From July 26 to August 8, 2025 Odette and Jerry rode from Donaueschingen, Germany to Vienna, Austria

After Denmark we really didn’t have any firm ideas about tandem trips. We agreed that we wanted to get back to Berlin but didn’t come up with loop rides that appealed to both of us. At some point I realized that if we shipped our bike cases to the end of the route, we could do one-way trips and that really opened up the options. At Christmas we talked to Will about travel in Europe and visiting him in Berlin – he encouraged us to visit and agreed that shipping our cases there from the start of our ride was a pretty low hurdle to get over.

Odette wanted to go to Vienna and proposed a one-way trip ending there. It seemed backwards but I didn’t ask too many questions. Odette found a large German bike tour company – Radweg Reisen – that offered a standard trip on the Eurovelo 6 route down the Danube. I told her that it was fine by me as long as they got our bike cases to the end of the ride and she assured me that they’d take care of it. We signed up and put down a deposit and then didn’t hear anything for a long time. Odette eventually managed to get a hotel list and then a Komoot itinerary for the ride. We figured out that by paying for the Komoot premium level we could export the daily routes as GPX files and although it seemed silly to start up with a new application, we got all of the route files for the German part of the trip and imported them into Ride with GPS. There wasn’t any explanation for the absence of the Austrian part of the rides and there were some issues with track artifacts but it felt like things were progressing.

Starting in about May Odette began to get anxious about the length of the daily rides and the elevation involved and about hotels that were way out of the center of town and about places that didn’t have restaurants or that had restaurants that were closed on the day we’d stay there. She was also anxious about the weather. We ramped up the training rides to deal with the first fear and she emailed the tour company about the second one (to no real effect.) For months we followed the daily temperatures at the beginning and end of the trip and that seemed to have a calming effect even though it looked like it could be very hot in Southern Germany.

Eventually the final installment of the fee was due and the company clarified that the Austrian portion of the tour was being supplied by another big European bike tour company – Pedalo. Coordination was not easy but we learned that Pedalo had their own application and that there was no way to download GPX files from it. We didn’t have direct contact with the Austrians, but the Germans assured us that written material would be available in Passau (the last German town before crossing into Austria) and discounted our request for GPX files, saying “you always have Google Maps”. Odette remained confident that everything would work out.

Odette booked flights on Delta and then had second thoughts about a 1-hour connection in Amsterdam. Having been delayed more than an hour by passport control there, I told her I wasn’t comfortable cutting it that close either, and she rebooked us through New York with a 3-hour layover. We got the bike serviced and had new tires put on it – The Polkadot Jersey shipped our front wheel to California to have a new rim put on it, and then weren’t able to get our bike ready until the day before we were set to leave.

The weather seemed to change and our concerns about excessive heat changed to concerns about flooding. I decided to take my touring shoes for wet weather and my regular bike shoes for warm days. I also decided to take full rain gear. I broke down the bike and packed it into the cases. I took a headlight in case we needed to comply with German regulations.

The flight to New York was good – everybody seemed determined to get us into the new Delta lounge in JFK but it was just crowded and not very interesting. The flight to Zurich was fine although not a comfortable as the bigger Delta planes, We had a little confusion connecting with our van but the ride was not too long and the boarder crossing wasn’t even a formality.

Donaueschingen reminded me of Frieberg further north in the black forest. We stayed at a pretty traditional guest house (Hotel Zum Hirschen) that saw a lot of bike tours. The food and beer was nothing special but it was still quite good. At dinner time the room filled up with a collection of local customers that were all about our age and who obviously all knew each other. We weren’t in the downtown or in the old city but we were within walking distance. We arrived after lunch and I got to work assembling the bike. Everything came together well but I had something of an audience. I was tired from the flight and didn’t feel like pumping tires with a mini pump. Odette was equally tired and wasn’t much help. We walked the bike over to a bike shop where the owner shook us down for 5 euros to use his floor pump.

The next day we rode a short (15 mile) loop to verify that the bike was working. We had enough navigational issues to remind us how much better we did outside of towns. We went to a museum with an immense, idiosyncratic, collection of fossils and stuffed animals (and a smaller but no less eccentric collection of modern art.) We got ice cream at the town center. We visited the spring that is considered the source of the Danube – but couldn’t figure out how to enter the grounds of the local castle.

