiety to reach them. Brrr it is getting cold as I thought it would.

Saturday 10th August

It’s my wedding anniversary. I’ve been married for 30 years!
Last night it rained waking me up but of course the tent was fine. Today is cool so far but with a blue sky. I noticed people walking about with little paper bags and walked down to the main road to investigate. I saw a queue of people in what looked from the outside like a post office but on closer inspection it was a bakery so now I have some pastries for lunch in absence of any other open shop. There is another solitary man here travelling by motorbike from Germany to the French alps he says. I complemented him on his light packing. He has a sensible small tent but on closer inspection I see he carries a large rucksack as he rides and I have to say is rather overweight, so probably we equal out (only Bertha is larger and more powerful than his Japanese dirt bike).

This campsite is aimed at and is full of young families and it reminds me of the few times we camped when the boys were small. In the toilets a father was guiding his toddler to not wee on the floor while the little boy sang a song throughout. How strange that life is all a game to the small. Adults aren’t often to be found singing while doing life’s shores, mostly it’s builders next door but the rest of us learn to be serious and focused.

I finished Where Angels fear to Tread with breakfast. It is nicely written but rather dated of course.

This morning I plan to take a short walk up the hill before it gets too hot…. It was very cool up there with a convenient little hut with its pitched roof just when I needed it. This afternoon I’ve spent reading Reissman’s book on narrative analysis, with a degree of scepticism. Published in 1990, Derrida, Freud, Foucault, Levi Strauss and a host of post structuralist thinkers don’t appear in the index. For me this is a rather parochial investigation, rooted in US feminist sociology without even the continental feminists like Kristeva influencing the ideas.

Saturday 9th August

I write from the sunny black Forrest next to my tent pitched by a stream. Today had its ups and downs literarily in this case. After sleeping well I woke to breakfast at 7.30 before the dining room opened but they were kind enough to serve me. It was raining outside so I delayed my exit for an hour until it stopped. €62 for a bed breakfast and garage seemed good to me and the place had the winning combination of being unpretentious and having English spoken. I packed up Bertha in her garage and then heaved her out onto the sloping alley and struggled to keep her upright. With my heart still pounding from exertion and the anxiety of nearly dropping her, I drove down to the hotel to return the garage key and promptly dropped her unfortunate bulk on the road while getting off without putting the sidestand down. I must say she took the fall very well. There was nothing for it but to unload everything and try to get her upright. I’ve done it before so I know it’s possible. A petite woman walking a dog asked whether she could help but I politely declined and just when I was starting to fish out my camera to record the event two beefy guys turned up and got her upright in no time without even taking the cigarettes out of their mouths. They seemed really pleased to help. It was strangely an enjoyable drama to live through the event you’ve been dreading. I remember reading, though from a different context and continent, Ted Simon saying that he didn’t fear disasters as he saw them as opportunities for people to express their humanity and provide help.

Once on the road I was heading about 190 miles to a campsite mentioned in the Cool Camping Guide, one of only a few in Germany. This one is in the black Forrest and has a car free tent area so the antidote to my caravan aversion, so some motorway miles with a parking stop populated by two coaches of football supporters and some lovely twisty roads later I found the place. It’s sweet and all the nasty caravans are tucked away completely invisible and everyone here is a cool camper under canvass (nylon) reading paperbacks and I am saying hello to people. It takes a while to wind down after arriving and organising everything in the heat to notice how beautiful the site is and how lovely it’s situation.

Miles 194 average 57.8mph max speed 92.5mph moving time 3 hrs 21 minutes

Working out the rest of the trip:
Sunday night here
Monday southern black Forrest
Teusday southern black Forrest
Wedn northern black Forrest
Thursday Northern Germany or Loreleyblick

Touratech is only 37 miles away south and Heidegger’s hut is 60 miles southwest and there seems to be a campsite quite close by where I can hide and prepare for my assault on the hut. Be warned, the guides say, it is still owned by the Heidegger family and they do not like their privacy intruded upon. The Heidegger family, Some sources say, are heavily armed and expertly trained in the techniques of close combat. I’ve worked out a good site to stay at close to Bitburg where Bitburger comes from for my last night before the ordeal of the Dutch motorway system.

Friday 8th August

Today has been mixed as all these days are. I got off around 10. It takes a good hour and a half to break camp. My cunning route across 20miles of country to near where the Mosel branches off from the Rhein took me to exactly where I wanted to be and I spent the day riding the road alongside this beautiful river. I stopped at a so called cafe in a less popular and less pretty town for lunch to be reminded that German food is not good. My salad was a mush of prawns with some curry powder thrown in for luck. Some French arrived by bike and made an entrance in reply to my greeting one asked whether the food was very good. I had to tell the truth. Then on the bike again. As the Mosel winds down towards Trier it is not as beautiful as further downstream and added to this it started to rain though lightly. I decided to keep to the river all the way to Trier and look for a hotel and to cut a long story short I stumbled on a place and seemed to get the last free room with a garage for Bertha to herself after alarming a young man with a motorbike who rents the garage next door by trying that one first. Once in the room which has a door that is one foot thick, I showered and fell asleep so deeply that when I awoke I had no idea where I was. I had a walk round this town and found a place to have a pizza and glass of wine and sat outside in a square in the sunny evening. Service is slow here in Germany so far. You need to settle down with a good book. My plan is to make a push south tomorrow to find a place from the cool camping guide with a car free tent only area. It’s 180 miles.
Today’s miles: 125 miles average 34.3 mph max 71 mph moving time 3:37 hrs