It rains in Mainz

Today was a very gray day! Also a pretty rainy day so we took a shortcut aka the train a skipped a city on our tour. We are therefore in Mainz a day early which means I get to tour the Steinberg winery with Lisa, Mike and one of Lisa’s old friends tomorrow. 😀

Mark and I enjoyed no less than fifteen croissants each this morning at our hotel before hitting the road around 8:30. We knew there was a big storm heading our way so it was a bit of a race against the clock to make it to Karlsruhe to take a 12:30ish train to Mainz. The Eurovelo 15 trails are pretty well marked (much better than Eurovelo 6 ever was!) but we still had a few “um where do we go now” moments. Mark’s phone was supposed to have a data plan working so we thought we’d be able to Google map our way around. As luck would have it, the data and cell service on his phone completely stopped working once we crossed over to Germany which was about one kilometer from our hotel. Side note: we stumbled into a T Mobile store tonight in Mainz and one of the workers changed the settings on his phone so we are now reconnected and Google mappin’ with no issues.

We will be spending tomorrow night in the same spot in Mainz before getting back in the saddle towards Koblenz on Monday morning. We are eliminating quite a few (hundred) kilometers from our trip with the train rides but I ain’t complaining!! If there was ever a time to stop and smell the roses, it’s on a bicycle trip through Europe with one’s dad.

I wanted to add some additional photos to this post but I’m having persistent techincal difficulties that may be but are probably not the result of operator error. I’m planning to post a few follow-ups once I get to a computer (especially one with a QWERTYUIOP keyboard).

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