Two Steps Forward Two Steps Back then Forward Again

If you stay just across the way from a cathedral, there’s a price to pay. At 6am the bells ring out, enough so I can feel a vibration in the air. It’s time to get up and participate in the world.

It’s not a bad thing. We want to make haste today because, weirdly enough, we want to get to where we are going and then come back to Regensburg.

WTF?

Today we are headed for Bogen. It’s a small town just a little more than 60km from Regensburg, and, funnily enough, where Neil’s nieces Vicky and Cathy both did an exchange in their high school years.

To get out of Regensberg we have to negotiate a myriad of Donau branches and the Regen river before settling onto a now significantly wider Donau for our trip to Bogen.

It is a very “practical stink” day for us as we zoom along, covering 50km before arriving into Straubing at 12:30. We’ve ridden within cooee of the Donau all the way, but there’s also a sense that we are in a busy part of the world as we skirt an autobahn, heavy with vehicles. While it might feel at times we are in rural Germany, the busy-ness is not far away.

We lunch in Straubing, watching people and wondering if any of the young women we see were in a class shared with either Vicky or Cathy. After lunch it is only a short ride to Bogen where we check into our pension, have a quick post-ride beer, clean up and then head to the train station to … go back to Regensberg.

We have a strictly forward motion policy and a desire that we make the whole way to Budapest via human power. When we started the trip we had plenty of time up our sleeves. We’re now pretty much locked into a forward-motion schedule to get us to Budapest by the 21st of July.

This is where the cunning plan comes in. Regensburg has an old theatre, and they are showing an operatic version of 1984, in English with German surtitles. The only issue is that the performance date didn’t line up with our time in Regensburg, and we could no longer afford to spend an extra day there.

Enter the German train system. From Bogen we can catch a train, connect with another and reach Regensburg in time to catch the show. Then we can make the trip in reverse, getting back to Bogen in time for bed at around midnight (yep, late for me!).

So thats what we do. We’re back in Regensburg for dinner then have a night at the opera. We both thought we were going to be at a huge advantage with the opera being in English, but truly, it’s opera. With a very loud orchestra and operatic voices it is very hard to understand the lyrics. We both studied 1984 at school, though Neil did it in both year 11 and year 12, having changed schools. He has a much better memory of it than me. The funny thing is, as we compare notes at intermission, both of us are using the German surtitles to try to understand what is going on.

The verdict. We’re both glad we did it. It was a cultural experience in another country. I just wish they’d had English surtitles as well.

German rail gets us back to Bogen on schedule. We’ve lost no ground, we’ve gained cultural experience and more adventure awaits in the forward direction.

Stats for today:

• Distance: 62.68km
• Climb: 124m
• Average speed: 17.1km/h
• Average temperature: 29C
• Moving time: 3:39:41
• 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 pension in Bogen, before we quickly cleaned up and caught the train back to Regensburg.

Along the way today: