Bikepacking Europe 2025 Part II

Part II of my bicycle ride, Europe 2025. I managed to delete all of my video files, and they are long gone. This is a recap from Regensburg, Germany to Bratislava in photos only.

As you know now by now if you’ve been following my journal, I somehow managed to delete every uh piece of video that I had that I’d prepared for this portion of the ride. Long story short, it’s gone. Cannot be recovered. I even called Apple support. Uh there is no hope. So, I at first I wasn’t going to do anything and I decided that I would go ahead and put together just a series of photographs showing this portion of the ride. And this portion of the ride began in Rianburg, Germany, and ended in Bratlavia, Slovakia. Overall, it was a mix. It’s flat. That’s a plus. I had a headwind every day and extremely unusual. I met a German couple who I’ve met on and off now for the last 3 or 4 days and even they said that uh winds blowing out of the east to the west are completely unusual. Uh normally it’s the other way around. So with good fortune when I turn around in Budapest, I will have headwinds all the way to [Music] France. Anyway, uh the ride basically follows Dan the Danube River. It is a beautiful ride. Uh I just cannot overemphasize the number of castles that you’ll pass along the way. Uh most of the ride is completely off-road. You are on small paved or crushed gravel roads that parallel the river the entire way. Uh most of it is either along the dyke or above the dyke as you ride. Occasionally you’ll spot a car out there, but uh those are cars that have driven to their favorite fishing hole. And uh there’s no vehicular traffic on these trails at all, but for a few fishermen. Uh there the infrastructure here is set up so that uh it serves the cyclists. There are small shops, pastry shops, cafes all along the way. Every 20, 30 kilometers, you’ll come across something in the middle of nowhere uh just to give you a break. There’s benches. There’s the basic repair tools and air pumps for bicyclists. Uh there are several fairies that cross back and forth across the river. Uh I just stayed on my uh planned route according to Kimoot and overall it was great. I did run into one snafu. It was a Sunday morning and I had left Basau Germany and I would had traveled about 15 kilometers and I was take a ferry across the river into Austria and of course the ferry doesn’t run on weekends or holidays and so I rode down the road uh the path on the German side for another say 15 kilometers and there was a dam which you could walk across. Ross, but it was being repaired and no bicycles were allowed to be walked across that area. So I continued to about 40 kilometers and found a bridge that took me into Austria and immediately and I do mean immediately I began climbing a huge mountain and I got to the top of it and I’m looking down several hundred feet to the river valley and I’m thinking why am I up here? But it was the route. And uh once I got to the bottom, I was back on the trail on the river and continued just for a very very beautiful ride. Uh the portion through Austria except for the very end is absolutely stunning just like Germany. Uh beautiful ride. Uh just couldn’t ask for better. There are thousands, and I mean thousands of cyclists out here. And on the weekends and holidays, uh the trail is just flooded with cyclists. It’s almost crazy. There’s so many. It’s a mixture. Um I’ve seen uh families riding. I’ve seen little kids riding. I’ve seen the extreme athletes riding at breakneck speeds. Uh it’s almost comical because they wear clothing that is all matched attire and it matches their pedals and it matches the rims of their wheels. Um it’s almost like a style contest. It’s hard to explain, but if you come here and ride this, you’ll fully understand and appreciate it. And then there’s just the rest, the mob, the people that are here, and everybody is friendly. It’s amazing. [Music] I camped uh every night uh between Reagansburg and Bratz Lava. And every morning except for one, my tent would be completely saturated with dew, at least the rainfly. Yet, it’s amazing. uh you would open up your door to your tent and open up the rainfall and look outside. And one morning in a campground, I was just awarded with just this beautiful sight of uh wild tulips. Uh and the grass is just dripping in dew. Uh but it was amazing. Just beautiful. and you just wait an hour or two for the sun to peek out and uh things dry up. You pack up and you just mosy on down the trail. And if there was a lesson to be learned here, it is stop rushing. Take your time. Enjoy the ride. This is something that I will likely only do this one time. And so my plan is to soak it all in as much as possible. Unfortunately, and fortunately at the same time, I planned a couple of days off here in this city uh while it was raining and it rained all day yesterday. It’s raining again today. Tomorrow it’s supposed to clear off. On the upside, the temperatures have also cooled down by a good 20 plus° Fahrenheit. Uh they are going to remain cooler for the next week or so. It had been reaching close to the mid80s at the end of last week. And with the humidity here, it made riding really tough. You wanted to get started early, but you couldn’t because the tent would be soaked. But even if you were on the road, say by 9:00 in the morning, if you did a good four hours, 5 hours of riding, you would get down to your next point. A lot of things here are governed by campsites. I try camping during the week and I take my days off. I like to spend them in a nice hotel where I can just relax and be a bum. But the rest of the time it’s camping. And since wild camping is prohibited in Germany, Austria, and many European countries, uh you have to camp at a campground or you take fear of being arrested or fined by the police. So sometimes you just pull up short because it’s a campground and the next campground wouldn’t be for some significant difference away. Anyway, uh it’s been a really good ride. I can’t complain. I’ve had a few rainy days, uh some sunshine. It’s been a mixed bag. Uh I try to look at the weather and plan, but it is what it is. And the plan is to uh ride around Europe this summer. And one way or another, I’m going to make it happen. I know I have the ultimate backup plan. If all goes wrong, there’s trains. And the trains in Europe run all the time. They’re dependable. And you can get around just about any place on a train. Unlike Sweden, you can also get your bike on a train. So, all in all, it’s good. [Music] While here in Bratzavia, I also went out and bought an external hard drive uh to store my video so I don’t have another mishap. We’ll see how that works out. I want to do a little testing today and see if I can actually download my videos onto the external drive and save them there and then be able to upload those back into uh a movie format so that I can later make a YouTube video. We’ll have to see how that goes. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] [Applause] Once again, if you’re still u viewing this video, I hope you are. I hope that you will subscribe, like, and share, and suffer. I’ll be back in uh about a week, maybe less. It’s 4 days to Budapest and there if all goes well I will put together a real video and get it out to everyone and hopefully I have learned my lesson and everything comes together. Thank you again for watching and simpify [Music]