Post your ride pics

[hozn]

@drevil 178924 wrote:

The third titanium frame I have broken. About 10 years old, from a frame builder that has gone completely off the radar (so no warranties)

Nooooo! I’m sorry to hear it, man!

[consularrider]

@drevil 178924 wrote:

The third titanium frame I have broken. About 10 years old, from a frame builder that has gone completely off the radar (so no warranties)

Sigh… by ricky d, on Flickr

Well, if you insist of jumping over giant sequoias, what do you expect!

[consularrider]

I rode with another retired Foreign Service spouse staying in gasthauses and hotels. We did overlap a little bit of Gina’s Switzerland-Italy (and Austria and Germany) route. Rode 143 miles of the Radweg clockwise from and to Sipplingen, DE and another 24.5 miles not on the route. Photos are in the Strava links.

Day 1
Drove from Frankfurt to Sipplingen, stayed at Gasthaus Bettina in Sipplingen. We took a walk along the lakefront instead of a bike ride to get a beer and then dinner.

Day 2 Sipplingen to Hörbranz, AT, 44.1 miles
The route passed through Überlingen, Meersburg, Friedrichshafen (where we stopped for elevenses at Al Porto on the Seestraße), and Langenargen. We detoured over to Insel Lindau, stopping for lunch at the Hafenrestaurant in Lindau-Zech (interestingly next to the campground I where I stayed 34 years ago) before crossing the Leiblach and entering Austria. We stayed that night at the Restaurant-Pension Wachter overlooking the old Zollamt which is now a Tabak. After checking in we headed back out along the Radweg into Bregenz, AT for coffee and ice cream.

Day 3 Hörbranz to Münsterlingen, CH, 43.4 miles
We rode back through Bregenz and through the Rhine Delta trying to figure out which of the streams was the main Rhine (turned out it was the one which had been most severely engineered). It also turned out that the “Rhine” was not the border between Switzerland and Austria. That honor went to the Alter Rhein which we crossed at an empty customs post between Gaißau, AT and Rheineck, CH. We had our elevenses at the Campingplatz Idyll near the Flughafen St Gallen-Altenrhein, CH. We continued on up the Radweg through Rorschach (no test required), Romanshorn, stopping for lunch at the Restaurant Pier in Uttwil, and reaching our hotel (Rotes Haus, an Italian pizzaria-restautant too, totally staffed with Italians who didn’t speak English and had only marginally better German than my riding partner) near the Münsterlingen-Landschlacht train station by 2 pm. We were told the “Chef” (boss, not cook) wouldn’t be back until 5 pm and to come back. We rode back the Radweg to Altnau and the Gasthaus zum Schiff on the lakefront for coffee and ice cream, and just generally lazed around until just before 5. Of course the Chef wasn’t back so they gave us each a beer on the house. The Chef finally showed up around 6 pm. It turned out to be a good place for pizza.

Day 4 Münsterlingen to Radolfzell, DE 42 miles
I made the mistake of thinking 12 CHF (about 12 U$D) each for breakfast at the hotel was too expensive, so we just rode out thinking we would stop at a bakery early on the ride. About a mile down the Radweg the Bodenseecafe had an outdoor setup right on the trail so we stopped. Two very small coffees and pastries were 16 CHF, should have eaten at the hotel! We continued through Kreuzlingen (across the Seerhein from Konstantz, DE) and saw two more empty border control posts. We were riding along the Untersee branch of the Bodensee and crossed the Rhine at Stein am Rhein, CH stopping for lunch at the outdoor tables of the Walz Bäckerei in the Marktplatz for our elevenses coffee, coke and pastry, 21 CHF (breakfast buffet at the hotel was looking like a good deal now ). From Stein am Rhein we continued crossing a totally unmarked Swiss/German border – they only way I could tell was by the change in the style of the wayfinding signs. We actually had a little bit of climbing on this section. We arrived at our hotel in Radolfzell (Hotel Christine) about 2 pm and they were happy to let us check in. Afterwards we headed back into town to find lunch settling on an eiscafe in the Rathausplatz and a little touring of the town. So far we had been lucky with no rain even though the forecast for the week had been for showers and thunderstorms. Our luck ran out when we headed for dinner. The only restaurant close to the hotel was closed for a weeks vacation, so we walked a mile back into town to another Italian restaurant (most popular cuisine in Germany?). Unfortunately the rain was worse in Frankfurt and several of the housing compound’s building basements flooded and our wives had to stay home to deal with that, so no Saturday trip to Rheinfells and no Bodensee cruise.

Day 5 Radfzell to Sipplingham, 13.4 miles, then drive back to Frankfurt
Since our wives couldn’t make it for the weekend, my riding partner just wanted to take the most direct route and get back to Frankfurt. It was basically a sidepath along the B34 which meant we didn’t ride down the peninsula to Konstanz or go over to Insel Richeneau or Blumeninsel Mainau as originally planned, and cut out 25 miles of riding. It also meant we cut the day’s climbing along the L220 and into Bodman in half which made my partner very happy.

