The end of the trip

Our route through Austria and Germany

Well, Peter and I have been back home now for 3 days. The flight was fine (though if possible I'll try to avoid the Frankfurt airport in the future, it was pretty awful), and jet lag is almost over. Now we're back to everyday life at home. There's not much of a routine, because we're still in summer vacation, and Eric and Kenny are gone on a trip.

The trip was a bucket list experience for me, something I've wanted to do for a long time. I'm glad I was able to do it with my 12 year old son Peter - he was an ideal travel companion, always good-natured and up for anything. As long as we stopped at all playgrounds and got ice cream at least once a day, he was fine!

The first few days were stressful - I didn't now how everything would work out, I didn't know if we'd be able to find suitable bikes, whether we'd have mechanical problems, if we'd be able to find hotels, etc. But once I got past those first days, I really enjoyed myself. I didn't put a lot of effort into seeing the "sights", rather I really enjoyed the things that we ran across while we were biking. Things like cherry tree with ripe fruit, a metal recyling plant, a nice view of the river, crossing the Danube on a water ferry. We took it very easy, and didn't try to do too many kilometers in a day. Every day was like a little treasure chest, with new and interesting things to see.

Keeping this blog was a great idea, both for logging what happened, and for having a bit of a routine. I wrote up the days blog post every evening. The folding keyboard was sometimes annoying (a few letters just did NOT work well, like b and h), but overall it was critical to being able to write reasonably quickly.

I would do this trip again in a heartbeat. Not along the Inn and the Danube, but along some of the other European rivers. Many rivers in Europe have bike paths on them, and while the Danube is the best known, many others are supposed to be really nice as well. So - this is not the last trip of this sort!

What would I would do differently? Buying the bikes, used, when we got to Innsbruck and then selling them in Vianna worked out fine in the end. However, it was stressful. I'm thinking of some other options for next time. Probably I'll bring bikes with. That way I'd have some experience with it, and it won't all be new. I'll need to get a different bike - mine is a road bike which wouldn't be suitable for all the gravel roads. And I'd need to learn a few things about assembling and disassembling the bikes. I may also consider a folding bike.

Another thing I'd do differently is - different clothes! What I ended up bringing was good in that it was quick-drying (great, since I did laundry by hand in the hotel sink almost every night). But that's all my wardrobe had going for it. I didn't really like what I had to wear, and felt frumpy much of the time. Not a huge deal, but I will be more selective next time.

I would try harder to not use sites like Booking.com. The worst hotel nights we had were when I restricted myself to the hotels that were easily available (just a few tempting clicks!) on Booking.com. An easy alternative is just to look on Google maps, see the hotels that are available, maybe check out their reviews, and call them! Speaking to people in German on the phone was stressful for me, that's why I avoided it.

I thought it would be hard to move from one hotel to the next every night. But it wasn't as hard as I expected. Once you set a few rules for yourself, moving is not that hard. One rule was - there's a place for everything, and everything goes in it's place. That way, you don't need to worry so much about losing things. Also, we traveled REALLY light. Many people remarked on that. People asked me if we were using some kind of service, that moved our bags from one hotel to another (this service actually exists). The less you bring with, the less you have to worry about losing or moving.

I think living like this is good for a month or so - which is what we did. Living like this for longer than that would probably get old, though.

Here's a few photos from the flight back to Seattle (over the North Pole).