June 27: Pfunds to Trafoi

 

It was clear and beautiful in the morning, perfect for our climb up from Pfunds. We rode up the road a bit and then descended to the Pfunds campground to drop off our bags. After that, it was a ride on the bike path until Voderrauth, where we rejoined the main road rather than staying on the bike path.  The bike path there would take you along a series of unnecessary climbs while the road on a Friday morning had relatively little traffic.

After a few galleries, we crossed into the Swiss border and the road got appreciably smoother as it went through a series of galleries before descending down to the river at Martina. At Martina, we stopped at the water fountain to refill our water bottles and then crossed the border back into Austria to begin climbing Nobbertspass. This was my third time climbing it and it was by far the easiest, having started when fresh and on a relatively cool day.

At the top, we regrouped. Xiaoqin's power meter had drained, and with Bowen's Edge 830 broken, we just moved the battery from his power meter onto hers. My power meter battery had also drained yesterday, but I had replaced it last night. Boen's power meter battery was also drained, but I hadn't brought the charger for that power meter so it was going to stay dead the rest of the trip.

When everyone had arrived, we descended to Nauders and bought lunch at the Mpreis supermarket. We didn't eat there, however, as it was still early and I knew the perfect place for a picnic. Following the bike path towards Reschenpass, we noted big displays that indicated that there was huge cycling event soon to happen. Then I remembered that Nauders was famous for the Night Race that was happening tonight! It was a good thing we weren't planning to stay in town that evening as there was likely to be no lodging available!

Part of the bike path was closed so we backtracked a bit and then rode towards the Italian border, where we stopped to take the obligatory picture at the zero kilometer marker designating the start of the Alto Aldige bike path that could take you all the way to Lake Garda, Verona and Venice if you were so inclined.

The weird thing about the border is that the climbing doesn't stop! It keeps going uphill until just before the Reschensee. Once we hit the Reschensee, a right turn took you to a playground with a zipline, a shaded park bench, and a water fountain, ideal ingredients for a picnic lunch. Of course we had lunch there, and took turns on the zipline as well.

The ride along the Reschensee bike path is gorgeous. It's not flat, but undulates enough to grant you dramatic views of the famous half-buried church tower designating the town that was drowned when the dam was constructed, as well as the lake proper. It is truly one of the prettiest bike paths you can use and it dumps you right on top of the hydro-electric dam that created the lake. From there, it's a series of fast and furious descents starting with the Lago della Muta Haldersee and then dropping all the way to Clusio, then Laudes. The bike path has been re-routed in recent years and now there are no longer any wacky turns to unwanted places but drops you directly into Glorenza.

In Glorenza, there's a hotdog stand that Arturo has waxed lyrical about for years, having missed it last year when it was closed as we were headed down to Merano. This year it was open and he bought everyone who wanted a hotdog one! What was new to me was the fresh strawberry vending machine next to the hot dog stand, and we bought berries from there too. From here, it was a hop, skip, and a jump to get to Prato Allo Stelvio, where we filled our water bottles before starting the climb of the East side of the Stelvio in the afternoon heat.

Fortunately, this afternoon wasn't that hot, and to my surprise, since the last time we came by this way, the Italians had finished building the bike path from the bottom of the climb to the first bridge, the most annoying section of the Stelvio. This separated bike path not only granted peace and quiet to a cyclist climbing at a low speed compared with the prevailing motor traffic, but was also right next to the river, for maximum cooling effect and scenic beauty! So the climb was very pleasant, and Boen and I took advantage of it before it disappeared just before the first gallery marking the final ascent to the village of Gomogoi.

From Gomogoi to Trafoi was steep, with a short section at 12% grade, but it was also high enough that the worst of the heat was behind us. Boen and I had long gotten rid of our helmets for maximum climbing pleasure, and we arrived at Trafoi in due course at the Hotel Madatsch. At the hotel, however, we realized that Otto Senior had been riding, and wouldn't be back for a while --- it turned out that we had missed him coming the other way!

When he did arrive, we rode with him to the campground and picked up the luggage, then rode back to the hotel to check in. After we checked in, we went back just as Bowen and Xiaoqin arrived with Stephan and Otto. We got settled in. The hotel was fancy, but we'd booked cheap rooms and hence the view was better outside the hotel than from inside the room. But the room was big and the elevator worked, and there was even a balcony where we could dry our clothing!

