High on a Hilltop

Day 3 37 kms


What a comedy of errors! This is where the tour maps and info let us down. We intended to take an early train to get some sight-seeing in but to our dismay there was only one train that day. It left at midday and stopped short of our destination.

The delay meant that we couldn’t sightsee, and ended up having to bike straight through to Maria Taferl, the next town on the itinerary. Luckily, the countryside was interesting and the path wound inland through farmland: fields of corn and bright yellow rapeseed, barns with cows …. but hardly any people. We couldn’t do without our daily coffee and cake stop, though, and we chose to do this at Persenbeurg under a famous 700-yr old linden tree. The cakes were the best we’d had so far. We reached Marbach and summoned our ride to the hotel, which was up on a hill, a very steep hill …. it was such a relief that they provided us a car.

The hotel was well-situated and our rooms, identical this time, had a beautiful unobstructed view of the Danube meandering far down below. This hotel also gave us the best dinner we’d had up to then; Charo had an excellent steak and I had a very good perch. I was disappointed, though, that it was not locally caught. Apparently there is not much commercial fishing along the Danube, probably because of all the power plants and other commercial activity. The food throughout the tour was disappointing. I had imagined breakfasts to be country repasts with homemade breads and country-fresh cheeses and farmer’s hams and sausages in rustic baskets. Instead, they were almost identical in all the towns and seemed to have been bought in the local supermarket. Pats of butter and cheese wrapped in foil; jams in plastic pots, the kind they have in airplanes; liver spreads and flavored cheeses in the ubiquitous little plastic pots.