Final Post..........

Home again & doesn't it feel good.
The trip home was a bit of a nightmare with QANTAS stuffing up our seating so that Yvonne & I were separated, even though we booked a year ahead & the A380 stuck on the tarmac in Dubai for over 4 hours fully booked out & the inside temperature over 40 degrees. All is good now after 10 hours of sleep in our own bed a sunny day with a brisk winter westerly, I love it, cold is GREAT !
A couple of pics of the trip home, well & truly in the boring category & a summary.
I feel the trip was an outstanding success overall, but as with all long trips it had its trials & tribulations all of which go to make up the colours of life.
As this was our first cycle touring trip we relied heavily on advice from Greg & Wendy, which was very much appreciated & certainly made things easier for us.
If we do this again we now have enough experience to modify how we set up for the trip to suit ourselves, as everyone does things differently.
Even though we were travelling fairly light, we could have further dropped about another third of our gear.
I hopped on the scales when I arrived home & was pleasantly surprised to find I had only added 2 kilograms to my weight. ( not too bad for the amount of bakeries & ice cream shops we visited )
Yvonne is a little cagey about her result, but has indicated she is about the same as when she left.
If you have gotten this far in the blog you will be about 1 of only  2 people who did & I will congratulate you on your tenacity.

Thats it............................................................ THE END.

Checking in at Frankfurt airport. Glad to get these boxes off our hands.

Sitting on board the 777 just happen to glance out to see our bikes coming on board underneath us.

High over the mountains of Iran, dawn finds us flying beside another jet headed for Dubai, the small white dot at the centre of the picture, it looked much bigger & clearer with the naked eye.

What appears to be the horizon just below the other aircraft is actually the shadow of the Earths terminator. The sun was rising on the other side of the aircraft & had not yet broken the horizon & as the air was very hazy the terminator shadow could be clearly seen moving down toward the horizon about a quarter of the way further down the picture, not something you will ever see from the ground.

Approaching to land in Dubai. The whole country is a giant sand pit.

Another shot approaching to land in Dubai, with the usual summer desert haze hanging over the city.

At 5 am it was already 37 degrees.

Taxiing for departure at Sydney airport for the final leg to Hervey Bay. Looking over Botany Bay to the other runway, aboard the 'bug smasher', pretty quick though, only 1 hour 40 minutes Sydney to Hervey Bay.

Nice view of Sydney city, bridge & Opera house, with some early morning fog.

Sydney Harbour.

Rainbow Beach & Double Island point.

Light wings back to Australia..

We are now sitting in the foyer of the hotel waiting for a Maxi Taxi to begin our journey home. It will be sad leaving Germany but great to be home again in Australia. We will be leaving behind many memories & experiences, only a small number of which actually made it to this blog. New friends made and again separated, the good times highlighted, by the tough times, which were few. Both our bikes, which were long in the tooth before we left, are now ready for complete rebuilds, brakes, cassette, chains, chain rings & bottom brackets, all worn and needing replacement. I thought that a trip like this may have knocked a bit of weight off, but with all those lovely German bakeries, I think the opposite will be true. We spent yesterday cleaning & re packing the bikes & after lunch took the bus into the city & the old town. A relaxing afternoon was had by all, followed by the final dinner with all the group together, which we enjoyed at the Chicago Meatpackers on the banks of the river. Today Yvonne & I took a final walk along the river bank & completed our final packing.
Stewart & Allison left for the airport about 1 hour ago, we will be leaving with Greg & Wendy in a couple of hours & Mike & Kate will be leaving tomorrow.
Endings are always such an anti climax.

 

Dis assembling & packing the bikes in the underground car park.

 

A mall in a more modern part of the city.

 

A very massive, modern shopping centre with a very unusual roof of glass in a vortex shape.

 

Kind of a sad sight of an elderly gentleman selling balloons, I never saw anyone buy any .

 

From the inside, someone needs to clean the roof.

 

 

Another inside view .

 

The building is unusual inside also, all curves & angles & this escalator maze.

 

 

This ultra long escalator stretches through the guts climbing a full 5 floors.

 

 

The glass roof vortex comes down & drains through the floor in the middle of the building.

 

The round green glass building in the centre of the picture is actually a round glass tube around a square building. A computer opens the triangular pieces of glass on whatever side the wind is coming from, pulling airflow in around the building.

 

Most people live in units, these over a marina, parallel to the river.

 

Back to Frankfurt ...43 klm

Final leg of a long ride, the weather quite warm in the mid 30s, but a short ride & flat.
We are now back in Frankfurt after pedalling 1,530 klms, on my bike speedo, which is very accurate.
( some of us a couple of klms more or less depending on sight seeing )
We ate dinner on the bank of the river & had to run for cover under a building as a summer storm blew over, there was plenty of lightning & thunder prior to its arrival.
 Today we will clean & pack the bikes, which are showing plenty of wear & tear.
In 36 hours we will be on a plane bound for home. The time has flown by & I think it will feel a little unusual not getting up & loading the bike each day. Only a couple more entries in this endless blog. On arrival home the first order of business will be to prepare the bus for a trip to Paradise at the end of the month.

 

Early morning vapour trails over Mainz, The skies over this part of Europe are very busy all the time.

 

Markets in the town square in Mainz.

