Alps - Day 18 : Planning a new route

In the morning, our German neighbor came over to talk to us. He also wanted to know how our bivy bags worked. He said the weather would get better in the next few days. For breakfast, we again had rye bread with chocolate spread. It had a lot of energy but wasn't very tasty.

 

There was a large road running from Wangen to Ravensburg. We weren't allowed to ride on that. Instead, we needed to follow a bicycle path that was much hillier and longer. If we weren't exhausted already we were so by now. In Ravensburg were no bicycle signs. We followed the car signs and ended up at the start of a highway. We had no choice but to backtrack and guess the right direction.

 

In Sigmaringen, we studied the roads. We could take a shortcut by cycling through the Black Forest. It would save about 100 km. Bram liked the idea of that. Otherwise, he would get back home on Sunday evening while he needed to start his internship on Monday morning. I also liked the idea of having at least one day to rest. Today we were most tired of the entire trip. For the rest of the day we would follow the route as planned, in the evening we would design a better version.

We cycled on to Albstadt. There were three possible directions, two roads running in the wrong direction or the highway. I asked someone for help. We received a complex set of instructions and managed to find the way to Albstadt. They really can't make good cycling paths in Germany. We bought some food at an Aldi. Bram had a salad with tomatoes and cheese, the only healthy food of the entire vacation. I ate 750 grams of potato salad. We spread out our maps on the ground. After half an hour of inspecting them, we were confident we carried all the maps required to plan a shorter route home. We planned to cross the Black Forest from East to West, which meant we only needed to climb once. Crossing it diagonally would be shorter but involve a lot more climbing.

From the west side of the Black Forest we would then take the route we cycled during our Black Forest cycling vacation. Back then, it had taken four days to get home. Now the route would be 40 kilometers longer, and we wanted to get home in 3 instead of 4 days. That way we would, like every vacation until now, get home one day earlier than planned. A lady passed by and asked what we were doing. She said, 'you guys have some bad maps'. She was right.
 

Near Horb was a campsite. It again took a kilometer of climbing to get there. We heard some people talk, and judging by their accents, they lived close to where we grew up. It's funny how you can tell where someone's from after hearing just one sentence. We only had a little cash left, but fortunately, we could pay by card. Tomorrow we would register and pay.