Tuesday, October 6

From	To	Distance (km)	Average Speed (km/hr)	Max Speed (km/hr)	Odometer (km)	Riding Time (hr:min:sec)	Push-Ups
Werbach, Germany	Seligenstadt, Germany	116.46	17.2	44.2	1591	6:45:16	250

(2461 words)

This morning, Matt and I got up in Werbach and enjoyed a decent breakfast at the Gasthof, with no sign of the lapel-grabbing proprietor that Matt and I had already dubbed "Herr Pushy." The breakfast was served buffet-style, which enabled me to partake of three (small) glasses of orange juice.

From the Tauber to the Main

After leaving the Gasthof, Matt and I got back on the Taubertal path and headed towards Wertheim. The morning was very cold, but the ride was invigorating. There were some beautiful fall-like sections in the first part of the day. At one point we sped downhill through a forest of aspen trees, whose leaves were mostly green -- perhaps 20% yellow. A carpet of fallen yellow leaves had already formed on the path beneath us, and many more yellow leaves were tumbling down like snowflakes as we rode. During the first hour or so of riding, we encountered some small hills. The hills were fun to climb and glide down from, and the hilly landscape scenic. I enjoyed the hills, but given that we had a looming deadline when we needed to be at the Frankfurt airport, I was unable to prevent occasional "these hills are slowing our progress" thoughts from gently tugging at my mind.

After rolling 25 kilometers, we arrived in Wertheim, a small town where the Tauber river meets the Main. In Wertheim, we stopped in a cafe for a bathroom break and a cup of coffee, which I enjoyed with two Prinzen Rolle cookie from my stash. We then rode to the Main and found a bike path that paralleled the river. We turned onto the path, and headed along the Main in the direction of Frankfurt.

At one point, we must have lost the bike path, because we ended up on a muddy single-track path that has us both slipping and sliding around. Once we found our way back to the real bike path, however, we found it to be well-marked and we made good time.

Nicht So Gerne

When it was nearing lunch time, we stopped in a small bakery in a town named Collenburg. In the bakery, I collected food items for our lunch: some assorted broetchen and two yogurts. After buying these items of food, I asked the lady behind the counter if she had a restroom there at the bakery.

"Nicht so gerne," she replied.

I smiled, because although I understood her meaning, I had never heard that expression used in that way before, and I found it somewhat amusing. What she told me in effect was, "We have a bathroom here, but I'd rather not let you use it." I figured that her words, "Nicht so gerne," which mean "Not so gladly," must be the idiomatic German way of politely communicating that particular kind of "No."

Matt and I rolled down the street to a gas station, where the people were happy to accept our kind in their bathroom. As we rode back up the street towards the bike path, I asked Matt if he wanted to simply eat lunch in the bakery's stehcafe. A stehcafe (which means stand-cafe) is a cafe with tall tables and no chairs. In a stehcafe, you stand at a table and eat your lunch -- a fast food kind of arrangement.

"No, let's roll on," Matt answered. Matt was in a mood for making progress.

I, by contrast, was in a mood for eating lunch. I never explicitly told Matt that I wanted to eat, or that I was hungry, because I wanted to be accomodating and easy to travel with. But I kept asking Matt, "Do you want to eat here? ... Perhaps you'd like to eat here? ... How about here?" as we rode. Finally, Matt succumbed, and we stopped to eat on a section of path next to some locks in the river. All day we had been passing long, flat boats as they navigated up the Main. We figured that at this location, we could watch the boats go through the locks as we ate our lunch.

The Mysterious Dock/Boat

Matt and I did a set of push-ups, and I returned to my bike to unpack the food. As I was unpacking, a fellow on a platform that I thought was a dock extending out on the river near my bike yelled out to me. He was gesturing and seemed to be saying something about our push-ups, but his meaning was incomprehensible to me. I asked him to repeat twice. After the second repetition, which made no more sense to me than the other two attempts, I just smiled at him, nodded my head, and said, "Ja, ja."

I walked a few meters to a bench overlooking the path and river. I sat down next to Matt and arranged our lunch items between us. Once I had gotten myself organized, and my broetchen peanut-buttered, I looked up was rather surprised to find no more trace of what I had originally thought was a dock, but what turned out to be some kind of boat. The man making incomprehensible comments about our push-ups had aparently pulled up anchor and sailed away. I scanned the entire river. He and his floating dock/boat had vanished without a trace.

The Soggy Sign

After lunch we rode on along the Main. As we were approaching Niedernberg, it began to drizzle, but we kept riding. About three or four kilometers after Niedernberg, we left the Main bike path to take a shortcut bypassing the Main's eastward thrust towards Aschaffenburg. We aimed instead directly for Stockstadt. Once we reached Stockstadt, we followed our compass and our noses to try and get back to the Main. I headed for some smokestacks, which I figured would likely be standing in a row along one bank of the river.

At one point on our quest for the Main, we zoomed past a soggy, limp cardboard sign that had a newspaper cutout of a bicycle pasted on it, and Matt commented that we should be near the bike path. But soon we found ourselves at a dead end at a factory entrance gate. We turned around and rode back the way we had come, Matt leading the way. As we once again neared the soggy sign, I yelled ahead to Matt to check the sign, but he didn't hear me. As Matt rode on, I stopped and unraveled the soggy sign, and discovered beneath the newspaper cutout of a bike an arrow labeled "Main bike path." I rode after Matt until I got his attention, and we both turned around and headed back to the soggy sign. We turned right onto a path consisting primarily of muddy red clay, and rode in direction of the soggy sign's arrow.