 

The 'DOM' in Mainz, quite spectacular inside with interesting underground crypts.

 

A statue with a stabbed bible in front of the church. ??

I will research this later.

 

Virtually all towns in Germany were bombed into oblivion. This small church was left as a reminder & memorial.

 

An old photo of Mainz after a bombing raid.

 

While riding over a bridge over the Rhine, this empty barge was just entering the Rhine from the Main canal.

 

This is absolutely the last shot of the group on the trail, in forest just outside Frankfurt.

 

A summer storm brewing over Frankfurt at around 8 pm last night. It had us running for cover from our riverside dinner location.

 

On the way home after dinner we came across this barge unloading coal for the local power station. It is being sucked up by a giant vacuum cleaner.

 

The whole group intact in front of our final hotel about 1 minute after ending our long ride.

Mainz ...101 klms

Really enjoyable ride today, temperature dropped to mid twenties to low thirties, clear skies & a pleasant breeze.
Nearly all of the track was smooth flat hot mix bitumen, with only a couple of short stretches of rough. It made the ride seem very easy, even though 101 klms  was the longest distance for a single day so far.
We are now only 1 short, 40 klm ride from Frankfurt & the end of our journey. I hope we have another lovely day like today to finish with.

 

Another ABC scoped out in Worms at morning tea, which we had at the bakery, of course, the interesting thing about this one was the archaeological dig in front.

 

This stuff was under the ground & is being catalogued, the church is old, so this must be REALLY old probably over 2000 years.

 

A double length barge carrying many containers. As there are no B doubles on the road here we reckon this one alone keeps at least 150 semis off the road.

 

An English sea mine in a road side park.

 

A mine sweeper beside the mine & a commemorative plaque.

 

Selfie while riding.

 

A 5.8 litre AMG Mercedes, it was black but he repainted it matt gold.

It was 135,000 Euros new & 22,000 second hand, they must be giving away the standard ones second hand. A good country to buy a used Mercedes.

He tells us it can cruise at 360 klm/hr on the autobahn, but uses a lot of petrol.

 

On a ferry crossing the Rhine, we did pay the ferry man before we got to the other side.

 

A harvested wheat field with the stubble baled up.

If you remember when we arrived all the wheat fields were still green, they are now mostly ripe & ready for harvest.

 

A shady stop for lunch in the middle of the wheat fields.

 

A harvester, harvesting a field of canola.

 

Some kind of radar installation, not sure for what, but probably a left over from the cold war.

 

Most of the trip on excellent hot mix bike tracks.

The most amazing park..

A day spent in Luisenpark, Mannheim. An amazing place, at first we thought it a little rude that you would have to pay 6 euro to go to a park, but by the end of the day we thought it was one of the cheapest & best things we had done to date.
The park is  a magnificent 50 hectare site with many cool & shady grotos plus lush green open areas, a huge multi armed lake & many individual attractions.
All the attractions were so clean & beautifully presented. There were boats that you just hopped in & were bungyed onto an underwater cable, that took you around the whole lake, taking about 45 minutes. All the while hundreds of giant fish would rush up to the side of the boat with their mouths agape looking for a feed. They were pretty clever as they only approached boats that had people in them. There was a reptile house with snakes,lizards, crocodiles & much more. A butterfly house with a huge variety of coloured butterflies. A desert cactus house, that looked & felt like being in Arizona. A comprehensive aquarium house, with the displays clean & colourful. A tropical house that spread across 3 huge glass houses, it was very hot & humid, but a very lush & real jungle. A great Chinese garden with walk through water features and a beaut tea house. There were many more things to see & do & we enjoyed it immensely. We had a very hot night in the hotel where the A/C was not working & so decided to check out & not stay the second night, we found one nearby with a very good A/C & comfortable room, a very fortunate thing as it was again around 40 degrees today. We now have only 2 days of cycling to get back to Frankfurt. Tomorrow will be a 80 - 90 klm ride with a forecast drop in temperature to around 30 degrees. I am now thinking of going home & have probably had enough riding for this trip.

 

A memorial at the base of the tower in the following picture, for 3 crew & 1 doctor who died when their helicopter flew into the top of the tower one night in 1994 after dropping a patient at the nearby hospital. The top section of

 tower was severed & the chopper & tower segment plunged down to this spot.

 

The tower has a viewing platform & a revolving restaurant  at the top.

 

Yvonne sits & watches the driverles boats going past on the lake .

 

One of the many cafes with one of the great little boats.

 

The fish crowding in to be fed, they allow you to pat them & occasionally bite your finger, not painful, just like sand paper.

 

A fish about to give my finger a good gumming.

 

Yvonne checks out some day lillies.

 

Another nest of storks, there were many of these.

 

The colour of these birds is hard to believe.

 

There were many penguins in this enclosure.

 

A glass wall in the penguin enclosure.

 

On our boat cruise of the lake.

 

A group of flamingos.

 

In the tropical house.

 

Some colourful monkeys.

 

Fish aquarium.

 

A corner of the desert house.

 

In the butterfly house, I didn't get a picture of the big blue ones as they kept moving.

 

Part of the Chinese garden.

 

Inside a large stone water feature.

 

A nice pagoda in the gardens.

A wobbly rope bridge .

 

Not sure what these things made from old bricks were.