A fancy hotel like this even had free snacks, potato chips, pop corn, etc. As we were starving, we grabbed the free stuff and sat outside to enjoy the scenery. Dinner was great, and we were starving so everything tasted good. I made multiple rounds to the salad bar, which in Italian fashion was never really refilled so the good stuff disappeared early.

After dinner, we walked up the street and discovered that the road was blocked! Arturo spoke to the manned blockade and we were told that this was the Stelvio Night event, where only bicycles, pedestrians, and so forth were allowed on the mountain until 8am! If we hadn't already paid for the hotel we might have been tempted to ride it. Well, not really, we'd already done plenty of riding that day! A glorious alpenglow surrounded us on our walk and we felt ourselves fortunate.

June 26: Mayrhofen to Pfunds (with train transfer from Jenbach to Landeck)

 

We got up, ate our Weisswurst, and got the bikes packed and ready to roll at 8:00am. The sun was shining and the bike path was easy rolling but Bowen was lagging. It took nearly two and a half hours to ride to Jenbach even though it was downhill though with a light headwind. By the time we got to the Jenbach train station, Stephan and Otto had already been cooling their heels for an hour while we bought train tickets and organized ourselves for when the train came. Otto rode along with us on the train so he wouldn't miss the experience of riding the Austrian trains.

The train to Landeck goes through Innsbruck, where we had to do a train transfer. Fortunately, that train transfer was relatively easy, and there were no other cyclists competing with us for bike parking space. On the way to Landeck, however, we could see the weather steadily getting worse and worse, with clouds first appearing and then becoming gradually darker as we approached Landeck. Stephan and Otto Sr, driving the RV on the freeway, got held up behind traffic, but that didn't matter as when the train arrived at Landeck the skies opened up and a thunderstorm blew through, necessitating that we stay at the train station for lunch to wait it out.

Arturo had a weather radar app on his phone, so he pulled it out while we had lunch. "It looks like there's a clear window of a few hours." Sure enough, by the time we finished lunch the rain had stopped, and Stephan and Otto Sr arrived. We mounted our bikes and loaded up our luggage so that we wouldn't have to depend on rendezvousing with the RV if it started raining. That way, we could just find lodging and figure it out.

The tandem led the way, with Xiaoqin and Bowen following behind but the others mysteriously fell back. I was determined to make as much headway as possible before the inevitable thunderstorm came back. Following the signs along the road I found the bike path leading out of town towards Pfunds, and it turned out to be quite pleasant and uncontested by cars. I would later discover that the others ended up on the car road and had to ride through the tunnel.

The bike path follows the Inn river, crossing it and following alongside it on the opposite side of the river from the main road. It grants you views of the power dams before dumping you out onto Prutz. Boen and Bowen had both played at the zipline playground behind Prutz but this time when we arrived it started raining. We hid under some shelters (one kindly resident even opened up his garage for Mark Brody), and soon when the rain stopped we kept going again.

I had my eyes on the Vaya hotel in Pfunds, which looked really good. It being a Thursday I didn't bother making a reservation. Past Prutz, the bike path follows a pattern where it would hit a climb, then descend into the next town before rolling on flat terrain for a bit before repeating all the way up the river to Pfunds. We made it to St Christina before it started raining again, but coincidentally we found a tunnel on the bike path just as the rain started so we had shelter right there!

Once again, the rain stopped but we could feel our luck running out. By the time we hit Mariastein it had started raining again in earnest, but we were already committed --- it was Pfunds or bust! We kept riding even though the sky was really opening up at this point and our socks were wet. But the scenery was still gorgeous. Arturo posted on Strava later that he thoroughly enjoyed it.

Arriving in Pfunds we discovered that the Vaya was full in between when I saw it had availability and our arrival someone else must have booked up the remaining rooms! Looking on booking.com we found Pension Grein, but when we got there there was no staff there. Fortunately, we had our phones and Arturo called the owner and settled us in for the evening. We parked our bikes in the garage, waxed all our chains, and then took showers. After that, the sky cleared a bit and we could walk to dinner in a light drizzle. It was an adventure and our clothing likely wouldn't dry, but that's why you always bring a set of spare cycling clothes.

At dinner, I looked for lodging for Friday. My favorite hotel, the hotel Frenzenshohe was full, but I noticed that Trafoi had an opening at the hotel Madatsch, a great location with a half pension. Arturo checked and the place was cheaper on the website directly for a half pension, so we booked it! That would place us at 1400m high, granting us a 1500m climb on Saturday, which was reasonable.

Review: Norwegian Wood

 I will confess to having bounced off prior attempts to read Haruki Murakami books, but hope springs eternal, so somehow Norwegian Wood found its way into my library queue and this time I actually read it.

Of all the Japanese novels I've read, this one feels the least Japanese. Other novels, I've read, for instance, would make references to Japanese books not available in English translation, but darn near every music/pop culture reference to this book refers to English music or American music, and nearly every book reference is steeped in English or American literature.

The book revolves around a young man who starts college a couple of years after one of his best friends commits suicide. The book has a lot of people committing suicide, making me wonder how come Japan's subways were so packed in the 1970s. Besides the aboved mentioned best friend, the best friend's girlfriend, the protagnist's new best friend's girlfriend and quite possibly another person I'd forgotten about also commit suicide.

The book's theme isn't suicide, however. It's about relationships. Again, the point of view character lives a pretty unbelievable life, but maybe college was cheap in the 1960s. Apparently despite being from a family that's not rich, he pays for his expenses solely with a part time job at a record store, and never has to be accountable to his parents, so he would skip out on classes and go on trips, etc., and still has plenty of money to go on dates, buy drinks and bullet train tickets, etc. I guess when you write fiction you don't have to be realistic.

In any case, the point of view character makes all the dumb mistakes a young adult male can make. I won't fault the author for those --- as a former young adult male I made many of the same mistakes, though not with the same wild profligarate spending (not being rich) and not having the kind of major that would have no consequences if I skipped out on them for weeks at a time.

In the end, the author makes the correct decision, but not before making a lot of questionable ones. I'm not sure I learned a lot about Japanese culture from this novel, but the novel must have rung a lot of resonances because it was apparently very popular both in Japan and elsewhere.

June 25: Mayrhofen Panoramaweg

Arturo, Mark and I got out of the apartment at 6:50am, walking to the nearest supermarket. When you visit Europe, you're used to very indifferent customer service. Some service workers even seem to think that customers are a nuisance. This store, despite being part of a chain, was tiny and had the most enthusiastic customer service agent in Europe I'd ever met. We started by buying bread and eggs, and then I spotted Weiss wurst. We bought two packets of 6, reasoning that would be two each. The customer service agent immediately reached back behind her and grabbed the special mustard that goes with Weisswurst proactively!

We then visited the other grocery store for more pedestrian needs. We also bought more sunscreen, having ran out. The kids would forever complain about the icky sunscreen, since they were much more used than our brush on sunblock which we'd successfully used for years.

The kids hadn't had Weisswurst at all on this trip before, and so they chowed down like crazy. Boen ate 3, as did Bowen. "Boen has got to be half weisswurst by now!" remarked Mark. We then got water bottles filled and got ready to visit the cable car for the Mayrhofen Panaromic walk, which Arturo had identified and confirmed with Stephan was a good one. Stephan had spent time in Mayrhofen before, so he decided to take the day off and work remotely instead. I asked him to ponder on whether he wanted to do the Stelvio or Silvretta instead. Boen got Otto to start pushing for Silvretta, since he thought that Silvretta + Klausen was much prettier than the Stelvio. Xiaoqin speculated that Stelvio would end up being their preference because it was just much more famous than Silvretta.

We walked over to the Penkenbahn cable car station and bought tickets (I bought the wrong ticket which cost a bit more) and then took the cable car up. It is a measure of the spectacular nature of the places we were going that our initial impressions were of being underwhelmed. The place was pretty, no doubt about it. It just didn't stand up to Secada or Tre Cime. I was glad we chose to stay for only 2 nights instead of doing more hiking in the area --- the location wasn't high enough anyway to stay cool, though the apartment we stayed at was cool enough even without AC.

The hike did grant us views all the way into the Italian Border, on the other side of the St Jakob/San Giacomo pass laid Sterzing, the town where we had started so many days ago. We walked past several artificial lakes and visited a mountain top church before doubling back and hiking down to the lower cable car station and riding it back to town, where we bought quick snack lunches at the supermarket before going back to the apartment to relax, get hydrated, do laundry, change into swimming trunks and then walk to the swimming pool.

The Mayrhofen swimming pool offered special rates after 3:30pm, so we bought passes and then proceeded to talk our way into the indoor area where the water slides were. There were two water slides which were on a timed schedule. One would open, then there'd be a 10 minute pause, then there would be another that would open. It was because there was insufficient staff to keep both slides open at the same time.

One of them, dubbed crazy river was the oddest water slide I'd ever seen. It had a couple of intermediate stops almost designed to stop you so you have to stand up and get onto the next stage of the slide. This looked like it was guaranteed to cause one slide user to crash into another if the previous one was slow. This was probably of no consequence if you were a kid and light, but I didn't want to be the adult responsible for slamming into a kid at high speed in a water slide like this one so after trying it once I stopped using it.

The other slide was much better designed, a fully enclosed tube that sloshed you around from side to side at high speed. If you weren't careful water would get up your nose. We all enjoyed that one thoroughly and couldn't get enough.

Arturo noticed that the supermarket closed at 6:00pm, so we had to leave earlier than expected to buy dinner and breakfast. We bought Weisswurst, for breakfast, and prepared to make Spaghetti Bolognese for dinner. We also got word that Otto Senior was excited about driving the Stelvio on the RV, so we started looking at train schedules and forecasts.

The forecast for the next day was for pleasant morning and a thunderstorm in the afternoon. We could take the train to Jenbach and then to Landeck where the climb to Reschen pass started, but that would forfeit riding in good weather. I decided to split the difference and proposed riding to Jenbach first thing in the morning, and then taking the train to Landeck and then riding up towards Reschenpass as high as possible. My preferred goal was to make Nauders, but Pfunds was also plausible. Nobody disagreed, but Stephan had a complication which was that Otto Jr really wanted to ride the train while he and his dad would do the drive to Landeck. He would have to meet us at the train station on our unpredictable schedule and then entrust his 7-year-old to the bad influence of our 13 and 10 year olds.

While dinner was being made, I checked the flat tire on the front. 

Review: Kaisnvxs SIM card for Europe

 I've always found the e-sim providers to be disappointing, with low speeds similar to T-mobile's European performance. This year, :Bowen was going to be riding his own single, which made having a phone with a data plan and voice call capability non-optional., making most data-only e-sim services not worth considering Of course, once I gave him a SIM card, Boen would be mad if I didn't give him one two, so I bought both of them the Kaisnvxs SIM card from Amazon.

12GB for $23 grants you less data than buying a SIM card locally in Italy, but on the other hand, I didn't expect to be able to buy SIM cards in Misurina, and didn't want to waste time in Bruneck or Sterzing looking for one. So this was a reasonable compromise. Having unlimited calls or SMS was also a big plus.

The SIM card activates on first use after you install it into your unlocked smartphone. That piece worked perfectly. So did the data plan --- though the kids weren't very careful with the data plans and the plans started throttling 20 days into the trip. The voice calls worked fine in Italy and Austria, but by the time we got into Switzerland it stopped working and I switched to using my T-mobile SIM card instead.

The SIM card was good value, but obviously I wasn't happy with it not lasting the 30 days as promised, and I would try a different card next year.

June 24: Krimml to Mayrhofen

The hotel didn't come with breakfast, but was fortunately right across the street from a Spar that opened early, so Arturo and I went to the Spar and bought breakfast, and we all gathered in Arturo and Mark's room to eat. Having a kitchen meant we could fry eggs, make coffee, and have a filling breakfast after yesterday's efforts.

In the past, I'd always ridden from Wald im Pinzgau up Old Gerlos road rather than visit the Krimml waterfall. But given that the Krimml waterfall was a centerpiece of the Tauern National Park, I decided that we should place it on the visit list, and Arturo agreed. The "new" Gerlos pass road was also a toll road, and my experience with toll roads is that meant that traffic would be manageable even if it wasn't light. Our target for the day was set for Mayrhofen, where we wanted to do more hiking. Stephan said he was feeling the strain of so many riding days in a row, and we clearly needed a rest day to dry out our clothing as well, as nothing had dried fully overnight.

We rode down to the campground to dropped our bags at the RV. Then we rode down to the Krimml waterfall. Crossing a bridge, I found what looked like a gorgeous place, but it turned out to be the waterfall therapy location, and closed to visitors from 10:00am onwards. A placard at the location told us that the therapy sessions would go on for weeks.

Turning back, we found the actual location, where we bought tickets and did the hike up to various viewpoints along the waterfall as well as down below where we could enjoy our shower. The waterfalls themselves weren't very impressive, but it was definitely worth a visit. I can see why Jobst wouldn't bother with the waterfalls on subsequent visits though!

By the time we were done with the hiking it was lunch time, so we ate lunch at the waterfall cafe. It wasn't cheap, but it wasn't outrageous either. After that, it was time to bike!  We rode back out to the main road and started climbing the Gerlos road. The road is a far cry from the Old Gerlos road with its 14-18% grades, but instead granted a steady 6-8% grade, working its way around the hill, granting us better and better views of the waterfalls as we rode. My front tire felt soft, so I had to stop to put air in the tires.

