Sat /Sun, 9th/10th Aug.
You may have noticed a particularly beery theme developing over the last several days? Time for a change.
On the town map of Bamberg, there is a Mountain Bike Centre highlighted, about 40 mins drive to the East. Whilst we’ve used our bikes a fair amount, we’ve not actually given them any kind of workout on a proper mountain bike type of trail. So after a short drive, we’ve set up temporary home at the Stellplatz in Heiligenstadt – and very pleasant it is too. It’s actually a car park, just inside the town boundary and just off the main road. By the Parkplatz, traffic has already slowed down to the regulatory 50kph within towns. Not that there is much traffic. A few tractors bringing in the grain from the fields and very little else. We’re alongside the Leinleiter – a small stream at this point, though it does get bigger further downstream. The most noise we can hear is from the stream.
It;s a very small town. There’s a small supermarket, hair-dresser, Bäckerei, Doner Kebab shop and 3 Gaststätte. There are two other camper vans in the car park, also loaded with bikes. The Stellplatz is free, although there are no facilities. Definitely great for a couple of nights.
BONG, went the catholic church bells every quarter-hour. But they had the good grace to stop overnight. Mass at 08:30 on Sunday was preceded by “untuneful cacophony on four bells”. It was also followed by the ringing of the single bell of the Evangelical church for a quarter of an hour or so. No way was any one of the 100 or so inhabitants going to unknowingly miss the appropriate service.
There was a helpful mountain bike route sign by the car park, showing 3 different waymarked trails of 32km, 44km and 56km lengths. To be honest, I didn’t have any great expectations of any of these being really fun rides (i.e. lots of twisty singletrack, technical bits, interesting descents – the sort of features you get at any Welsh mountain bike centre) as my experience is that trails in Germany tend to be on the longish, steepish climbs, not very interestingish side.
Joy was a bit concerned about the length of the (32km) trail, but the map clearly showed any number of places where we could take a short cut. With a photo of the trail map on my phone we set off.
It was indeed steep. The first couple of kms of climbing were a bit brutal, but most of it was on road or Feldweg (roads between the fields that are often asphalted). It then evened-out a bit but without any exciting bits.
The most interesting bit was a steep descent down what we felt was a truly ancient valley in the forest, with moss-covered bare cliff faces to our side. One could imagine ancient peoples having lived and died here [I’m reading an interesting book at the mo called “The Old Ways”. It’s about ancient paths and byeways, both on land and sea (marked on charts) with a slightly lyrical premise of the path or trail holding a memory of people’s passing that can be felt down the ages].
This steep descent marked 3 things:
- We’re right by Veilbronn, approximately half way point, and
- It’s lunchtime, and
- There just happens to be a convenient Gasthof.
Mountain Biking and big meals don’t normally go together well, and this was no exception. We ate too much. We didn’t intend to – ordering one starter and one main between the two of us – it just turned-out that way.
When we resumed the trail, we found that we were hitting the steepest climbs of all on a full stomach. Needless to say we didn’t exactly fly up them.
The rest of the trail was pleasant enough, but pretty uninteresting and we were glad to get back to base.
That night, another thunderstorm with accompanying downpours caught up with us, and I lay awake for some time wondering if the Leinleiter was going to overflow. Needless to say it didn’t!