After a few days in Stuttgart, visiting family, I needed to head out again. These are the hardest mornings: leaving a warm comforting place, and heading back out onto the road, alone.

Solo bikepacking is a weird hobby. Practitioners will talk about crying alone in their tents from the utter loneliness of the experience, but will tell you about how they would do it all again, … once they recover emotionally from this one.

One my hardest, but most beautiful, days of cycling was after spending a night with my mom. I was heading out alone, in the cold winter, with no accommodation planned for that evening. I spent a large part of the day on the verge of tears, but ultimately, it was one of my most beautiful days of cycling, ever.

With this in mind, sad to leave family behind, I left home, and headed out to my first stop of the day: the bakery at Kaufland.

German supermarket bakeries may be one of my favourite things in the world. The selection of pastries is incomensurate. Just picking what to have to have for breakfast seems to require an in depth cost/calory/taste trade-off.

I want everything but can only have one. What will give me the most joy?

Luckily, I’m on a bicycle and burning stupid amounts of calories every day, I can just get an assortment, and snack throughout the day. This ladies, gentlement, and children, is why my bicycle has storage space!

After a very exciting first stop, I was on the road, sappy, but on a sugar high.

Today, I would be cycling through deep Bavaria. I would be following the Neckar, the river that passes through Stuttgart, on it’s way from the alps to the Rhine. A small winding river, flanked most of the way by a well signposted long-distance cycling route.

To get to the river, I would have to cross a range of hills and nothing makes a nice climb feel easy as feeling bloated from eating a massively oversized pastry. I was in for a treat! The slow, and griding climbs gave me ample time to question my lack of impulse control, or lack of foresight. Or maybe I should have just looked at my route a little more, and waited an hour to over-indulge.

Exploring on a bicycle takes you through many places you would not have stopped in otherwise, and German towns fall neatly into two groups: charming and picturesque, or utterly boring and ugly. There may be a correlation with the degree of destruction suffered in the 1940 - 1945 period. Luckily, today was mostly charming and picturesque towns.

The other notable aspect of exploring Germany, is it’s reckoning with it’s past. I passed through Tübingen — a beautifully preserved old town, enveloped by strong walls, perched atop a hill — and looked for an entrance. I casually stopped in front of a nice building to take a picture, and looked for a plaque recounting its history. Instead, I found a plaque recounting the story of the dilapidated building behind me: the former headquarters of the police, and the Gestapo.

The plaque told the story of the deportation of the Jewish population of the town: of 24 living in the town, 2 survived. One “had previously evaded deportation by committing suicide”.

After a silent moment, I headed deeper into the old town, making my way, at random, through alleyways and onto beautiful squares, looking for a place to eat. This may have been the biggest challenge of the day. wanted something by the river, but not too crowded, not too fancy, … I ended up in a bakery, in the modern part of town, far from the river.

Of course, less than 500 metres after setting off again, I found, what would have been a perfect place: an open-air bar in a park. Life.

As I left town, the atmosphere changed. The morning had been a meadering ride from city to city, but now, I could see the foothills of the Alps, and the the scenery was getting wilder.

Passing a bend in the river, I saw a massive bridge under construction. Most people would have continued past it, but the Engineer in me had to stop to understand how it was being built. I climbed up one of the access roads as far as I could to get a better look at the construction site, and the underside of the bridge. Stopped to take pictures, move to get another angle, went back to take a better pciture, … I must have spent 20 minutes just ogling the bridge and trying to guess what was going on!

Still, I had to make progress, I had a deadline! The road took me back to Germany’s darkest days: along the path, a large metal book drew my attention. I stopped to take a closer look, and found a meorial to “Forced Labor, Euthanasia, and the Holocaust”. The pages told the history of Oberndorf An Neckar during the Nazi era: listing the victims of Nazism, and the history of the prisoner of war camps in the area.

TODO: NEED A WAY TO MARK A PAUSE / PONDER THE MOMENT

Cycling at night is no fun, especially when you want to experience the views, so on bike adventures, I always keep an eye on how far I still want to ride, and how many hours of sunlight I still have. After a long, lonely, forest stretch, I spotted the next sign-post for my route. Drawing closer, I discovered an ominous sign: my direction was crossed out with colored tape.

I pulledout my phone and started looking for another route, but the prognosis was not good. It would be a long detour. A car came by, and I asked the driver if I could go on, but they were adamant that the road was closed. I looked at the map some more, desperately looking for a trail or path I might have overlooked. I tractor came by, and the driver, and older gentleman, started talking to me in German. He spoke no English, and the best I can do is very limited Dutch, but it seemed like he was telling me that I could pass the obstruction with my bicycle. With sign language, limited words, and a few repetitions to be sure, I grew more confident that I had understood.

Relieved, but somewhat worried that I had misunderstood, I proceeded down the forbidden path.

Past experience has proven that this is not always a good strategy. I remember cycling through the night and deciding to take a shortcut through a construction site, that left me, a couple of kilometres later, at the edge of a precipice, looking at an unfinished bridge. Still, I hoped that today would be different.

For a while I saw no signs of construction, then some signs warning me about dangerous rockfall, and telling me to turn back, but I was committed to this mistake. I would see it to a cul-de-sac, or make my way through whatever was ahead. I would carry my bike if I had to.

In the end, the obstruction was non-existent. There was construction on a bridge passing high above the path, and, out of an abbundance of caution, the path had been closed to protect passers by from potential falling debris. I thanked the kind tractor-driver for his persistence in telling me to go ahead.

Now, I just had to cycle out of the canyon the river had turned into, across a bridge, and up a large hill. Not a pleasant thought, but much better than the climbs that would have been required if I had needed to detour.

Getting closer to the top of the hill, I saw a golden tour sticking out: I was reaching civilisation again! I had reached the town of Rottweil. The birth place of the Rottweiler breed of dogs, where they were bred to pull the heavily laden carts of butchers to the market. I passed through town quickly without spending too much time exploring because I was running out of daylight, but I would have loved to linger more.

I reached my destination, the town of Schwenningen, just as night was falling. I was sweaty, disheveled, and hungry. I went to my hotel, dropped off my things, and started hunting for a restaurant for dinner. I found an American-themed burger restaurant a few streets away. I would explore the town another day.