North, West, U-Turn, East. Half of the trip is done, while we were slowly cycling north, we had a complete U-turn in our direction and heading now to the east.
Although Frankfurt and Darmstadt were really nice as we could meet some Joomla friends, we were not really sad when we could leave the hotel. Shouting people at 2 am at night is not a nice thing when you want to recover from exhausting travels.
Rushing a bit to get the early train, we left Frankfurt via train to Bad Soden-Salmünster to continue our trip to Fulda. Today was one of the seldom moments a conductor came to check the tickets. While I rummaged through the bags to find my wallet, he asked if we all have the 9€ ticket and then just left, as everyone said yes.
At this moment, suddenly, the anti-theft protection from Phil's bike started its job, and the train was filled with a loud and annoying noise. It seems somewhere in my bag was the device to stop the sound, which is really hard to find in a black bag, with sunglasses and someone shouting: "It's the squared device". We were sure to attract attention, but after a few moments, Phil fished out the device and could stop the annoyance. After reassuring the conductor that it wasn't the train making these noises and also no fire alarms, we finally reached "Bad Soden-Salmünster".
Because of the rush in the morning, we first looked out for a bakery for some breakfast (discussing that the literal translation "early piece" is much nicer than "schnell brechen"). We found a nice open store a few hundred meters away from the train station (to Phil's surprise, all big stores were closed on Sunday...).
Well strengthened, we started the tour, and it went very well. The temperature was exactly at the point where it was cold enough for British bodies but already warm enough for my good feeling. The first hour we had the highest average of the whole tour, and the steep hill did not stop us. On top, we had a great outlook, but it seemed we have occupied the place from a man in his wheelchair, so we continued after some sips from our bottle and a corn bar.
What stopped us (or especially me) was a semi-flat rear wheel, which brought some challenges like lost connection pieces to the pump and a hard-to-open valve. But after a few minutes and some teamwork, this was fixed, too, and we could continue heading east.
The first cliché of eastern Germany came on a bigger parking slot, where three men were standing around a black car, listening to right-wing German rock and having more runes on their shirts than any Viking boat. Passing them, my bags at my bike bent more and more a few kilometres later, and started touching the spokes of my rear wheel. This problem didn't leave me till we reached our goal, and I had to be careful, fixing them every few kilometres.
Also, a car driver didn't like how Phil was riding on his bike, honking multiple times...what a **** as we were all as right as possible on the street. The last little highlight was the passing of a big mountain of stones from a quarry, stopped there for some photos.
Besides that, today was really a great trip; we get on very smoothly and were close to our destination earlier than expected. One last hill to climb, and we reached the current Airbnb house, warmly greeted by a very nice woman.
We decided to spend the afternoon finishing different Joomla tasks and order some Chinese food via the "To Good To Go" app. Still shocked, how a whole country could close their shopping centres on one day of the week completely ("All this is unused for a whole day...") Phil drove with me to the restaurant, got the food and we had a really relaxed evening.