Odette called the tour agency to find out what we were supposed to do with the cases headed for Vienna. She was told that they had no intention of doing anything with the cases other than transporting them daily as regular luggage. The person at the agency said that we were welcome to make other arrangements but that they wouldn’t help. They suggested that the responsibility for this arrangement lay with their Austrian partner, Pedalo. Odette capitulated quickly rationalizing that it wouldn’t be that much of a hassle to deal with the cases at each stop. I was really upset because it invalidated the whole premise of a one-way trip. We had something of an argument but it didn’t change things – we weren’t going to get what we thought we were paying for and it was too late to do anything about it.

The next morning we got out relatively early. The ride was mainly through wide valleys and quiet farmland. Most of the farm roads were one lane wide – but paved. Unpaved roads were very solidly compacted. We didn’t stick to the river but seemed to seek out low traffic byways. We saw a crowd at the seasonal sinkhole where the Danube completely disappears, but didn’t leave the route to investigate.

While the route had it labeled as Fridingen, our hotel (a former forestry lodge called Gasthaus Jagerhaus) was ten kilometers beyond that town, closer to Beuron. We had to navigate around a road closure (for a parade?) in Fridingen and afterwards the ride was all in forest on double-track gravel. We stowed the bike in a shed full of farm equipment and crossed the river on large stepping stones. Odette sang the “valderi-valdera” part from The Happy Wanderer as we hopped from stone to stone. She was afraid of falling off a cliff and there were private property signs all over, so we crossed back and amused ourselves watching small fish in the shallows. The lodge had a restaurant but it was closed and we were ten kilometers away from any services. However, there was a snack bar for hikers where we could get food to eat in the “garden shelter.” After an early dinner (the snack bar closed at 5:00) we watched a thunder storm leave an accumulation of hail on our balcony.

The path beyond the lodge was advertised as single track but it was just an extension of the gravel from the day before. The navigation was pretty easy as we headed down narrow valleys. (There were a couple of places where we climbed over limestone bluffs next to the river while the railroad went through ancient tunnels.) We saw lots of towers and ruins of castles and monumental monasteries and abbeys. Although it drizzled all day we never got Heavy rain. The hotel in Obermarchtal (Gasthof Berghofstuble) was pretty modern with a pizza oven out back. We parked the bike in a garage with a lot of cleaner-looking e-bikes. We asked the guy at the front desk for a restaurant recommendation which he provided – recommending a restaurant (klostergasthof Adler) owned by his daughter and where he was the headwaiter. It was quite a walk into town but we saw the old part of the village while we were happily wandering.

The next day, after a false start, we rode on to Ulm passing through wider valleys. For some reason there were fields of dry brown wheat interspersed with shoulder-high green corn. Much of the wheat had areas where it had been blown down or trampled. I suspect that the change in weather that we’d observed (hot and dry became cool and wet) interfered with the wheat harvest schedule, but I never got a satisfactory explanation. We had an intermittent light rain, more off than on, and shortly before reaching Um we encountered a police barricade blocking a bridge over the railroad tracks. Our maps showed a route that didn’t go next to the railroad tracks and we crossed the bridge on foot with no hinderance – we later learned that a landslide just up the tracks from our crossing had knocked a train off the rails and killed three people. For some reason Odette didn’t believe that the bypass route was the best option so we continued to a larger highway where we found a bikeway that was so muddy we ended up walking it.

Just as we were entering the town I hit a line of pavers marking the apron for a bus stop and I caught them at an oblique angle. (It just looked like a line in the pavement and I totally missed the fact that it had a 2-inch lip.) The wheels were knocked out from under us and we went sliding across the road but escaped any real injuries. Both Odette and I were paranoid about curb edges for the rest of the trip.

The pathway put us out at the river bank downtown and we had trouble navigating to our hotel. (Google Maps wasn’t working – if you waited long enough you could see a map but there were no directions to your destination.) There was a collection of homeless people under the bridge where our route ended and I thought about asking for directions, but then thought better of it. We finally used a combination of the printed booklet and maps without directions to get us going in the right direction.

The hotel (Hotel Am Rathaus) was downtown but without a restaurant. The front desk was in a different building from our room but the bike storage was locked (and un-openable.) Ulm is a pretty big town (with the world’s tallest church steeple) so finding a place to eat was not a problem. – we ate just down the block at Gaststatte Krone and were quite happy.

In the morning we rode on to Donauworth mainly keeping to the river and riding significant stretches of unpaved pathway. As we entered town we saw a red squirrel who didn’t stick around to be friendly. (He was a very impressive flame-orange color.) We rode past a big Airbus factory after that. The hotel (Hotel Donau) was nice – and the restaurant they recommended (Goldener Hirsch) was very good.

