In August it was my (Jonas') mom's birthday and I gave the most precious thing that I have right now - time. I thought it would be nice to spend another whole weekend with my parents on some outdoor activity trip and for this we planned to take a weekend to cycle from Würzburg to Bamberg within two days with spending the night in Schweinfurt. We did not find an earlier weekend to do it so it came to the last weekend of October to take the trip.
On Saturday morning we took an early train to Würzburg where our trip on the Main-Radweg should start. We were extremely lucky with the weather as it was just sunny the whole day which made cycling along the river Main a real joy. The weather was nice, there was no heavy ascends and the colors of all the leaves were just beautiful: All the vineyards and trees were shining in different shades from green to yellow and red. We first thought it would be 80km on both the first and second day but we found out that it was more like 95km on day 1 and 65km on day 2. Everything close to 100km gets pretty heavy so when we got to the last 20km before arriving in Schweinfurt were tough and we were very happy to reach our hotel after about 6h of cycling. The evening was spent relaxing and getting a delicious dinner in the hotel's restaurant with some nice local wine. If you haven't been to this area, it is definitely worth a visit!
When we woke up on the next morning we found it to be much colder than the day before and after a quick breakfast we had to get out into the cold to start the second part of our trip to Bamberg from where we planned to take the train back to Erlangen. The first 30 minutes were pretty cold but we were warmed up after that. It was not as sunny as the day before but during the morning it got at least a bit warmer and we were not freezing our fingers off anymore - nice. While cycling the last kilometers, Vroni and I could take time to make a little replanning on what we still needed to buy or organize for our trip which was very helpful and allowed us to make a new plan afterwards. When we arrived in Bamberg at noon, we got a nice pizza at the Italian restaurant Salino (YUMMI) before taking the train back to Erlangen. After the 160km we were glad to just relax for the rest of that Sunday.
It was a very enjoyable trip on which we could spend some quality time with my parents, test some new gear and enjoy the beautiful Autumn countryside of Franconia. With the big package from VAUDE we also received our new biking shoes that now allow us to "click into" the pedals to not only be able to push down the pedal but also pull on it to get a more even strain on your leg muscles. We were both close to falling over a few times because you forget that you are connected to the pedals when stopping but nobody fell over - yet :-D. Vroni's new bike computer proved to be precise on measuring distances but gave very weird ascend and descend measurements and we had to return it after the trip. Right now we are planning to track our GPS with Vroni's phone which we can charge with our bikes while cycling.
Cheers,
Vroni & Jonas
