40 miles, 3 hours on the bike

Almost all of our riding today was on very rural country roads near the Danube.

At about 10 miles we took a side trip to check out Burg Clam or Castle Clam. This involved a steep climb up 700 feet in about 2.5 km. That means it was a 9% and steeper grade.

Built before 1149 this castle became the home of Lord Baron Johann Gottfried von Clam in the early 1600’s. It has been in the Clam family ever since. We arrived just in time for a tour of the castle which we thought would be only 40 minutes. The entire tour was in German and lasted over 90 minutes. We had a handout that was in English so we could follow along. Here are some of my photos from this tour. Here you can see the old against the new.

The inner courtyard.

Our guide explaining how the pharmacist handed out his drugs through this little door.

The formal dinning room of course.

A bedroom.

And the view from here.

Another amazing thing about this castle is that it’s rooms are available to rent and you can have special events there including dining in the formal dining room. And most amazing of all is they have huge rock concerts on the hillside (see my first picture above). Apparently, Nickelback will be there in a few weeks.

From here we biked down the mountain to the ferry and continued on our way up the other side of the Danube to the little town of Marbach.

At the grocery store across the street from the river we noticed these markings indicating two recent flood levels.

Here you can see that they are adding five feet to the flood protection wall next to the bike path along the river.

Our destination for today. The door to the left is the bike garage.

As we wandered through town on our way to dinner we noticed people lining the streets with tree branches all neatly tied against the buildings.

They are expecting their religions leader (like the pope) to be passing by tomorrow.