Industry makes the world go round, but it sur is ugly!

It seems I have learnt to sleep properly. This morning when I notice the church clock chiming, calling people to early Mass, Neil tells me it went all night, every quarter hour. How did I sleep through that? He also tells me that he was awake to hear the 2:45am chime, but told himself to be asleep before 3am. And he was. How does he do that?

We don’t hurry this morning. We have only a 50km ride to Worms, and it is flat and likely not that interesting so we take time to make breakfast, pack up, and leave only at 11, which is check out time.

One the way out of town, every single road intersection, be it a side road, a business entrance, is painted bright red, with white bicycles. Not even an Audi driver could miss it, or the message to watch for bikes!

We are catching another ferry today. I had already checked the schedule to make sure it is running, but I am still glad to see it unloading on the other side of the river as we arrive at the ferry dock. There’s heaps of cyclists waiting; there’s been plenty of recreational cyclists out and about all the way from Speyer. It’s Sunday and the sun is out. Why not?

The ferry takes us across from Altrip to the Mannheim power plant – known as the second dirtiest coal fired plant in Germany. As a bonus, we get to do a loop around on an elevated road, crossing through the facility and then a trip along the eastern side of it. Germany is certainly showing us its finer face today!

The route takes us through parklands and beside people’s back yards as we approach Mannheim, then we cross a bridge back across the river to Ludwigsheim on the other side where we stop at a bakery and pay for a toilet visit by buying drinks, a Berliner for me and a cheese pastry for Neil.

We are deep in industrial Germany here. I had noted that the route leaves the river and takes a rather large loop as it heads north toward Worms, before going back to the river. What the map hadn’t shown me was that the loop was necessary to get around the absolutely huge BASF facility that sprawls along the river bank. We must have ridden 10km to get around it. So many gates, huge car parks, and even a train station! BASF has come a long way from making cassette tapes and floppy disks! You can imagine the convenience of this location in the past, making it easy to dump waste into the river and consign it to the North sea. And to be fair, the river also makes it convenient for shipping in and out.

When we finally arrive back at the river we take a break and watch a huge, quad river boat navigate its way around a bend. We’ve seen double boats, with an unpowered front section connected to a rear, powered section, but this one has two additional sections, connected side by side, making it both long and wide. It must take one highly skilled captain to drive this thing.

While we’re watching this, a police boat swoops in on a smaller boat that appears to be right in the path of the larger river boat. I don’t know if they were arresting or assisting, but they lashed the smaller boat to the police boat and carted it away.

I didn’t know what to expect with Worms. As we ride in, my first impressions are of betting shops and shisha cafes. Like most German towns the place is decked out with German flags in anticipation of the World Cup – Germany’s first match is tonight. The town has a heavy Middle Eastern influence, and plenty of kebab shops!

You can tell the place is a remnant of some former grandeur. There is a massive old cathedral – more than 900 years old – that you can barely see because it is covered up and under renovation. There are remnants of old town walls incorporated into normal buildings. It’s a town that’s getting on with something, but I’m not sure what that is.

We could have easily had kebabs for dinner; finding something else was a little more challenging, but we end up at a Greek restaurant where we over order, causing the waiter to raise an eyebrow and count the dishes, then proceed to overload on knoblauch (garlic) – it is everything, and applied with a very heavy hand.

We’d hoped to find a bar where we could watch Germans watching the world cup, but failed on that part, only finding a kind of live site just after the match had finished. A small crowd were walking away. As we walked back to our hotel there were plenty of cars celebrating the win in the time honoured fashion: scarves and flags trailing, horns blasting.

Stats for today:

• Distance: 52.04km
• Climb: 88m
• Average speed: 15.6km/h
• Average temperature: xxC
• Moving time: 3:20:04
• See our ride on Strava

The beer picture

At the end of a day’s ride, our tradition is to enjoy a beer, and to photograph it for posterity. Today’s beer picture was taken at our very white hotel room, with the free beer that came in the mini bar.

Along the way today:

Click on an image to scroll through the gallery at full size.