Days 15-17 – Full Tilt to Fulda: Kappel to Fulda

Days 15-17 – Full Tilt to Fulda: Kappel to Fulda

Monday January 19, 2015, 276 km (172 miles) – Total so far: 1,401 km (870 miles)

Day 15: Woods Outside Kappel to Koblenz – 77.9km

The night ended up being the coldest on the trip yet. Due to being up so high in the hills it got down to -3 degrees outside. My winter sleeping bag did the job during the night and despite waking up a few times due to a cold face I was reasonably comfortable. The real trouble only came when I opened the tent. One of the t-shirts I had left on the ground of the tent had frozen in places. It was no surprise then that my shoes which I had left outside the tent had pretty much frozen solid as well. With no other option I had to put my feet into them, it was like sticking them into two blocks of ice and my feet started going numb pretty much straight away. No amount of moving my feet to get the blood flowing was helping so I just had to grit my teeth and bear with the two now fully numb feet.

It got even worse for me when I started loading my gear onto the bike and packing up the tent. It was now -2 degrees so my fingers started going numb right away. I should probably mention here that I have very bad blood circulation. When I was 16 I went on a ski trip to Italy for a week and brought gloves that weren’t up to the job. I had numb hands every day and when I came home I had lost the feeling in the tips of all my fingers. It took several months for that feeling to come back. Ever since then my fingers and hands have been even more susceptible to the cold. It was the only real hindrance to me in this cold weather. I had been comfortable sleeping at -3 degrees in my sleeping bag and I also had a liner with me that would effectively keep me warm at -15 to -20 degrees. The only real trouble was coming from the hands. Despite having glove liners and large Sealskinz gloves they weren’t doing the job. In the end it took me two and a half hours to pack everything up as I had to keep rewarming my hands every time I touched the tent. This was something I was definitely going to have to find a solution to before I camped again in this temperature.

When I finally had some feeling back in the hands (the feet were a lost cause!) I rolled the bike back out of the forest and started cycling into the frozen landscape.

The roads were surprisingly grippy so that wasn’t an issue and I made my way to the first small town on my route. There I headed straight into an Aldi to try and defrost my feet! I should have spent longer there as I hadn’t fully got feeling in them when I got on the road again. In the future I had to make sure not to leave my shoes outside the tent on the frozen ground and also to make sure I got feeling back in my feet/hands fully before leaving somewhere that had a radiator. Having to suffer through all of these learning experiences wasn’t fun. Why couldn’t I just have been born naturally wise!?

I found here as well that one of my water bottles had frozen solid. With the temperature staying between -2 and 0 for most of the day it stayed this way! I remember when I was in Morocco I bought a frozen bottle of water in a shop before starting on a hot desert section. I then drank it as it melted throughout the day. There it was perfection, here not so much.

I felt like a night indoors tonight so that I could get the feeling back in my extremities. I knew Koblenz had a youth hostel and I would be passing by that way anyway as the bridge I needed to reach to cross the Rhine was located there. It was already late in the day as it had taken me so long to pack everything up so I aimed to finish the day short of my usual distance, in Koblenz.

I followed cycle paths through fields, woods and small villages along the top of the plateau. I was stuck up at 500 metres altitude for most of the day. The descent I was waiting for to take me out of the cold took a while to materialise.

Finally after a good 50km covered on top of the plateau I started descending towards the town of Boppard which sits along the Rhine in a deep valley, very similar to the one I had cycled up at the start of my trip into Germany.

From here it was just a straight cycle along a river cycle path all the way to Koblenz. This section was a bit boring so to make it more interesting I started trying to catch up with one of the barges that was passing up the river alongside me. With a tailwind behind me I was able to average around 27-28km/h. Soon enough I was gaining on it and was in a bit of a race with it. Back when I was fitter and was commuting into work every day I would race the Dublin buses in along the N11 every morning. It made the journey a lot more interesting and pushed me to cycle harder. I was trying the same thing here. We had a good competition going and on the inside corners the barge would gain on me and on the outside corners I would gain on it. I started pulling ahead of it so even got cocky and took a photo of it behind me. After a good 10 kilometres of racing the surfaces on the cycle path started to deteriorate and I was left in the barges wake.

The rest of the cycle into Koblenz was much slower and less exciting for me. I pottered along the various badly surfaced paths before arriving at the bridge I needed to cross the Rhine. Crossing this bridge I was able to get a good look at where the hostel was situated, a top a high fortress on the edge of the city. It was a cruel end to the day as I struggled up a long sharp climb before I arrived at the door of the hostel. Once inside it took a while for the feeling to come back to everything but it got there finally.

