Day 18 - Salzburg to Kraiburg - ride total 1,360 k, 11011 m

A cooler start to the day that made for great riding and no hills to speak of for the ride. Shortly after leaving Salzburg we crossed on to Germany and the only way we knew we had crossed an international border and had cycled in to another country was our phones all let us know about their roaming packs being available in what it's now Germany. If it wasn't for that there would have been no way for us to know we were in another country.

Again we kept to the country lanes and back roads away from traffic. Having said that the farmers are right in to their harvest of crops, hay and silage and we encountered quite a few farmers and their tractors going about their farming activities.

Inevitably on journeys like this I always see a big tractor with a huge manure tank behind being towed through the village to spread the contents on the paddocks nearby and sure enough I encountered one of these today however was not quick enough to get a Pic. I'm sure it won't be the last. 

It just strikes me as to how interconnected the whole of the farming scene is here. There are virtually no farm buildings out in the paddocks (other than the small old hay barns that now appear not to be used). Otherwise in this area it appears several farmers houses and their huge animal barn and farm sheds are all grouped together, some even right beside the church in the middle of the village.

Then when you do get to a town (something bigger than a village) there you see highly productive farm land growing the full range of crops or grass adjacent to the town.

This is quite a contrast to NZ where there is a gradual change of land use from the towns and cities out to what we would call economic or productive farming units. I have yet to see a "lifestyle property".

The pictures show typical farm buildings one with rooves completely converted in solar panels both sides and the other with a huge gas collection bladder over the effluent pond that they use to power an electricity generator - by the look of the scale of their electricity harvest and production it would appear that they would meet all their own electricity requirements and have surplus to sell. 

The Pic of two fully clothed men in a shower is proof of how man Australians it takes to get a European shower to operate. In this case the Kiwi requested the assistance of the Aussies. You would think it should be quite simple but no it's not, and while we got the shower to work there is no way we could write the instruction book for others to follow! 

Now back to the Austen Deans march to freedom.

Once Austen got closer to Germany the POW's were able to acquire a German army truck that had been abandoned along with a couple of Jeeps. They had 16 men in the truck and 8 in the two Jeeps which to them must have seemed like first class travel compared with what they would have had to endure since being taken Prisoner. The trail during this phase has been harder for us to follow however I know they progressed their way through Zell, Tyrol, Reichsburg, Munich, Ulms, Augsburg and a 16 hour day through Stuttgart to Strousburg.

On the 25th May they made arrangements to sell one of the Jeeps the next day (someone had borrowed the other) however that might they went out in it and had a crash! So no vehicle to on sell unfortunately.

At 4:30 while having a bath Austen was told a plane was there and at 6:40 they took off for Goldaming RAF base in Surrey England, at which time upon landing he must have felt that yes he is now once again a free man.

I want to thank Paul for sharing his father's story and diary with me as it has allowed me to gain a little more insight into what our forbears went through to give us the freedom we have today. The sad thing is, that today, not everyone in this world has the freedom that we Kiwi's take for granted.










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