Day 24 - Karlsruhe to Strasbourgh - ride total 1,832 k, 13,611 m

They say "it's about the journey and not the destination" - well today's journey has taken us to in and out of countries that we hadn't planned on going in or out at the points we went in or out. All because the ferry across the Rhine that we found out we needed to take upon arrival at a vehicle loading ramp at the end of the road in Germany wasn't scheduled to begin service on this Sunday morning untill 10:00 a.m. and as we had got away to a good start before 7:00, we were now lookiing across the river at the vehicle off ramp at 7:45 a..m.!

No, it didn't rate a "Bugger" as theses are just some of the things that pop up from time to time - all we needed to do was back up less than a km and pick up the trail down the side of the Rhine that we had taken to get us to this point.

Off we went. However, before we rejoined the trail we saw that it was now closed as they must have been doing some work on it.

Not a problem, all we needed to do was to now keep the big river somewhere out on our right and keep pedaling until we come to a) an operational ferry or b) a bridge. After a few more km's and as we were skirting the side of a village we decided to detour in there to check out if there was a bakery open and yes we were in luck so we were able to stop and have our breakfast there at about the 25 km mark. We did pass a bakery when we were leaving Karlsruhe however our two coffee connisours deemed it not up to the required standard so we rode on.

Over breakfast we got a bit more scientific with our route planing and re-mapped our route from that point on - the only problem being that our technology that we rely upon to download the route to our Garmins chose this point in time not to play ball. After a complete close down of our phones and Garmins, Stephen at least was able to get the new route up on his Garmin and I managed to get it to open in the phone App, so rather than having three of us with some idea of where we were going we were now down to two.

Stephen was lead navigator today and did a good job of getting us back on course (over the bridge at the 35 km mark) and on to the Hostel on the Island in the Rhine on the French side of the Border - so tonight is out first night in France.

Check in was at 3:45 and as it was only 2:30 we decided to remain in Germany as we had seen an Ice Cream restaurant in the village Square. Three wild berry Sundae's later we were ready to roll on the last couple of km's across the Rhine (and the border) to the Hostel that we arrived at right on time.

The Rhine is a very large navigatable river an is great to ride beside as you get to see the barges moving along the river transporting their bulk items (like sand, shngle, gas and other liquids) - Riding beside an empty barge going upstream I clocked its speed at 14 kph. The vessels at times can be seen to be carrying the family on board and they have the Gazebo set up on deck, their car sitting up there as well and I've also seen a kiddies play area.

The bridge into France we took was the footage and cycle bridge with lots of people walking/riding in each direction. We stopped in the middle for a pic and the pic has me with one foot in France and one foot in Germany and other that for that and me pointing at an imaginery line on the pavement you would not know we had crossed from one country to the next.











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