I was able to relax here for the night and use the Wifi to plan a route for the next few days. I discovered there are 500 youth hostels in Germany so I set out a route for the next two days that would make use of them. The cold nights were set to continue and I didn’t fancy spending another 2 and a half hours packing up my tent so until I had found a solution to the hands issue I decided I would make use of these hostels when I had the option. Looking at the map both Wetzlar (100km away) and Fulda (200km away) had hostels so these looked like perfect targets for the next two days.

Day 16: Koblenz to Wetzlar – 100km

I woke up to a light dusting of snow outside and a freezing fog that was hanging in the air. As I was packing up the bike all I could hear were sirens around the city. I could only assume this was due to car accidents caused by the conditions. Without further ado I started the long descent from the hostel and started climbing into the hills behind Koblenz.

I decided to trust Google’s routing today. I had no idea what the roads would be like so if I could take any routes that avoided traffic that was okay with me. This ended up making for an interesting day as I spent the majority of it off road making my way through snowy frozen forest paths and small cycle ways through the countryside. The forest paths made for some challenging cycling as there were ruts frozen in parts which made it very hard to control the bike. I nearly went down a few times in slow motion but somehow kept it upright each time.

The off road paths I had chosen and all the climbing had meant for a very low average speed and it ended up taking 6 hours of cycling before I finally reached Wetzlar. Just like Koblenz’s youth hostel, Wetzlar’s youth hostel was located at the top of a steep hill on the edge of the city. It took another 20 minutes before I finally arrived, one of the longest days of cycling so far.

It turned out the hostel was nearly entirely empty. There was only myself and one other guest. The place was huge spanning several buildings so it all felt very weird, very much like the hotel in “The Shining”. Luckily nothing out of the ordinary happened and I had a very quiet night to myself.

Day 17: Wetzlar to Fulda – 98.6km

It had gotten down to -5 degrees during the night. When I saw the frozen landscape outside the hostel window I was very glad I had spent the night indoors. Breakfast was a very quiet affair with only myself and the one other guest. It wasn’t too long until I was setting foot outside in the cold again and starting my cycle towards Fulda. There were blue skies and the sun was out so I had a pleasant morning following more cycle paths towards the hills which lay between myself and Fulda.

It was to be another long day of cycling today. The roads I were on today were snow free but there ended up being quite a bit of climbing so I spent the day going up and down on winding country roads passing through typical German villages along the way.

In the villages I was passing through I would get stared at by most people. I’ve mentioned this happening before but this ended up being something I experienced all the way across Germany. A lot of people stopped walking and turned around to look at me passing by. Whenever I was at a junction waiting to get out onto the road, passing cars would frequently slow down so the driver and any passengers could get a good hard stare in. I felt like I was surely going to cause a crash somewhere. And in addition to this sometimes when I was trying to take a photo, a car would slow right down to a crawl as it passed by me. I would have to wait an age for the car to finally get out of the shot before I could take the photo! I was used to this kind of thing in the Middle East and knew it would be happening a lot once I got outside Europe but I hadn’t expected it here. People just seem shocked that there is someone trying to cycle across Germany in the Winter, I thought there would be more out there doing this sort of thing but from the looks I was getting it seemed I was very much in the minority. Then again, maybe they were just staring at the big Irish head on me, who knows!

A mountain biker I know mentioned that any cycle tourers they’ve ever seen have always had a grimace painted on their face. Every single one they pass always have this same grimace! From this it doesn’t exactly look like a fun pastime! I’ll admit that today I was fully guilty of this, I had a full on grimace for most of the day. Due to the temperature staying close to freezing all day it was another day where my hands suffered. This combined with the sharp hills meant for a rather unpleasant expression for most of the day!

Nonetheless I grimaced through it all and finally reached the last village before Fulda. Here I had a choice, I could descend down to the main road and loop back into Fulda on a flat route or I could take on a steep climb here and descend straight into Fulda. I obviously thought I hadn’t reached my suffering quota for the day so I took on the steep climb. The grimace was in full swing all the way to the top. With it getting dark I finally summited the pass and started the long descent into Fulda. As usual the youth hostel was located up a hill outside of the town. This time though I was being smart, I had already climbed the bigger hill behind the hostel so all I had to do was to pick out a route that allowed me to descend most of the way there. Finally I had one up on the sadistic location planners of the youth hostel association of Germany!

In the evening I took a quick stroll to the city centre to see the architecture on display. As usual with the towns in this part of Germany it was all quite impressive. Dinner ended up being the usual baguette with cold meat. Staying in the youth hostels meant I had to keep the costs down elsewhere so there had been no hot meals for a while. Breakfast, lunch and dinner were now mostly made up of the baguette and cold meat combination! I knew that I was sure to get sick of it soon but for the moment it was my main/only fuel for the trek across Germany.

Later that night I checked my email to see I had a response from a Warmshowers host in Eisenach, my planned destination for the next day, 90km away. Warmshowers is a site similar to Couchsurfing except it is set up for touring cyclists. This was to be my first time trying it out so I was looking forward to it.