[consularrider]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]18011[/ATTACH] View from Gasthaus bettina, Sipplingen, DE

[ATTACH=CONFIG]18012[/ATTACH] Meersburg, DE

[ATTACH=CONFIG]18014[/ATTACH] Narren Brunnen, Lindau Island, DE

[ATTACH=CONFIG]18015[/ATTACH] Over the Dornbirner Ache, Rhine Delta, AT

[ginacico]

@consularrider 178929 wrote:

I rode with another retired Foreign Service spouse staying in gasthauses and hotels. We did overlap a little bit of Gina’s Switzerland-Italy (and Austria and Germany) route.

Great pics – Of course now I want to go back to see Lindau and all the other places we missed! SUCH a great place for bike travel.

[consularrider]

@ginacico 178933 wrote:

Great pics – Of course now I want to go back to see Lindau and all the other places we missed! SUCH a great place for bike travel.

Lots of great riding in the Frankfurt area, just saying …

[drevil]

@consularrider 178928 wrote:

Well, if you insist of jumping over giant sequoias, what do you expect!

Is there another way of riding?

[drevil]

Oy!

Dirt Rag Mag Issue 205 by ricky d, on Flickr

[consularrider]

@drevil 178953 wrote:

Oy!

Dirt Rag Mag Issue 205 by ricky d, on Flickr

We really need the ELITE! button back!

[huskerdont]

Coupla pics from riding around Chicago:

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Huh, those were rotated on my end.

[bobco85]

The second video in my series about Seattle’s neighborhood greenways, the Central District N-S Greenway features a couple of tools not found in the DC area. One of these is the installation of curb-adjacent crosswalk buttons that cyclists can use without needing to get onto the sidewalk. They can either activate crosswalk signals like a HAWK signal or flashing beacons to which drivers around here tend to actually respond, and the road markings have cyclists riding in or adjacent to the crosswalks where they might be most likely to be seen. There are a couple of them in this video, and I have found them to be a cool addition.

I was able to do a bit better with minimization of the camera shake (I filmed the same day as for the Beacon Hill Greenway video, so there were similar issues), but future videos should be far less shaky (fingers crossed) as I have been filming with a more stable setup and more attention paid to taking things slowly.

[video=youtube_share;uGG5U5oswE4]https://youtu.be/uGG5U5oswE4[/video]

[bobco85]

I had some visitors from Virginia this past weekend that y’all might know. Since they were in town, I took Zach and Elena on a quick bike ride along the Burke-Gilman Trail, on and across the new SR 520 Bridge, and to Gas Works Park on Lake Union before heading back. We encountered some rain near the start, but it luckily subsided by the time we were halfway back across the 520 Bridge (the Seattle area is full of microclimates, and we were just on the edge of a rainstorm). I also took them to the Cascade Bicycle Club headquarters in Magnuson Park.

(left) Selfie on the Bellevue (east) end of the 520 Bridge while sheltered from the rain; (right) at the midpoint of the bridge just past the edge of the rain
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While on the bridge, we encountered a few folks I know from the Cascade Bicycle Club who were out on a ride with the club’s executive director on the right!
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After riding on the Burke-Gilman Trail through the University of Washington campus, I took them to Gas Works Park which sits on the north side of Lake Union. (left) Lake Union with choppy water due to the wind with a view of the Seattle skyline; (right) a boat plane as it was landing on the lake
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Pano of Lake Washington from Magnuson Park, close to the Cascade Bicycle Club headquarters
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(left) stopping at Ivar’s, a local seafood chain, for some freshly caught halibut and chips; (right) the dockless bikeshare couple who tried both manual and electric LimeBikes and ofo on the ride
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[consularrider]

Do you like Fachwerk villages? Babenhausen, Hessen on the R4 cycle route was pretty neat although in pretty boring flat farm fields topography.

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[ursus]

@consularrider 179053 wrote:

Do you like Fachwerk villages? Babenhausen, Hessen on the R4 cycle route was pretty neat although in pretty boring flat farm fields topography.

I have enjoyed your videos and pictures from the Frankfurt area. Just curious, since you got to Babenhausen, have you crossed the Bavarian border to Aschaffenburg where my mother was born? I have been there several times but never by bike. My father was from Frankfurt.

[consularrider]

@ursus 179055 wrote:

I have enjoyed your videos and pictures from the Frankfurt area. Just curious, since you got to Babenhausen, have you crossed the Bavarian border to Aschaffenburg where my mother was born? I have been there several times but never by bike. My father was from Frankfurt.

I’ve ridden to Aschaffenburg three or four times, most recently last September with kayakcyndi when my housing compound in Frankfurt had to evacuate for a WWII bomb disposal.

[Author]

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