Day 48: Schaufhausen to Radolfzell
Distance: 31 miles
The morning started early with Brittany waking me up telling me she heard something outside our tent. She’d heard something before we went to sleep but I brushed it off and we just went to sleep.
At 2:30 we heard something again. By the time I was fully awake she’d gotten dressed and got a glimpse of what it was. She said it looked like a hedgehog, and it had its head in our food bag. As I was fearfully contemplating my interaction with this creature she was already unzipping the tent and prodding the creature with the handle of our pan. It didn’t move, but just kept its head in our food bag.
She prodded it out of our food bag, but it just stayed there outside our tent, he wouldn’t move on his own. Turns out he was eating our container of peaches, maybe he was in a peach coma?
She then remembered that the bathroom had a floor squeegee, so she ran and grabbed it and then proceeded to roll the hedgehog away from our tent. It was hilarious! I’m a wuss, it reminded me of the time we saw a raccoon in my warehouse, I quickly jumped back and ran away, and she grabbed a broom to chase it out!
It was rainy and wet when we woke up for the morning to put the tent away. It’s more hilly here in Germany than it was in France. The miles seem to go by a little more slowly because of the up-and-down riding, we also seem to need more stops with the climbing.
At our afternoon shopping break, we had to find a bathroom for the kids. Taking a four, six, and eight-year-old to the bathroom is not my idea of fun, but it is what it is. We went to the Lidl, which is similar to Aldi, and more like a bulk food store with low prices, but no public restrooms. We’ve learned from past experience that if the kids need to use the restroom, they are very accommodating and lead you to the back. Unfortunately, after 15 minutes of bathrooming, including dropping a five Frank coin in the toilet, we heard the lady asking about our progress. I didn’t realize that they had to wait for us! The lady was quite irritated, but only new polite phrases in English so she still told us to “have a great day”, she was really mad.
Water, and bathrooms are more readily available in Germany. Many of the towns have running fountain springs with drinkable water, and there seem to be many more parks here as well. We came across an amazing park today. It was right on the Rhine river, it had a splash pad and a kiddie pool, and a water feature that let the kids bring water up to the top of a little structure and re-route the water down it with the option to dam up the water. Hard to explain at 11pm while Hazel’s not cooperating at bed time:)
We rode through some very cool forest sections, there will be more of this especially as we head north to Stuttgart.
Dale Majors 