Bitte langsam: slow please

5-13th April 2026

We enjoyed Germany at a more leisurely pace than planned thanks to the cycling tour equivalent of freshers flu. I was working through the dregs of it; my symptoms were a little too vocal but I felt okay. Ben was still at the worst of it and suffering (he informs me that it is scientifically proven that he, as a man, experiences the symptoms twice as worse as I do).

Germany has been one of the countries I have been looking forward too, and luckily, given we spent slightly more time there, for good reason. The cycling infrastructure is less ostentatious than its Belgian and Dutch counter parts but just as good as making cycling across a country as easy as it can be. Despite following more waterways (the Rhein from Bonn until joining the Neckar at Heidelburg), our route was much more scenic and varied than the poker straight routes we took along the canals through Belgium, diverting us every so often onto forests paths and cobbled streets through medieval towns. Some of my favourite stretches wound through allotments which people seem to take great care over, with views of vineyards criss-crossing the hills above us.

After an impromptu and rather sunny rest day in Neckarsulm (more on this later) we left the rivers behind and started to zigzag through forests and open grassland between them. This took us to the most traditional German campsite I can imagine where we were greeted by a live rendition of German folk songs.

The following day brought more sunshine and a long climb on a rather busy road that we were glad to see the back of. One of my favourite things about these trips is seeing the landscape and buildings slowly change from one place into another and at this point the combination of both were starting to inspire me to sing the Sound of Music rather badly – southern Germany and the Austrian border were approaching. That afternoon we shared what we had assumed were purely cycle paths through the fields with a lot of farmers out ploughing the fields (we later learned before the rain came).

After a very long day and a campsite next to the autobahn we decided to bypass Munich in favour of a campsite with a sauna in the rather fabulously named town of Wolfratshausen. It turned out a sauna was exactly what we needed – it had rained pretty much non stop from the moment we’d pitched our tent the previously night which doesn’t make for happy campers or cyclists. Feeling significantly warmer after the impromptu sauna and after a last minute change of route we headed towards Austria a little earlier than planned, not quite prepared to see what the mountains had in store for us…