Monday to Friday

a work-week of cycling southern Germany

Monday (Freiburg - Donaueschingen - Engen)

8am coffee date in Freiburg, then off to the old train station. Surrounded by a gaggle of school kids, there’s no place for the bike, so I stand in the train’s entry portal. The chatter of German makes me want to study again, to transcend my dozen catchphrases, to communicate with these boisterous children in this foreign land.

The train glides through the Black Forest, deep green wet hills outside the windows. We pass logging equipment, hilltop shelters, clouds hanging in valleys, rushing streams, and ancient farmhouses with new cars out front. I am amazed by the value of my Deutschland-ticket, €49 per month for unlimited trains and buses and trams, the ultimate insurance policy for an April cycle trip.

Bright red running shoes, blue shorts, yellow jacket, azure helmet: I am mister primary colors. The students leave, I find a seat, and I remember the weekend. Shockingly nice weather in Freiburg, improvising West Coast Swing at an afternoon dance in the same studio where I taught a workshop in December. This time I'm a newbie, a nobody, a delightful reversal. I smile, play, and mess around. My ex invited me here. We dance to the same song I played for her in Paris, not long after we met, from a speaker hidden in a friend's bag. Later we eat ice cream and discuss therapy. She asks if I’ve really dug into my childhood, asked what happened there, how it might affect my habits and decisions today. Was I really as happy as I imagine? I don’t know what to say.

I detrain in Donaueschingen, cycling first to Deutsche Post to mail a love letter, then to a classic German lunch joint, full wood paneling, for a fixed menu of meat-and-potatoes with mushroom soup. The server asks what I'll drink. I ask for tap water. She responds “still or sparkling?” Ack, it's too late, I'm not getting out of this, I should have said nichts from the very beginning. So I order sparkling, €3.30 for a tiny bottle I never wanted, with a full liter of perfectly good Freiburg tap in my bag. Why does this get under my skin? An aversion to plastic bottles? Not wanting to be a difficult customer? The little chipping away of one’s savings and thus one’s freedom? The moment sticks.

At Donauquelle, the headwater of the Danube River, I flip a coin into the monument. It is the same river I followed from Vienna (in the opposite direction) on my first European cycle trip. I pull a thera-band behind my back, stretching my arms wide, fending off bad posture.

Now it’s the countryside. Six swans rest in a sea of lush grass and yellow flowers. White petals from windbreak trees flutter and cling to the bike path like snowflakes. Over distant hills I spy the upper blades of a wind turbine, metallic beast-like arms that spin and beckon. Rolling past fat brown cows resting in a field, I burp; three raise an ear without turning their heads.

I stop and discover that I've been riding with the top flap of my backpack open, right where my wallet lives. Beginning again, my kickstand drags on pavement. Jesus, Blake, get it together. Reaching my destination an hour early, I sit in the sun and watch pink petals swirl in a plaza, like the plastic bag in American Beauty.

At my Warmshowers host, the mom shows me around the house and then lets her 5-year-old monopolize me on the trampoline. Her 7-year-old sister arrives and we play hide-and-seek in the backyard. The parents serve up pasta bolognese, and I use Google Translate to dictate German sentences that make everyone laugh. The night ends with a round of Siedler von Catan.

Tuesday (Engen - Markdorf)

I walk the 5-year-old to Waldorf Kindergarten alongside her father, a physicist turned stay-at-home dad. He’s about my age. Who would I be if I were him?

Today's ride is less about details, more of an interior journey. I mentally construct a thought experiment that explains why some people can afford to travel in other people’s countries. Cycling along Lake Constance, Switzerland stares at me from across the water. It is identical in appearance to the German side yet quite wealthier. The same question again! I park at a café, sip a flat white, and record the thought experiment in a journal.

My next Warmshowers host, Nic, has three teenagers who all speak a little English. One invites me to play Fortnite. After we figure out how to invert the mouse’s y-axis, he’s amazed at how good I am at shooting bots. “Ever hear of Quake 2? Counterstrike?” He has not. I was playing these games fifteen years before he was born.

Witnessing family life in a big house with teenagers confirms my worries about screen-solitude, yet it also gives me the solo time I desire. I register my hypocrisy.

Wednesday (rest day)

Waking at 7:30, the entire family has departed for school and work. I lounge, write, pet Moritz (the couch-dozing cat), read in a coffeeshop, and cycle uphill through the rain to meet Karen and Mathias Kern, two longtime advocates for homeschooling, unschooling, and radical alternative schools in Germany, where such things are mostly illegal. We swap origin stories, discuss mutual friends, and muse about where the movement is heading. Karen already owns two of my books. I experience the pleasant gravity of hanging around a niche for two decades.

That evening, three of Nic’s friends pick me and him up in a car. They’re all married fathers, sporty, reserved, fifty-something. To them I am a curious novelty, the writer-traveler-bachelor. We attend a screening of the Banff Film Festival, three hours of short outdoor films. The climbers, cavers, skiers, bikers, and paragliders inspire me, but I do not yearn for their lives. I sense my relationship to wilderness changing.

interactive trip map

Thursday (Markdorf - Lindau - Immenstadt - Kempten)

Upstairs at 7am to say goodbye, the family leaves me alone in their big home. I have instructions to leave through the garage. Such trust.

Today, it is cold. Instead of my original plan to ride the hills, I detour to lower-elevation Lindau, grab takeaway Vietnamese noodles, and board an hour-long train to avoid three hours of quasi-arctic cycling. Disembarking in Immenstadt, someone has shaken the snowglobe. The world is now white.

Ignoring my mapping app in favor of local signs, I end up on a meandering riverside route. Now it begins hailing. The path is muddy, and I can hear my drivetrain clogging with sand. I laugh at my situation, tinged with concern. On my first tour, freezing rain almost defeated me in New Jersey. So I beeline back to pavement, cruise into Kempten, and warm up in a library. A full package of “American-style” chocolate chip cookies aid my recovery: better and cheaper than any such cookies in America.

My host for the night is Lukas, a friendly twenty-something who has cycled all over Germany and Greece. Over homemade veggie curry, his girlfriend Pia reveals that she is pregnant.

Friday (Kempten - Pfronten)

Müesli, vielen dank, ciao. Uphill I go, weaving through snowy hills to the hotel room I booked for the weekend, €45/night for a private room in the Alps, the charging station for my social battery.

Cycling through the villages of Oy and Wank, I suppress my inner 13-year-old. Then I pass a store called Manhard.

Upon arrival everything feels wrong. The room is ugly. I compose a complaint list in the shower. Then I make a coffee—my first of the day—and sit staring out the window. Ten minutes later, everything is better. We are but chemical cocktails.

I exchange messages with the friend I’ll see in Innsbruck, then I walk into the tiny town of Pfronten. Quiet shoulder season vibes. The smell of woodsmoke. Temperatures just above freezing. I think of all the mountain towns where I've delighted in the liminal space between ski and summer: Durango, Boulder, Paonia, Ashland, Asheville, Crested Butte, South Lake Tahoe.

Tonight: calls with friends, a movie, wine. Tomorrow: reading, writing, not biking. Possibly meeting a Couchsurfer. Sitting, thinking, staring. Consuming time, peace, health, and freedom. Watching snowflakes fall through an old white window, somewhere near the Austrian border, happy and alone.