Leipzig to Pegnitz

Left Leipzig earlyish with my poor old bike making bad noises from the hub. I say earlyish because we had to fight the German hordes at the Youth Hostel free breakfast - some even came armed with their lunchboxes and stocked up for later!
We headed toward Gera on the B2 which we will follow pretty much all the way to Augsburg. The riding to Gera was rolling hills and pretty hot - about 32 degrees and 85km. Thought we have had to sleep on park bench as hotels were pretty hard to come by but found a beautiful one off the main drag and settled in the luxury to which we would like to become accustomed. Sundays are not a day to be looking for anything to be open very much in Germany.

From Berlin to Milan

Monday dawned hot again and I wasn't going anywhere until my poor old rear hub had some due care and attention. Turned out that the internals of the cluster carrier had pretty much shredded themselves - I was lucky to make it this far I think. Bike shop guy was great though and fixed it all on the spot and so on our way to get lost (again!) getting out of Gera - lost an hour here - I was not a happy traveller.
Very hot and unimpressive riding to Hof - about 90km and our first taste of some bigger hills and close traffic. I worked out that I am getting about 20km per litre of water. Cheaper than petrol - water is about 50 cents a litre while petrol is over 2 dollars a litre so I'm in front! Found the Youth Hostel in Hof (at the top of another hill of course!) but the room was cheap and fantastic after a hard day - even though we had to pay an extra 8 euro because we were (just) over 26 years old. Bike is like new as well.

From Berlin to Milan

Tuesday we headed off from Hof under cloudy and cooler skies but still steamy. The riding was the best so far with uncrowded roads, no steep hills, lots of rolling Bavarian countryside and quite a few bike paths - highly recommend this area for riding. Got lost (again!) in Bayreuth but found Pegnitz after 90km where we are staying in a Gasthaus with CNN on TV for company. Had a hotdog mit senf under the walls of a castle for lunch - cobbled streets, no traffic. Even when we hit the main roads which we had to at times, the drivers including trucks, tractors, cars were all very forgiving and gave us a wide berth.

From Berlin to Milan

Tomorrow (Wednesday) we head off toward Nurnberg and beyond toward the Alps hopefully by Friday depending on the weather. It has been very stormy here at night so thankfully we have not had to ride through any real rain so far. We saw in the paper though that south-west Germany (where we are headed to) has had big floods from storms but we haven't had to deal with any of that thank goodness.