Grein
I guess we had our good weather day in Austria. It rained most of the night and we awoke to a damp morning though the rain had stopped finally. The campers had some wet stuff including bike seats.
After lunch we continued on the river a short while. Then we made sort of a joint indecision to try the Kultural radweg - an offshoot that we hoped would present more variety than the "same old river" path.
We certainly got some variety. We followed the Mradweg (for museum) signs on the most part and only had to consult Randy's detailed maps a few times. We were only 15 km from Grein when we made the switch. Soon we were only 9K away.
After some more curves and nice country roads and a busy road we were 11 km away - something wrong with this picture?? No, we were still on the M trail. Then we hit a very steep climb for about 10 minutes (maybe half that - its always twice as long as it seems.)
That hill took us up to the Clam Castle, and we're not talking seafood here folks. Built in 1149 it has been owned by the Clam family since 1454 and 3 generations still live there - in summer anyway. It is one of the few fully intact fortresses in Austria. We had a very friendly guide who took her time, answered all our questions and gave us a great tour and her English was not that bad. It is an impressive building - I wouldn't want to live there though - too cold.
After that tour the rest of the ride was mostly an easy downhill into Grein, a small town where we soon found the campground. We even saw some sun during the early afternoon. However soon after setting up camp it began to rain lightly and that continued until dinner time when it mostly quit again. Since we were immensely hungry after the ride we were able once again to find gelato and pastries even on Sunday in this small tourist town. Also some of the usual beverages outside a little restaurant.
We had another great dinner - grilled pork tenderloin, rice and tomato/bean sauce. Jenny keeps doing a great job of whipping up three meals a day plus doing most of the shopping with some help from Craig. Craig has to find and establish the campsite before any of us get there. In return they occasionally get to party along with everyone else and they get to haul over the autobahn in their great vehicles. Craig would dispute that as he has the loaded down Peugeot Boxer van. But Jenny has a supercharged VW camper van that does 160 on the autobahn - that's even fast in mph. Sorry Jenny, maybe Henry wasn't supposed to know that.
I'm afraid the after dinner conversations have started to deteriorate. Either we're running out of topics or we've become as familiar with each as old friends due to our 3 weeks close association. I don't think I'll bother with tonight's topics. After all my mother is reading these things. We're becoming acquainted with James from Birmingham who is doing a ride to Istanbul on his own and has crossed our path more than once. So far we haven't scared him off.
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Posted August 21, 2005 by Tour Participant
Austria |
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