Sunday began with me donning my Shiner Beers bike jersey, which I had acquired the year before at the Shiner GASP ride at the Spoetzl Brewery in Shiner, Texas. Represent! Another hearty breakfast with a heaping bowl of Müsli and pretty soon we were all back on our bikes and back on the road. Unlike the day before, today I decided to just stay with the group and not be a lone wolf again. Besides, this time the route was going to be a lot shorter.
Sunday's ride, like Saturday's, was eastbound along the lake's north shore. Our starting point was Sipplingen, and we were riding *toward* Meersburg, which had been our starting point Saturday morning. The weather was a lot better on Sunday; the sun was out and it was a lot warmer. No more feet going numb!
Our first waypoint on the trip was Überlingen. The first thing I noticed there was this rather eye-catching statue fountain.
The biggest reason to stop in Überlingen is the long promenade along the lake shore. Don't ride your bike on it; dismount and walk with your bike. Riding on the promenade is not allowed, and people WILL call you out for it. At least, they did for us! This was a nice place to stop for a break and so some of us stopped at an outdoor café where I had a lattè macchiato.
Riding further brought us to Unteruhldingen. There isn't a whole lot to see there except maybe this open-air Stone Age museum, known as Pfahlbauten (Pile Buildings).
Late in the morning we arrived at Meersburg. This was not our final destination of the day, but still the end of most of the bike riding. Here, our task was to catch a ferry across the lake, though not across any borders. There is a quite long east-west peninsula that sticks into the west end of the lake, splitting that end into northern and southern branches. Our ferry took us across the northern branch of the lake to Konstanz, which is on the tip of that peninsula.
The weather looked nice but it was actually really cold and windy up there. Must have been because of the sea breeze.
The next, short leg of this trip was to the island Mainau. This took awhile, though, because we ran into a little local party.
This lively affair was called Egger Hornisten Fest. A brass band played while a vendor served up beer and sausage. We must have stopped for a half hour or more. I had a couple glasses of the beer; I think it was a Pilsner.
With that little diversion over, our next stop was a little island called Mainau (pronounced like "my now"), just off the shore from Konstanz. This whole island was a collection of tourist attractions and you need to pay for a ticket to get in. Also, you can't ride your bike over the causeway to the island, you must leave it on a rack outside the gate. We all did exactly this, locking up our bikes on the rack, buying our tickets and then making our way over the bridge to Mainau. Once on the island, we stopped for lunch at the first restaurant we saw, Rothaus Seeterrassen. This was a pretty good cafeteria-style restaurant where you get a tray and silverware and then pick which line you want to stand in and/or serve yourself from the salad bar. I can't remember what I had, I think loaded up my plate at the salad bar.
Mainau's most unique attraction is probably the Schmetterlingshaus, that is, the Butterfly House. This is a huge greenhouse in which countless butterflies from countless species live. Even if that doesn't sound interesting to you, you should still check it out if you're in the area and have the chance, because it really is something to see.
The butterflies are constantly flying around so it's tough to get a picture that really captures what you see in here.
Here's a few of the more interesting things we saw on Mainau. There's a lot of cool stuff to look at, so Mainau is certainly an essential stop if you're in the area.
The group split up a little after we stepped back on the mainland. I think some people rode the tour bus from there. I followed someone else on my bike into downtown Konstanz, which took a little while because we kept making wrong turns. Konstanz is certainly not a big city, but it was definitely the most populated, most bustling town we visited during this whole trip. Also, to get to our hotel we had to cross the Rhine while remaining in Germany, because the border is a little wonky and doesn't always follow the river and the lake. After riding through the bustling streets of downtown Konstanz, we pulled up in front of our hotel.
Well, this is definitely one of the more memorable hotels I've stayed at. This is the Hotel Graf Zeppelin, which was where we would be spending the night. It seems the airship inventor was born and raised in Konstanz. There was a huge bike rack outside which we locked our bikes to. With a couple hours or so remaining before dinner, I took a refreshing shower in my fourth-floor room and took a little walk downtown.
I'm usually not much for buying hokey tourist souvenirs. If I'm going to take something home from a town I visit, it's likely going to be something like coffee grounds or a bag of Müsli. It was the former I would be finding that night, at a local coffee roaster called Contigo.
Not many people know this, but there are two species of coffee plants from which coffee beans are typically harvested. The beans from these two are called "arabica" and "robusta." If you've drunk any coffee today, odds are it was brewed from arabica beans, because that is what most coffee is made from. Arabica is, however, extremely difficult to grow, only surviving in a few select spots in the world and being frustratingly delicate and sensitive to the weather--not a good thing when a little something called climate change is going on. Robusta, on the other hand, is quite hardy and will flourish almost anywhere; the only problem is that coffee made from robusta beans is much more bitter than arabica. Wikipedia says it's commonly mixed with arabica in espresso. Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, says there's no way to make robusta coffee palatable to the general public. Now, either I've got better taste than the general public or Schultz doesn't know coffee, because of the two bags of grounds I bought at Contigo, one was made from robusta beans and I thought it was delicious.
When I made it back to the hotel after procuring the coffee, most of the rest of the group was sitting at a table outside enjoying some drinks. Naturally I joined them for another mug of beer while waiting for dinner time to arrive. Where was dinner that night? Not at the hotel. We all took a bit of a walk through the town to get to Wirtshaus Bürgerstuben. As usual, I can't remember what I ate, but I do remember what I drank, probably because I took a picture of it.
I asked the waiter for a dunkel Weizen but he recommended I have this Schwarzbier (black beer) from Berlin. I don’t think it’s a stout but it tasted a little like Guinness.
After dinner it was back to Hotel Graf Zeppelin to get some sleep and recharge. We had one more day of riding ahead of us, and it was going to be on the other side of an international border.
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