June 23rd: Garmisch to Bad Tolz

We woke up to sunny skies. It was cool but not cold, and I was happy to be riding again. I had expected all the rain to make the chains on the triplet rusty and squeaky (the ebike had a crank case that protected the chain from all but the worst downpour) but other than a link or two with a touch of rust on it, the bike wasn't making much more noise than usual. I was pretty grateful that I'd brought the fender this time, though leaving the front fender behind meant that I'd had soaked shoes more than a couple of times, which was painful because I only had one pair of shoes, a victim of trying to reduce weight on an already too-heavy bike.

The ride to Bad Tolz was fairly straightforward, leading us through beautiful fields at first at a good pace --- until I made a bad shift and shifted the tandem into the big chainring/big cassette combination. I probably had no business running a 52t chainring on the bike in the first place --- I could probably downsize to a 50t big ring with no speed penalties, but I'd simply been too lazy.

Fortunately, a couple of cyclists came by and helped me with the problem, though not without a lecture about not shifting into the big-big combination. We made our way to the town of Ohlstadt, where we once again found signs for the Bodensee-Konigsee bike route. We ignored the route, cycling towards Bad Tolz. We ate lunch at Grossweil, which had a restaurant with an attached playground which was great as adults could eat a quiet dinner while the kids worked themselves up an appetite while waiting for lunch to appear.

After lunch, we rode towards Benediktbeuern along the bike path, which quickly degenerated into dirt. Boen fell asleep again just before Benediktbuern , amd I briefly considered staying there. Benediktbuern was on a different train line, and had the problem that it had a 9:50 train to Munich instead of 9:00am train. The difference was significant, because the Bayern ticket had a restricted start time of 9:00am, and I expected the 50 minute difference to be a big deal. So we decided to go on to Bad Tolz.

 I found a couple of hotels, but all of them were far away from the train station. I would later discover that none of the hotels were near the train station simply because of zoning restrictions. I picked one mistakenly thinking it had a pool when all it had was a sauna, something not needed because of the summer temperatures. At least it was only a 40 Euro mistake.

With sunglasses on, nobody can tell that you're sleeping --- except for Mommy!

We arrived, checked in, did the usual routine and then walked over to the local greek restaurant for dinner. After dinner, we walked alongside the Isar river towards downtown. While I'd lived alongside the river in Pullach for a while, I'd never ridden down this far alongside it: river bike paths make for boring rides, and the cycle path there in Pullach was mostly unpaved anyway, so I preferred to take the train and skip that boredom. Bad Tolz was a wealthy town, however, and here the river bike path was paved.

Downtown Bad Tolz was mostly empty on a Monday evening, but the ice cream shop was open, and there was more than one. We walked around and then returned to the hotel. The hotel manager had given me two taxi companies to call for a taxi to take us to the train station the next day. I called the first one via Skype and made an appointment.