This is another one of those "Pretend it's yesterday" posts...
I had to go into work, on my holiday. Having attempted to play for sympathy on the 'Mundane news" Thread, and failing miserably, I decided to turn this to my advantage: I had to finish some design work which I reckoned would take a maximum of four hours. If I planned a long route into work and a longish route out again, I could probably manage about 70k in total, with a nice long break in between fooling about with a computer and calling it 'work'.
It's a tough life.
So, I planned a route along the valley that runs past our village, to the Neckar valley. This is one of the main valleys in our state, and would bring me to Stuttgart, where I could cut through some parks to work.
After work I'd cheat and catch a tram for a couple of K's up the side of the valley, then ride from there out into the countryside along a route I'd used a couple of days previously, and back to our village.
Here's a map, because I like maps.
Possibly a bit ambitious for a not terribly fit fortyish bloke, but still...
Cycling along the valley brought me under this bridge, which if all went to plan, I'd be cycling over in the afternoon. Notice slight downhill gradient, which made the first part of the ride a lot easier...
I was trying to keep to time on the way to work, so I didn't stop to take many pictures. This is why the next one is of this bridge which marks the extreme end of the Mercedes works, the other end is on the edge of Bad Canstatt, several kilometres away.
Surprisingly few people -even Stuttgarters- know that Stuttgart has a port, which considering we're about 600k from the sea, isn't obvious. We're close to the end of the navigable section of the river here, so I ended up riding between container terminals and cranes. At some point when I'm not in a hurry, I'll go through the grungier bits of the port and take pictures instead of skirting around the edge.
There's a great cycleway running alongside the river for several kilometres from the main entrance to the Mercedes works along the river to Stuttgart.
From there I could ride mostly through parks to work.
I forgot that German names tend to be descriptive, so when I planned a route past the Villa Berg ("The Villa on the Hill"), it meant what it said on the map.
Still, it means I had a fairly direct and traffic free route until I had to take a road for the last 500m or so. Unfortunately this just meant I got to work quicker: there's always a flip side.
...
At this point, please imagine your correspondent sitting at a desk
pretending to work while being distracted by Cycle Chat working.
...
After work I cycled halfway up the hill until I reached a tram stop, and decided climbing hills is what trams are for.
By British Standards, Stuttgart is tiny, and the southern suburbs are still distinct towns with a cluster of buildings, then suddenly fields, then another town, often with big apartment buildings standing next to a field, or in this case, a whole random entertainment complex. It looks like someone in Stuttgart's government decided "We urgently need to build several massive theatres; half a dozen big hotels; and maybe a few casinos, and we're going to put all of them in that town
there:" so suddenly the cycle lane was running between gleaming offices and large signs advertising "Aladdin", "Anastaisia" and even "The Bodyguard", egads.
Eventually the cycleway passed a building site, ran under the Autobahn, and suddenly it was countryside, with fields, tractors, and farms with huge biogas tanks that look like they could burst any moment and make a humorous flatulence noise on a grand scale.
Or maybe that's just my warped imagination.
Eventually I rounded the airport, and the final houses fell away:
If you have very good eyesight, you will make out two white lines just off centre in the far distance: these are chimneys from a large power station in the Neckar valley, which I'd cycled past that morning.
What you can't appreciate from this photograph is the wind. The previous day, the wind had been going in all directions, with an persistent breeze that was just enough to be annoying and managed to be a headwind whichever direction I was going. On this day it has regrouped and was howling east to west.
Naturally I'd chosen the most exposed part of the route to try riding west to east.
It took about half an hour, riding hard downhill on the middle ring to reach the next town.
Eventually I made it to this bridge, with a new cycleway opened with great fanfare a few months ago by the state roads department. As the Bridge was built in 1993, that means it's only taken a quarter of a century to add cycle facilities. With such rapid progress we may even have a cycle lane on each end by 2045...
Still, at least cyclists no longer have to ride into the valley and out again.
And I was able to take an overhead view of the route from that morning...
One final picture, taken mainly to celebrate not riding into a headwind at last.
The route goes through that picture from left to right. Twice, come to think of it.
70k total, well 69.3, if I'm honest, and six of those were on the tram, but don't tell anyone.
Now Beautiful God daughter has intimated that she'd like to go on a 'long' ride on Good Friday. She's 14 and pretty fit, so planning is underway...
.