The ride from Donauworth to Ingolstadt spent a lot of time in a nature preserve which was very pretty and pretty buggy. We found the Hotel Bauer Garni which was a long ways from the center of town, not near anything, and which had no restaurant. We’d eaten cheese and fruit in the nature preserve so we decided to walk into the old town center for an early dinner. It was a long walk with a bridge to cross and several busy streets to get under. Things weren’t helped by serious road construction between the hotel and the bridge. We walked around the old town, noted the Audi facilities, and ate at an outdoor bistro (Theresienhof). We spent a bunch of time in a bookstore and then a bunch more looking for a bike shop for chain lube. We didn’t get either books or lubricant but we bought fruit and cheese for the next day. While checking out Odette realized that she couldn’t find the card key for the hotel.

It was late afternoon so we hurried back to the hotel – cutting through the construction site and having to scramble up a sand bank to get around the fencing. The lady at the front desk was still there and didn’t seem upset about the loss – saying “you can get in with the second card, right?” Odette had to admit that she kept both cards in the original envelope and lost the whole thing…

Maybe an hour after leaving Ingolstadt Odette wanted a restroom and soon one appeared – just after I passed a couple of other cyclists. I didn’t want to pass and then pull over so I asked if we could stop at the next one and then spent the whole ride looking for an open restroom. Our route took us to Weltenburg and then restarted at Kelheim, Before leaving Seattle we had noticed that there were two maps for that day but the guys at the tour company explained that Weltenburge and Kelheim were the same thing and Odette didn’t ask any questions. There were crowds of people on the path around the Weltenburg Abby – theoretically the oldest monastery operated brewery in Germany. We figured out that the path came to a dead end and turned around to get back to the road. Google maps wasn’t working again but the maps we could get to didn’t show any road going around Weltenburg to get to Kelheim. After riding the path a couple times we asked a ferryboat guy how one got to Kelheim and he directed us to the tour boat at the end of the path. We rushed onto the boat as it prepared to leave (finding half a dozen cyclists waiting for us) and discovered that the material provided by Radweg Reisen included a voucher for that very tour boat (which they had helpfully neglected to tell us about.)

The boat ride was calm and the scenery pretty. Across the river we collected ourselves and started off towards Regensburg. It rained really hard, but not for too long, and the sun came out before we reached the town – a beautiful old city. Our hotel, Altstadt Quartier Hotel Muncher Hof, was right in the heart of the old town but only a couple of blocks from the pathway so navigation and cobbles weren’t much of a problem. The bike parking was reached through the hotel lobby and had tools and a bike washing station. We ate at an old monastery converted to a restaurant (Weltenburger am Dom) and I had Weltenburg dunkel which deserved the awards it has won.

Much of the ride from Regensburg to Deggendorf was on river dikes. Much of the dike was unpaved and quite muddy from the rain which came down hard intermittently during the day. There were some colorful markings on the Komoot maps which nobody had explained to us but which were probably detour routes to get around the dike construction that had been ongoing for at least five years. We persevered on the dikes and were able to ride through the longest closed section – albeit in a wet muddy fashion. At one point we helped a german couple lift their bike down to get round a barrier and the man slid down the embankment when he attempted to reciprocate. My main worry was that the construction guys were going to show up and throw us out of their workplace! Coming into Deggendorf we rode through the port area and chose the path at the base of the dike because it looked like the gravel wasn’t as loose. A quarter of a mile later we were in unrideable mud that went up over the tops of my boots. Luckily our hotel, Hotel-Gasthof Hottl, wasn’t too far off. The old lady at the front desk didn’t speak english and didn’t want to even try to communicate. A younger lady eventually did take care of us. Bike parking was through the lobby and we were really muddy so they sent us around the block and made us enter from the rear. We ate at the hotel because nothing else was open.

The next day started out wet but dried out before we got to Passau. We ran into more dike construction but we weren’t as aggressive about riding through the work sites. (We backtracked from the first one we encountered to avoid a few hundred yards of loose gravel and rode a couple extra miles as a result.) On this stretch there were signs rerouting the bike route around the construction which made us much more confident about getting where we were going. We did almost get smushed by a fast car while transiting a cornfield, but that wasn’t construction related. The Hotel Atrium Garni was across the river from the town and up a steep hill. You had to ride up a ramp to a bridge across the Danube and we disagreed on the approach to that bridge. We also experienced a flat tire while we were trying to figure out the ramps. I located the puncture about a third of the way around from the valve stem but I couldn’t find anything in the casing to cause a puncture. The mini pump worked well driven by the threat of rain.

