It was your echt Romantic Road today: a super ride past authentic German sights such as colourful half-timbered town houses, sturdy medieval city walls, and heavy goods vehicles. A reminder that ‘Romantic’ is not always the same as ‘romantic’.
Anyway, it was another fisty and moggy morning. But thanks to another early start and the ever more efficient packing-up regime of my tiny superlight tent, I was off by eight. Well, I say superlight: the sodden outer probably weight a kilogram, about 998 grams of which was water.
Breakfast came from the cafe in a Rewe supermarket. The novelty of inexpensive, tasty filter coffee and fresh-baked pastries is not wearing off. Handsome Donauwörth lived up to its name, being very much worth the Danube that flows through it.
It was intriguing to think that I could just have turned right at the bridge and gone downhill all the way to the Black Sea. I followed the route of the Via Claudia Augusta, along a pleasant railtrail that whooshed me easily out of town.
More good bahn paths took me to pleasant (and deserted) Harburg… and some roadside paths. The Romantic Road was devised in the 1950s to showcase historic southern German towns for motorists. The bike alternative came much later, when the roads had become too busy for pleasant cycling. (My partner – who is still my partner – gleefully rode it in the 1980s, when traffic was much lighter than today.)
The cycle version is well-signed, flat, and car-free. But it often spends time zigzagging through bland farmland. If you’re in a hurry for lunch, as I was, the good news is that while the original Romantic Road is a busy, lorry-infested highway, it has (as do most German main roads) an excellent, smooth, wide, car-free cycle and pedestrian path running alongside.
This trick got me to Harburg, and then to Nördlichen, quickly and easily. Not, perhaps, very Romantic, but then neither is a meandering gravel path round the edge of maize fields and electricity substations.
If I could paint I’d do a painting called The Romantic Road, with Caspar David Friedrich’s lone wanderer looking out over autobahns filled with lorries delivering car parts to Frankfurt.
Nördlichen isn’t all that well-known, but proved a picturesque place for my Rewe picnic lunch. I also cycled round the walls, three miles of intact fortification still here after seven centuries. My front garden wall only dates back to 1980, and it’s falling down already.
It was a bit drizzly as I got to Dinkelsbühl, my campsite target for tonight. I stocked up on items I was short of from another Rewe, such as beer and sausages and socks, and had a quick shufti round this famously photogenic Romantic town.
However, I’d do my main sightseeing tomorrow: I was keen to get my tent up before the forecast downpour, have a shower and some dinner, and get an early night.
Hmm. Despite the attraction of a little lake right by the tent camping area, things didn’t quite work out. I didn’t warm too much to the site – very campervan oriented, pricey, and with grumpy bar staff. But the worst thing was the group of teenage campers making an awfully loud racket all night, yelling and laughing and singing along to some overloud music. I couldn’t sleep despite earplugs and a woolly hat.
Around midnight I heard an infuriated woman admonishing them, but they simply laughed and carried on. Somewhere around two the noise abruptly stopped – I wondered if the irate German woman had somehow poisoned them – and I got some sleep at last.
Miles today: 51
Miles from Füssen: 158