June 25th: Bad Tolz to Tergensee

The forecast for the next few days were for heat, heat, and more heat. On a bike tour, my traditional solution was to climb up into the mountains and stay as high as possible, only descending into the valleys in the mornings to climb back out again. On the triplet, that was not a a feasible solution. I considered briefly riding from Bad Tolz to Tergensee, then over to Achensee to Innsbruck for access to the Alto Aldige Valley. But one look at the forecast told me that Innsbruck was going to be even warmer than the Munich/Tergensee area! Once the temperatures climb past the point where you can sleep, your bike tour is going to be in sorry shape. So the best bet was to continue towards Salzburg. Besides, Xiaoqin was giving me a hard time about not making it to Salzburg!

Despite my exhortation for leaving early, we ended up departing the hotel at 10:00am. Compounding the heat was that it was a climb up to Waakirchen on a busy road, thanks to Google routing. Sweat came off me in heavy drops, soaking my headband. I just wanted out, and that's why you saw no pictures from this period. The ride was miserable, and our relief came only when we dropped into Gmund and got our views of the Tergensee.

Right in Gmund by the lake we finally saw a playground with twin ziplines! This enabled Bowen and Boen to have a zipline race:

When we'd had our fill of ziplines, we kept riding in the heat towards Tergensee, stopping only for ice cream.

The apartment we'd chosen to stay at turned out to be closer to Rottach-Egern than to Tergensee. But it was close to a supermarket, so once we checked in I could run out and buy lunch so we could stay in our cool apartment. We then took a short (free) ferry ride, before having dinner, and even got in a short dip in the lake proper.

I looked online and decided that rather than stay put, we could ride to Schliersee the next day so we could make (minimal) progress towards making it to Salzburg. Booking.com showed several promising places, but the place that was cheap was far away from the water, and the place that was on the water was stupid expensive.

I deployed a trick that worked for my Spain trip: I went directly to the hotel web-site, and reserved a room. Booking.com would try to make me book 2 rooms for the hotel on the lake, but the hotel's website itself considered Boen a "free entity" since he was still 4. So we could book just one big family room, and only pay a minimal (30 Euro) extra charge for Bowen. This made the nice looking lake side hotel (with swimming pool and private beach) much more affordable. I went to bed satisfied that I had a plan for what was likely to be the hottest day of the week. And since we didn't have breakfast as part of the hotel/apartment we rented, we could eat early and leave early.