We walked the old section of town a couple of times and walked a covered mall once. We found a bike shop and bought chain lube. I cleaned the bike and lubed the chains and made sure that various bolts were tight. Several of the couplers needed tightening. I assumed that this was the cause of the rubbing sound we had started to notice from the right-hand pedals since when I lubed the pedals they seemed to spin freely without any noise. The replacement tube held for overnight and didn’t even need topping off. The first night we ate at a traditional restaurant (Bayerischer Lowe) where the food wasn’t great and where we were seated outdoors, next to smokers, and instructed to clear out in no more than an hour. The second night was much better. (Laarco in the Hotel Pulus Bogen.)

Before leaving Passau we met with a guy from Pedalo who said “of course GPX files were available – you just have to ask for them.” He also sympathized with our complaints about Radweg Reisen and had some advice about making the Pedalo app work. The bike felt great out of the garage but we quickly ran into navigation problems and within a couple of miles we had a flat tire – again about a third of the way around from the valve stem. I still couldn’t find anything in the casing but I changed the tire and started pumping only to find that the tube wouldn’t hold air. I don’t know if it was a bad patch on the tube or if I damaged it getting the tire back on the rim but leaving Passau we had three good spare tubes and now we were down to two. I reinstalled the tire with another tube and it inflated – only to go flat in about two miles. When I changed tubes this time I was very careful not to pinch the tube with a tire lever. I asked Odette to patch the two punctured tubes so that they would be ready if we needed them, but the cement was thick (from an unopened tube) and she apparently hadn’t ever patched a tube before. Both of her patches came off before we got going again. We got another couple of miles before repeating the process – I installed our final tube after an exhaustive but unsuccessful search for something in the tire putting holes in the tubes. When the final tube went flat I got out the patch kit again as it was our only option – only to find that Odette hadn’t gotten the sandpaper back into the box. I used the file on my leatherman to rough up the surface and I squeezed the last drops of cement out of the tube but it was a long shot that it would hold and it didn’t. However, I did find a minuscule shard of glass embedded in the rubber that I couldn’t feel from inside the casing. At this point we were six or eight miles from Passau on a bike trail at a wooded road crossing with no way to fix a flat – Odette was ready to call Pedalo (for whatever that would have been worth) when the support van for Vermont Bike Tours pulled up and asked if they could help. When he heard our story the driver offered us a fresh tube and before leaving he insisted that we take two more. Having found that glass shard the first one was all we needed as it took us all the way to Vienna without even topping it off.

The route got easier from that point. We took a ferry across to the North bank and rode there for a while before crossing back and finishing up on the South. Odette had recreated the Pedalo route in Komoot so we had turn-by-turn that didn’t disappear when the phone slept. (Inasmuch as it was all bike path along the river the turn-by-turn was a luxury.) Even though it was a short day we wasted so much time on flats that it was late when we got to Aschach – so we headed straight for the Hotel Faustschlossl – which was across a bridge from the town and up an insanely steep driveway. It took a little bit of doing but we got into the bike cage and parked the tandem and then got to our room and found our luggage. Only our two backpacks and been delivered – and the luggage tag had been altered to show two pieces instead of the four we’d entered. Odette called Pedalo who had some trouble understanding the situation but finally said they call us back. They did call 45 minutes later to say that our bike cases were on their way to Vienna.

We walked down the driveway and back across the bridge and ate at a Pizza place. (pizzeria Santa Lucia)

The next day was all bikeway along the river and it was sunny and dry. This was fortunate since we didn’t have any turn-by turn directions. There was a ferry crossing, a hydropower crossing (where we didn’t understand the process and almost got out on the deck at the time when traffic was coming in the other direction) and a bridge crossing just before the end of the route. After the flats we were hypersensitive to mechanical issues and we noticed a rubbing / creaking sound from the pedals for much of the ride. My left foot started to stick when I tried to unclip and I eventually stopped and determined that one of my cleat screws was missing. We ate at a cafe enroute and rode through a lot of vineyards and several cute touristy towns. Grein was touristy but old and historic and very substantial. There was a bike shop across from our hotel (Hotel Goldenes Kreuz) where I got a screw and a patch kit. We climbed up a steep hill (on foot) to the local castle but it was late afternoon and the castle closed at 5:00 which didn’t seem like enough time to be worth the price of admission. We ate at a guesthouse (Gasthof Zur Traube) a few blocks from the hotel which had great food and beer.

The ride from Grein to Krems was more bike pathway by the river and more sun. There was a ferry at the start and a bridge near the end but the river was getting very wide so crossings weren’t as frequent. I was getting noise from my pedals but it wasn’t constant and I didn’t want to waste time tracking it down since I figured that the real answer was probably new pedals. Krems is evidently a suburb of Vienna – it feels like a big city with postwar buildings and lots of freeways and railroads. We stayed at a hotel (ARTE Hotel) next to the University campus which was apparently operated by the hotel management program. The restaurant (2Stein) was interesting if not polished. We gave up on getting desert and walked half an hour (past a prison) to a commercial district where we got ice cream.

