The forecast for the day called for thunderstorms in the afternoon. While I was usually sanguine about rain and thunderstorms, Grossglockner is famous for bad weather. In 2008, I spent an entire Spring watching the forecast for Grossglockner every weekend to see if I could make an attempt to ride it, and the weather was so awful every weekend that I never actually made it!
Emphasizing to Bowen that he need to make every effort to reach the summit before noon, I made him drink a cup of cappuccino in the morning. Boen demurred, confident in his ability to catch his brother before the summit, despite giving him a head start, since we were stuck with delivering the luggage to Otto Senior's RV before starting the climb proper, giving us an extra 60 meters of climbing. Ben would decline the luggage service, as he had a scheduled to make today --- he needed to get to the train station at Zell Am See by 3:00pm in order to catch the train to Munich!)
We were all out of electrolytes so before starting the climb we stopped at the supermarket at the corner of the main highway (it was a Monday, so supermarkets were open again), and bought 3 tubes of electrolyte drinks. These would be sufficient to last us until the end of the trip. Two of these tubes were blackcurrant flavor, a flavor you'd never find in the USA. The other one was a green apple flavor, also another flavor never found in the USA.
Grossglockner consists of two passes, Hochtor (2504m) and Fuscher Torl (2428m), with a dip in between. The climb from Heglienblut to Hochtor is a fairly consistent 12% grade at altiitude, testing the lungs and legs of any cyclist. The good news, of course, was that the RV was carrying our luggage for us. After about 20 minutes Boen and I arrived at the toll gate, where instead of forking over cash, bicyclists get to pus a button and ride through the gate guarded by a swing arm.
From there, the scenery gets rapidly better and better, giving you grand views of the valley behind and ahead of you. At Baumstamm, we caught up with Xiaoqin, who had asked on the group chat if anyone else had seen Bowen. Fortunately, Ben had caught up to him and would ride with him to the summit. We stopped for some pictures, and then rode on, ignoring the turnoff to the Stausee. Arturo and Mark would do part of it before running out of time.
As the climb got higher the wind picked up and it stopped being hot. We came across some sheep grazing at the side of the road at a fortuitous rest stop, and Boen got off to pet the goats. At hairpin #19, there was a water fountain that let us refill our water bottles before the final push to the top of Hochtor. There, we stopped for the obligatory photos before riding through the summit tunnel, descending down to the Fuscher Lake, and then hammering up the last 200m climb to Fuscher Torl. Two corners before the Fuscher Torl, we saw Bowen, and that automatically made the engine in the back of the tandem turn up the power. We caught Bowen just before the final turn and rolled across the Fuscher Torl signpost. There, we stopped for photos, then ice cream, and then stood at the watch tower waiting for the Xiaoqin to arrive.
We had our fill of pictures, bathroom stops, and seeing the weather start to turn, decided not to wait for others, putting on our jackets.
I've always descended Grossglockner under time pressure, but this time I didn't feel very much pressure despite the rain drops. The clouds just didn't look very threatening, and I knew we could descend the road well before the thunderstorm. This time, I enjoyed looking around as we descended at speed --- great walls of mountains around us as the wind whipped past us at better than 40mph. We could have gone faster if I wasn't so impressed by the scenery that I kept stopping to take pictures! This was by far the most satisfying descent of the Grossglockner highway I'd done.
At the bottom, we rode the busy highway (which wasn't unpleasant to ride because we were just as fast as the cars!) down to Bruck, where we found a restaurant with a perfect rating on Google that served burgers. The burgers were great, but not really deserving of a 5 star rating. The others by this time had ridden down to Zell Am See, not having seen any of my signal messages to meet at the restaurant. No matter, as we made plans to rejoin them after lunch.
Riding to meet them, Boen realized he forgot his gloves and we doubled back to pick them up. By the time we'd met up with everyone else, the thunderstorm was starting to blow. That decided things for me: if we're going to wait out a thunderstorm we should do it by train, not inside a hotel. I quickly made the decision that we should ride the train to Krimml, and spend the night there. We took our luggage from Otto Senior's RV, and rode to the train station with raindrops coming down sporadically.
At the train station, we bought tickets via the app to Krimml, then booked a hotel there. Rain came down in sheets, and we saw lightning. When the rain cleared for a minute we walked over to the train platform, and there we were told that the train now only went to Mittersil, despite us having been sold bike tickets all the way to Krimml. The non-cyclists could take the bus from Mittersil to Krimml, but the bus wouldn't take bikes! This was a big change from the last time Arturo and I were here, as back then the train took us all the way to Wald im Pinzgau, just one town away from Krimml. "I can't believe the app sold us bike tickets for Krimml when the train wouldn't go there!" declared Mark. The train had a dedicated bike car, and the tandem even got its own spot, lying down on its side in the bike car!
On the train, we coordinated with Stephan, since we were quite tired and the extra 20 miles of riding wasn't going to be good with luggage. They were going to be slower than the train, so we told them not to try to meet us at the train station. Since everyone had live tracking on their phones and GPS units, we figured meeting up on the fly was feasible.
Getting off the train station in Mittersil, we picked up the Tauern Radweg, the famous bike path from the Krimml waterfall to Salzburg. The bike path was most frequently ridden in the other direction, from Krimml downriver all the way to Salzburg, but with the broken trainline and the rain we didn't see very many cyclists at all. It was overcast and gloomy, maybe even threatening, but the rain only sprinkled on us here and there, and after half an hour, it stopped and the sun even came out, enabling us to doff our raingear.
In Neukirchen, Stephan stopped and we coordinated the luggage handoff and with our reduced load and the better weather we started making good time. The bike path detoured to and fro compared with the main road, but our stint in Neukirchen told us that the main road had so much traffic it was best avoided.
Arriving in Krimml during the golden hour, we were so late that we decided to eat dinner at the restaurant before it closed. "That last 2km felt harder than Grossglockner," said Arturo, reflecting the weariness we all had at this unexpected ride. Ordering my meals and eating quickly, I let the others get their desert while I rode to the campground to pick up our luggage and bring it to the hotel. Once the hotel had checked me in and opened up the garage, I waxed all the chains on all the bikes before we settled in for the night. Nothing we washed was going to dry (despite the hotel having the best sink to date for handwashing our laundry), but we had salvaged a day and was ahead of schedule!
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