Day Eight - Noisy German party disco time - part zwei.

Following what had honestly felt like one of the hardest, most gruelling and energy sapping days we have ever had we had hoped for a nice peaceful camp with all, or even some mod cons….a place to relax and rewind perhaps. It’s clear neither of us are feeling great at all and indeed there is some techiness in camp (all sorted inside 2 mins with a man hug in case you are wondering) so imagine our delight when having selected the perfect pitch some guy who is less than 20 metres away turns on, and up, his very loud Bluetooth speaker and music (if that is indeed not insulting to the entire creative arts industry to call it “music”!).

We are so in desperate need of chill time and are keen to confront the protagonist however our exhaustion, lack of German, instilled Britishness and I can’t lie the very intimidating nature of his demeanour meant that “fingers crossed” someone else would sort it out . Eventually they do and we have ring side seats although it all goes off rather limply with a handshake and the tiniest, most imperceptibly small drop in volume….oh well.

Despite our mood, the uninspiring arrival in Nuremberg, the sub optimal camp site and now the noisy German disco party time (again!) I should say that the on site cafe (scrub that…I am going to upgrade it to Bistro right here and now) did surprisingly good food and I would go so far as to say (hold on to your hats!)….it was nice.

The alarm goes off at 5am as is now the norm after a very, very fitful nights sleep (I mean more than usual in a tent….combination of heat, party disco German nonsense until around 2300 and fretting about how the hell we are actually going to pull this whole cycle to Budapest thing off) we head off around 630. We stop just a few miles in at what is fast becoming our favourite pit stop in Germany….the warm and always appreciated welcome of “Norma”, a chain of supermarkets which more often than not also have a cafe / bakery attached. We like “Norma” so much we pay her a visit twice a day if we can!

Once we finally break free of the Nuremberg suburbs the scenery starts to change….its rolling and beautiful.

”Rolling” is off course a rather romantic Wordsworthesque way of saying “bloody hilly” and after 7 days of cycling and of course the abominable heat this is a lot even by TMAAT standards. We manage to make some good progress in the marginally less insane morning temperatures but by midday we are struggling badly. We cycle from shady bit to shady bit, pausing to take even as little as a minute to revive before attempting to move on. It’s exhausting and v slow work. During one of our many pauses we stop at our second most favourite new thing to do which is find a shady cafe to have ice cream….given my overall cleanliness already seems to be attracting a lot of insects and other wildlife there was fleeting moment where I thought I might smear my melon and strawberry cup all over my face and neck but I thought better of it.

Given we are now off plan now and essentially busking campsites we are just indescribably delighted to arrive in Regensburg around 1630 and find a clean, hospitable and well set up campsite. Thank goodness!

As Marc cooks up some TMAAT pasta we discuss what happens next and agree that AT ALL COSTS we must arrive in Vienna on Saturday night so we can actually have a day off and dare I say it, have some “fun”.