It being the afternoon, once we got out of the tree cover it got warm rapidly and Boen and I just poured power into the pedals and just got the climb over with. At the summit, there was a huge toll terminal, but bikes were free and so were the bathrooms! So we made use of the bathrooms, filled up our water bottles, and then walked over to the viewing platform to wait for the others to show up. Apparently we were not the only ones to have felt the impact of the afternoon heat, as the others slowly made their way to where we were, with Bowen bringing up the rear.

When we had all eaten our snacks, we started riding down. Not having ridden this road before, I had no intel to provide the others. The road quickly intersected with the old Gerlos road intersection with a descent, and then we were at the familiar Gerlos Stauseewhere we stopped for an ice cream. There were views of the reservoir (Speicher Durlassboden) as well as goats for the kids to feed and play with. We probably spent too much time there, but it was a short day. And then there was a short climb followed by a descent to the town of Gerlos itself.  We saw cable cars and what looked like a very wealthy town, and in the future it might be a better place to stop than Mayrhofen..There was a strong headwind through town, so we had to pedal.

Past Gerlos the road once again took a big dive and the headwind was no longer an issue. The descent finally terminated in a series of hairpin turns which dropped us into Zell am Ziller. Stephan was particularly impressed. "I'd driven this in the past, but had no idea that the road felt this good on the bike! And it's not even 3 hours from Munich!" He was moving to Munich in August and this trip had affirmed that the decision was going to be a good one for cycling.  In times past, we'd just ridden down towards Jenbach from there, but this time we went up the river towards Mayrhofen. Stephan's dad had found a campground in Laubichi, and I'd identified the Black Eagle Luxury Apartments as being reasonably priced and reasonably close to town.

The river bike path wasn't hard to find, and once we got on it, it switched between gravel and pavement. Since it was just a 6km ride we didn't bother looking for alternatives and just rode along until we found the campground. The campground entrance was surprisingly hard to find, and eventually we just got bags handed over to us over the fence while I struggled to do electronic registration for the apartments on a tiny smartphone screen. The apartments turned out to be one of those zero-contact places, and we would only get entry codes after registering all the guests AND paying the guest tax.

Arriving in Mayrhofen, we found to our dismay that the apartments were right next to the main road. Fortunately, there was a well rated Smashburger place next door, so after parking our bikes and moving into the entirely adequate hotel (no AC though!) we could just walk next door and have dinner. Over dinner, I looked at our schedule and realized that we were ahead of schedule. I had originally intended to arrive in Mayrhofen on June 26th, but we'd somehow made it here on June 24th. That gave us another 6 days!

Arturo had found a panoramic hike using the cable car for the next day, and we were exhausted so after dinner we did laundry, hung up all the clothing, and went to bed, leaving tomorrow's choices till tomorrow.

June 23 2025: Heiligenblut to Krimml (with a train transfer from Zell am See to Mittersil)

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!

Review: Camelbak Steel Podium Bottle

 Pierre Moreels told me that the best insulated water bottles are the stainless steel podiums. During this year's hot summer tour (people actually died in places like Italy and France, where AC is not commonly available), I discovered that our regular insulated podium bottles didn't keep water cool for more than a couple of hours. When I found these bottles for about $30 each, I decided to buy 2 to give them a try.

These look just like the regular insulated ones, except that they're made from stainless steel. They're much heavier than regular bottles, at 354g each. The flow rate on these bottles are great, due to a straw in the middle of the cap which allows air to enter the bottle. You can't squeeze these bottles to get more water, but I have no issues with them.

Here's how incredibly well they work: I filled them one quarter with ice, and then the rest with cold powerade. 24 hours later, they still had some ice left! In fact, your biggest danger with this bottle is that if you treat it like a regular water bottle and fill it with ice and water, after 3 hours you'll run out of water because you still have too much ice left in the bottle!

The biggest con with this bottle is that being made out of steel, unless it's a perfect fit, any metal bottle cages are going to give some rattling with this. Actually, even without a metal cage, if you have ice in the bottle you'll hear some rattling sound from the ice in the bottle! Having a plastic/carbon cage does alleviate the problem.

On cool days, I will take the trouble to switch out to regular insulated bottles or even uninsulated bottles. But on a hot summer day, these bottles are the bee's knees. Highly recommended.