8 September Oberarnsdorf – Traismaurer – Tulln - Klosterneuburg

A beautiful day paddling through the Wachau, the Austrian Wine area. "God bless the wine production". I fully agree!
This is a very pretty part of the Danube bike trail.

I check into a hotel in Klosterneuburg. Have a hearty meal, wash some clothes and sleep tight.

9 September Klosterneuburg - Vienna - Hainburg

An overcast day, with light showers brings me to Vienna. The bicycle road feeds into the city nicely. Pompous and rich is how the city appears to me.

I bump right into an enormous statue resurrected 19 August 1945, making sure to the habitants of Vienna that it was the Russian Red Army that freed them from the Fascists.

I lunch in the Stadtpark and get out again. That’s only possible after asking, because maps do not help too much. But a friendly street cleaner helps me, but not after telling me that one without a map is depending on what others tell. But I do trust you completely, I tell him. A big smile shows under his enormous moustache.

After one hour I am out of the city and I can head towards Hainburg. I bike with a strong back wind through a beautiful nature reserve, the Donau - Au environmental park. The colors are fabulous.


My couch surfing host, Miriam, is a Slovakian, lawyer and has chosen Hainburg (Austria) to buy her apartment. However she works as the procurement manager in a bank in Bratislava. By bus that takes only 25 minutes.

She takes me on a quick tour of Hainburg, a medieval town with an intact city wall and some towers. We climb the road to the ruins of the castle above the city. Afterwards I have a wonderful dinner in a restaurant, recently bought by a Slovakian. The vegetarian meal with potatoes, zucchini and cheese is wonderful.

We discuss about the changes and her career wishes. But I’ll try to explain more tomorrow about the specific position of Bratislava, so close to Vienna and formerly so far apart and now so close together.

7 September Arnsdorf – Traismaurer – Tulln - Klosterneuburg

From my generous host and his girlfriend, I cycle down in the direction of the Danube. He pointed out the route via a GPS site. Still it’s not easy, because here there are many routes marked, some for mountain biking, some for touring. Which road signs, with the wanted village names, I need to follow is very unclear. Asking does not help. Some people are car drivers and they don’t know the cycle paths. Others are cyclists, but the instructions become too detailed and complex. A map of the area would help, but would also force me to stop every time a decision needs to be taken at a cross road. With reading glasses and my cycling sunglasses this takes time and it requires a map that is small enough and easy to reach. A GPS is no luxury for these circumstances I realize now. But the landscape I have passed through was beautiful and that was worth the frustration of heaving to turn back a couple of times.

In more time than expected I reach Ybbs. On the market square I buy several home cooked/prepared Sicilian goodies and eat an extensive lunch. Refreshed, I then pick up the Danube cycle-path.

Along the Danube the usual Eastern wind is out there again. That makes the weather stable and warm with dry air and the sky again steel blue, as well as the Danube, but after 4 days of head wind, boy, do I long for my eBike! The extra 10 kilograms I’d take for granted. I remember the wise warning words of my colleague Camille! But lets say it’s just an extra training.

Reaching Melk, I have to take another good rest. Sweating I climb up to the enormous Monastery. It appears to be tourist trap, with a large flock of Americans. I am having a nice chat with two over-sized pensioned species. But they do like my undertaking and wish me all the best. Americans can always appreciate an adventure even more when it takes a sportive effort.

On my last resources, I reach Oberarnsdorf, where I negotiate me into a pension. It’s Saturday evening and every room seemed to be taken and reserved. At a ‘Weinstubl’, I am treated as a king and they give me some fruit instead of bread. Broken but not beaten, I sleep like a baby.

6 September Linz – Enns – Mauthausen – Wallsee – Aschbach Markt

After trying to fix my blogs - I have discovered I have accidently created two - I go to a bicycle shop to change my front tire. It’s too warm out to chance it any longer. In bicycle shop Bruckl in Linz, they fix it within 15 minutes.

It appears a good decision because some paths off the Danube route are not asphalt paved. Besides, it gives me a secure feeling. Some shopping in a large supermarket with gluten-free products and again some time trying to write the blog and publishing it, make me start at 12 o’clock.

The sky is fully blue, it’s warm and there is wind Beaufort 5 straight in my face. It cools, but it also requests more energy to fight that strong and constant wind. I skip a visit to Mauthausen, the former NAZI-work camp, where they killed people just by working them to death giving them bad food and not nearly enough. Over another dam in the Danube – used for turbine waterpower - I come to Wallsee. Here I have to leave the Danube cycle route to find my ‘Warm Showers’ host. Although I have studied Google maps and written down several small villages, but this proofs not too work. A GPS would not be a luxury. There is no guiding Danube anymore and the number of small roads is enormous. Asking slows me down and the Austrians describe the route in their dialect, which is hard to understand, but proofs impossible for cycling instructions. Describing a route is multi interpretable. Not everyone thinks in the same way. Details are mixed with important elements and small and little distances tend to vary. I spill energy in going back a couple of times. But at 5.30 pm I do arrive at the house of my host in Aschbach Markt, a warm showers professional.  Look at his incredible tour though the USA in 2010.

After a dinner out together with his girlfriend and sharing a bottle of red wine from Austrian make, I sleep like a log.

5 September a day in Linz

From the apartment of my couch surfing host, who left early to go to work, I find my way to the ARS museum. It’s just across the Danube, which waters are blue, as well as the sky. Not a cloud.

At the museum, I learn a lot about the current research into the genetics of the human being. What amazes me the most is that we are not very faro off from the situation that we need tan answer to the question: “How private is our personal DNA structure”? Who has right of ownership? Do we want to know all the risks to develop a certain illness at a certain age? Will that be a blessing for mankind?

An interesting museum, in the middle of the attention, because of the yearly ARS-festival. This year’ s theme TOTAL RECALL, about the storage of information or how we memorize? Research has just succeeded to store a complete song in the DNA structure and another lab decoded the DNA into the original song. Will this change our methods of digital storage in the very near future?

In the evening we visit the opening of the festival at a closed down Tobacco factory. The building is huge and a modern monument.

On one of the giant walls 15 by 40 meters they show the people at the opening. The theme here is: “We are here”.  A combined play, using the huge video wall, actors in strange outfits, a sound artist and 40 drones, create an atmosphere of: “You are being watched and you better keep in line”. Big Brother in an extreme form.

http://youtu.be/MBHXt9UKz18

After some drinks, I am going to bed to gain strength for tomorrow.