The ride from Krems to Viena started out with a complicated bridge and highway crossing and then evolved into long stretches along the river broken by crossings of smaller bodies of water. I was getting a lot of noise from my pedals and couldn’t find a way of pedaling to make it go away so I just tried to be as smooth as possible and attempted to keep the speed up so that I didn’t have to listen to it any longer than necessary. We crossed over to Donauinsl – an artificial island that is used for flood control – and rode on that for the last stretch into the city. The bridge crossing from the island into the city was complicated and we were hungry so not at the top of our game. We missed the hotel (NH Danube City Wien) the first time we walked the bike past it, but eventually worked our way back (Google Maps was still not working) and got checked in.

Bike parking was in an underground garage but there was no elevator access. We parked the tandem and then went back around to the front to get our bike cases which we wheeled down to ramp into the garage. I broke down the bike and got it into the cases while Odette reclaimed the clothing we’d put in the cases and got us situated in the hotel room. When I took the cranks off I found the self-extracting bolts to be loose both back and front on the right side. I suspected that the noise was from the crank and not the pedal. (This is a problem since if you ride with a loose crank you deform the hole and can never get it tight again. Before the pandemic I replaced the cranks on the tandem for exactly that reason and I hoped I didn’t have to do it again.) We hauled the loaded cases back around to the front and stowed them in the luggage room. The hotel catered to busloads of tourists so it wasn’t a surprise that the lobby was overwhelmed by tourists when we showed up with our cases (we would learn that the morning breakfast was a free-for-all.) This made it even more mysterious that evening when we ate in the hotel restaurant and were the only guests.

We had two days off the bike in Vienna and we visited the Vienna Museum, the Modern Art Museum and the Leopold Art Museum. We bought 48 hour subway passes which worked well – the Vienna subway is easy to figure out and not complicated to ride. We ate at couple of semi-fancy restaurants )(Restaurant Vienne and Bier & Birli) and walked around the city quite a bit. Google maps finally decided to work in the city and that helped our navigation. However, the Delta app wouldn’t work so we couldn’t check in on line and had to get to the airport early to check in for an international flight. That process was super simple and there was no explanation why we could’t do it online. The flight to Amsterdam was smooth – business class just means that the middle seat is left vacant. The flight from Amsterdam to Seattle was long but typical – we both slept a couple of hours and didn’t have much to complain about. Our bags came off the conveyor in Seattle at about the middle of the batch and the line at customs wasn’t particularly long. The face recognition system seems to be working now since customs was shortened to a single click without even any questions. The elevator to get to the parking garage is a bottleneck and the one to get down to rides hare level is just as bad. The ride home was slow due to the traffic from an I5 closure.

Reflections:

One way trips are still a good idea
seemed like an easy tour and it was: 625 miles in 13 days with only 9,000 ft, of climbing
I’d like to continue the Danube route on into Hungary
We’re able to do back-to-back 60 mile days as long as the elevation isn’t too much
I’m glad I bought a new pump – RoadMorphs rule!
It’s a fallacy to think that local tour operators book better hotels and plot better routes
I visited Vienna in 1975 but didn’t see anything on this trip that I could recognize
No problem finding english speakers and english menus – probably easier than in Berlin
The touring shoes with Showers Pass waterproof socks were just right – I didn’t need the regular bike shoes
Still brought too much stuff – need to work on reducing clothing & electronics
Treppelweg FTW!

Photos

Maps:

8/8 – Danube Tour 13 – Wien – 56 miles
8/7 – Danube Tour 12 – Krems an der Danau – 53 miles
8/6 – Danube Tour 11 – Grein – 58 miles
8/5 – Danube Tour 10 – Aschach an der Danau – 45 miles
8/3 – Danube Tour 9 – Passau – 43 miles
8/2 – Danube Tour 8 – Deggendorf – 61 miles
8/1 – Danube Tour 7 – Regensburg – 59 miles
7/31 – Danube Tour 6 – Ingolstadt – 39 miles
7/30 – Danube Tour 5 – Donauworth – 58 miles
7/29 – Danube Tour 4 – Ulm – 42 miles
7/28 – Danube Tour 3 – Obermarchtal – 55 miles
7/27 – Danube Tour 2 – Fridingen – 38 miles
7/26 – Danube Tour 1 – Donaueschingen – 15 miles