How it continued

Hello everyone,

Did you eagerly wait to know how it continued? We apologize for not hearing from us yesterday. Yesterday was perhaps the most exhausting day of the tour for us, not because we rode so far, but more mentally.

But let's start from the beginning. You may have noticed over the past few days that our strength was slowly diminishing. Our muscles and our bicycles needed a break, and we have already come a long way. That's why we decided to turn back, using buses and trains.

Tuesday morning started beautifully. We started in Solingen with sunshine and headed towards Leverkusen on a beautiful bike path. Slightly downhill, mostly shaded, wonderfully flat, so an average speed of 28 km/h was possible without effort. Accordingly, we arrived at Leverkusen station early, from where we wanted to take a long-distance bus to Frankfurt. That worked out fine, despite a little delay and some technical problems, but our nerves were very tense because the plan was to take a train to Stuttgart in Frankfurt, and the delay had grown to one hour, which would have been extremely tight.

Unfortunately, we drove on the A3 motorway, where, as you may have heard on the radio, there was a complete closure yesterday. Great, everything was at a standstill and no one was moving forward. To escape the stuffy heat of the bus, most of us got off and walked along the motorway. Instead of the planned 3-hour bus ride, we were on the road for 7 hours. Our nerves were on edge because we had definitely missed the planned train, but the later trains only ran until half past eight. And we had no idea if and when our bus ride would continue. Fortunately, we finally continued towards Frankfurt around half past six, so instead of 15:20, we arrived at Frankfurt Central Station shortly before 8 pm. There, we quickly had to find a ticket counter that sold tickets for us and our bicycles. The direct connection to Stuttgart had no more space for bicycles, so it took three regional trains to bring us from Frankfurt to Stuttgart in a good 3 hours, so we arrived in Stuttgart at midnight. By the way, if we had missed the train, we would have had to wait until 3 am for the next one.

As nice as the day started, it became nerve-wracking, and we were very relieved when we finally arrived and fell tiredly into our own beds!