The Gray-Haired Man on a Mountain Bike

We followed the path of red clay, which wound back and forth through a landscape dominated by factories, fences, and industrial by-products, until we arrived in a clearing. At the clearing, the ground was no longer red, but black, as if a big pile of coal had once stood there and been gradually removed, leaving only a layer of small black bits of coal pressed into the ground. As Matt and I stood there brainstorming about which way we should go, a gray-haired man on a mountain bike appeared. This man seemed to be in his 50s or 60s, but despite his age, and perhaps because of his interest in biking, the man seemed quite fit.

The gray-haired man pulled up to us, stopped, and asked if we needed help. Upon learning we were looking for the Main bike path, the man told us how to get from the clearing to the path, from which he had just come. When he learned we would soon be wanting to find a place to retire for the night, he recommended that we ride to Seligenstadt and spend the night there. He said Seligenstadt was a quaint town containing many houses and buildings with Fachwerk (the criss-crossing beam style facade sometimes seen on old German buildings). He also asked us where we had started that day. I told him we had started at Werbach that morning, and that my cyclometer showed we had gone 101 kilometers so far that day. As we parted company and rolled off in opposite directions, I thought about how nice it is when out of the blue on a trip you meet a friendly person, such as this gray-haired man on the mountain bike.

An Obstacle Course

We followed the old man's directions, and soon found ourselves back on the Main bike path. We found this section of the bike path to be quite heterogeneous, rather like an obstacle course. We encountered one obstacle that was composed of a set of concrete steps leading down to a concrete platform, followed about 30 meters later by a symetrical set of concrete steps leading back up. In the middle of the far steps, we could see an eight inch wide swath of flat concrete forming a ramp, allowing bicyclists to roll their bikes down and up as they walked next to them on the steps. Given our make-progress mindset and our thirst for he-men type challenges, we decided to simply ride our bikes down and up that thin ramp, surrounded on both sides by concrete steps that would be rather bumpy and treacherous to ride on if we were unfortunate enough to stray from the ramp.

Matt was the first to descend, and unfortunately he slowed down more than I expected when he started. I had to slow down quite drastically to keep from hitting him from behind, which in turn made me quite wobbly as I began my own descent. But despite my wobbles I made it down the thin ramp without veering onto the steps. For my trouble, I was met on the platform by a vicious untethered attack dog. The dog approached me from the right, growling. He cocked his head at me, his right ear extended and his left ear floppy, with a look in his eye that said, "I'd be tasting your ankle right now if it weren't for my owner's mad yelling and arm waving." Matt and I had recently seen several people carrying leashes, their dogs running loose nearby. I mentally formed the theory that people take their mean dogs out to these rather remote places and let them run loose, where there aren't many people around for their dogs to clamp their jaws onto. Meanwhile, in addition to dodging the dog, I was also attempting to calculate and attain the appropriate speed for my vault up the coming ramp. I saw Matt make it up the ramp, and I followed, once again successfully, without veering onto the steps. It felt quite exhiliarating to reach the top.

Shortly after the combined stairs/vicious attack dog obstacle, Matt and I had to stop and portage our bicycles over a bridge, underneath which water spilled along a man-made causeway into the Main. We carried our bicycles and panniers up seven concrete steps, across the bridge (about five meters in length), and down the steps on the other side.

Before long Matt and I pulled off the path and stopped at a nearby gas station for a bathroom break. By my estimation, we were still about four to six kilometers shy of Seligenheim, but just to make certain we weren't already in Seligenheim, I decided to inquire as to our location. I approached some men and told them I was heading to Seligenheim, and wanted to know the name of this town.

"This is Mairflingen," one of them told me, "To get to Seligenheim," he continued, "just go down to that next stoplight and turn right."

"That's OK," I said. "We're taking the Main bike path to Seligenheim. I just wanted to make sure we weren't already in Seligenheim," I explained.

"That's nice," the man said, "but to get to Seligenheim, you can simply go down to that next stoplight there and turn right. You can't miss it."

"Well," I said. "We're just following the bike path along the Main. There's less traffic. Nicer scenery."

"But to get to Seligenheim, you can just go down to that stoplight and turn right, you know," the man repeated.

I gave up explaining to them about the bike path. "Thanks," I said, and rode away. At the street, in plain view of the men, Matt and I turned and rode away from the stoplight, in the direction opposite their recommendation.

Arriving in Seligenheim

Soon Matt and I were back on the bike path, which became progressively more beautiful as we eliminated the remaining few kilometers between us and Seligenheim. When we finally rolled into Seligenheim, we found it did indeed have cobblestone streets and many old Fachwerk buildings, just as the gray-haired man on the mountain bike had described.

We found a room at the Frankfurterhof, a hotel that had a very friendly man running it. After stowing our bikes in a garage behind the hotel, and completing our push-ups in our room, we headed out for a pizzaria recommended by the friendly hotel man. On the way in I'd seen several Asians, and had asked the hotel man if there were a lot of Japanese staying there. He had told me that the Asians were not Japanese but Chinese. He said they were here on business, and that they had already been staying at the hotel for seven weeks. On the way down the hall as we left for the pizzaria, Matt abruptly turned right into an open door, which he thought was the stairwell, but which turned out to be the private room currently occupied by a Chinese man and the sole Chinese woman in the delegation. He apologized and as quickly as he had barged in ducked back out. As I passed their room the occupants were still staring at the door with surprised and perplexed looks on their faces.

We found the pizzaria, which about five minutes after we arrived was invaded by a dozen thirteen or fourteen year old girls who had come to celebrate one of the girl's birthdays. The girls sat at the next table over, such that the conversations Matt and I held during the remainder of our stay at the pizzaria were regularly interrupted by chattering and giggling from the next table. Unfortunately, the food at the pizzaria was a mixed experience. Although the penne with spicy tomato sauce and sparkling apple juice that I ordered was good, the salad and the Hefeweizen were not. After returning from the restaurant, we collapsed into our respective beds and fell asleep.