Day 30 - to Heidelberg

I woke at 6am to see it was chucking it down outside so I rolled over and hoped it would be better in a couple of hours. It wasn't. Nothing to be done except to ride west through it with a wet arse. The nearest place to get leggings that I knew would have some was in Nurnberg 300km away so that was that. After about an hour of rain, it did clear and I made it to Nurnberg relatively dry, bought the leggings and then it really started to piss. I dived into a cafe, parked up and ordered the Leberkase....mmmmm! (literally translated as liver cheese ) a sort of hot meat paste made of hooves and ears and all sorts of nasty things and waited it out.

It passed, and actually got quite nice. I decided to try and cross the rest of Germany with using a Motorway so just pointed the bike west and wherever there was a choice of road, I always took the one that was smallest and bendiest. It was an easy way to navigate as I didn't really have a destination in mind. Just west. I came across a field of sunflowers that had been harvested but some of them obviously had slept in and missed the cull. A strange sight.

Tonight is the last night of the trip so I thought it would be fitting to camp by a river like the first night by the Elbe in Hamburg. Last night, as I was going to meet Pat in Prague, I rode alongside the Elbe again for 20km. Still navigable by pretty big boats even there. Tonight I am by the Necker just a little south-east of Heidelberg. Barges trundling up and down as I write.

Almost gone full circle. By this time tomorrow, exactly one month to the day, 13,000km later, I will have. Time to join the real world again.