Towards Bavaria. First tourista! 4th week of September 2003

Bike touring towards Bavaria

We took a ferry across the lake to Meersburg the following day. It rained and rained – a cold, driving rain. We looked for a spot to set up camp for the night, to no avail. The towns were too close together – there wasn’t a patch of field or woods between them. We kept going in the dark, our headlights illuminating the road in front of us. At least in Germany the drivers are very aware of and very courteous of bikers. I know that for my part, anyway, I prayed for the rain to let up. Even though I was wearing my waterproof Goretex jacket, I could feel the wet jacket sticking to my arms. The rain soaked through my hood to wet my hair. It dripped from the front of my hood onto my nose. We passed by hotels, and I longed for a dry, warm bed with thick duvets and fluffy pillows.

Finally, Stéphane spotted a break in the road. We went to investigate and discovered a field bordered by trees. That was as good as anything at that point. As we tried to put up our tent as quickly as possible, one of the poles snapped in half. Perfect timing! Luckily, we had a replacement part, but in the meantime, our tent was getting soaking wet.

The next morning we awoke to find ourselves in an apple orchard. As I was awakening, I heard the sound of a tractor in the not so very far distance. Shortly after I stepped outside the tent, the rumbling of another tractor announced the arrival of a second man, who was pulling a wagon behind his tractor. The man smiled. He was going to pick the apples. Then another man arrived behind him and smiled at me. Apparently they didn’t care in the slightest that we were squatting in their orchard. As we were preparing to leave, the head man came over and asked where we were from. Big smile, very friendly. He wished us good luck. And I had been worried because we were on private property!

We had only been biking for a couple of hours when Stéphane got painful leg cramps. He feared that he may have torn a muscle. We stopped in a field to rest, and it became evident that we could go no farther that day. Nor the next day. So we resigned ourselves to two days in the field. But we did have luck in one sense, anyway. Unbeknownst to us, there was a small stream behind the woods in the field where we were staying, so we could have drinking water. Plus, we were protected from view by a tall wall of bushes. For two days we read and relaxed. Our only company was a white-haired farmer coming to mow the grass the first day and a younger, smiling version coming the second day. As Stéphane put it, it was like having our own private garden with our gardener coming to take care of it for us.

All was well in our big garden until the third day, when we had planned to move on. I had awoken in the middle of the night feverish and aching, to find myself violently ill. Our problem came from the little stream that we had been so happy about. The one where we had gotten water to drink, to brush our teeth with and to wash our hands. The little stream that we had believed was the source, and therefore supremely fresh and clean. That little stream made us extremely ill. Stéphane was still fine that day, however. But just thinking about food made me sick to my stomach. I begged him to eat far away from the tent so that I didn’t have to smell the food. My last meal had been späetzle, and just the thought of it made me ill. Twenty-four hours later, Stéphane had it just as bad as I did. We spent another miserable day in the field. The next day, though, we were out of provisions. No food left. We had stretched it as long as we could.

Still feverish, we mounted the bikes to search for a grocery store. We realized as we left that we weren’t quite at the top of the hill. In fact, there was one tiny village above us, where the farm animals’ excrement was washed away, and where the farmers washed their dirty equipment and polluted the stream. Lesson learned: next time, we’ll use our water purifier, no matter how clean the water appears to be.

As we passed the first town, we realized that luck was not going our way. Today was Sunday – all the grocery stores would be closed! And we were stuck without food. Still weak with illness, we found a pizza shop in the next town and decided to stop. After eating, we started to feel a little bit better and decided to bike as far as we could manage that day. In the late afternoon, we stopped at a graveyard – where we often found fresh water to refill our water bottles – and a woman started talking to me about the water. All I could make out was that she didn’t want us to refill our bottles at the cemetery, but wanted us instead to go to a place farther in the town where the water was better. My gaze followed the direction she pointed to, and I understood that it was “second on the right-hand side.” We said “thank you” and she drove off with her husband. Following a moment of hesitation (because we wanted to arrive in the town of Memmingen before nightfall), we decided we’d take the little detour and go look for the better water.

I expected a fountain in the center of the village; it was, in fact, their home! We saw them outside, as if waiting for us, and they invited us with big smiles onto their porch, where they served us ice-cold sodas. Then, before we knew it, out came a steaming meal of knüdel (a sort of dumpling) and a hearty stew. Fortune really was smiling down upon us. Barely ten minutes before, we had been wondering what we would do for dinner. Then appears Geralda, our guardian angel, and her husband Hans.

After a few minutes, Hans leads his spritely mother onto the porch. She is proud of her 88 years, and she wants to know all about were we’re going and where we’ve come from. They bring out an atlas, and we trace our itinerary for them. I tell her my grandmother is 89, one year older than she is, and that her mother came from Germany. They seem interested in the family, so I get out my little photo album, and show them pictures of everyone. Geralda says that her daughter speaks English, so Hans goes to fetch her from the next town over, where she is visiting her boyfriend. They come back, Hans, their daughter Tiné, her Hungarian boyfriend Christiane, and Tiné’s little brother Daniel. In the meantime, Geralda and the grandmother had invited us to stay for the night. We accepted happily.

Our first host. Geralda treated us like kings!

We spent the night in the company of Tiné, Christiane, and ten-year old Daniel. Tiné spoke excellent English. Christiane – not so well – so Tiné did a lot of translations. Christiane said that when he had gone to school (he’s the same age I am), they had to learn Russian, and he had hated the language and the sound of it. Now (since the fall of the Communist bloc) the students learn English or German.

The evening flew by quickly. We had a fun time and laughed a lot. Stéphane entertained us all with his card tricks. We slept very well on their roomy couch, and Tiné woke us up the next morning with breakfast already prepared. A huge breakfast, German-style: omelette, croissant, fresh bread and butter, jam, meat and cheese, yogurt, milk, and coffee. We enjoyed ourselves so much with them that we decided to stay until later in the afternoon. And besides, we had promised Daniel the night before that we would still be there when he got home from school.

Before leaving, Christiane wanted to make us a Hungarian meal, so we were spoiled with his homemade gülash. As promised to Daniel, Stéphane did more tricks for him and for the rest of the family before leaving. It was hard leaving. The grandmother held onto both my hands and seemed not to want us to go. We had spent such wonderful moments with the family.

Geralda gave us a backpack brimming with food. Freshly baked breads and cakes, still hot from the oven; a jar of the grandmother’s homemade jam; tea; a couple of cans of paté; apples and bananas; energy drinks; even a calendar of postcards. She even offered to give me thermal underwear if I needed it. It was so much, it was a little bit embarrassing. But it was all given with such a good heart and genuine goodwill. We will think of them often.

It took only a couple of days to reach Munich, where I had wanted to arrive in time for Oktoberfest, the city’s famed beer festival. I’m not much of a beer drinker, but I wanted to be sure not to miss out on the party! It rained all day Wednesday, but we pedalled on. As luck would have it, as we were setting up our tent that night, out tent pole again broke – and again in a rainstorm. We had no replacement part this time, only thing to do was to improvise.

The next day we pulled into the campground at Munich, a place like no other I’ve ever seen. The tents were piled one on top of the other, the camping cars were jammed in as tightly as possible, and throngs of people were swarming about. Thousands and thousands of campers. The tents next to ours were one foot at most from the opening of our tent (good thing we arrived on Thursday, because they were turning people away by Friday night). We were surrounded by a throng of beer drinkers from Germany, Italy, and England. We ventured out of this fun-loving crowd downtown to experience for ourselves this festival that is uniquely Bavarian. Vive la fête de la bière! Vive l’Oktoberfest!