Distance: 41.64 kilometres
Time: 2 hours 18 minutes
Speed: 18.1 km/h
Ascent: 105 metres
Word of the day: Fabrikschornsteinsilhouettenlandschaft: the visual outline of factories against the sky
The Captain writes:
It’s fantastic to be touring again after a fairly lengthy break (ouch!). I’m happy to report that my shoulder has survived the first day with no problems whatsoever. However, I’m getting ahead of myself…
The journey down to our start town of Sarreguemines was lengthy but very enjoyable – we spent the first night in a very comfortable room in the Maiden’s Tower of Leeds Castle. The tower was built by Henry VIII for Katherine of Aragon. It’s a beautiful spot, surrounded by moats and lakes populated with geese, swans, ducks and other bird life, and it was very pleasant to wander around, especially once the castle grounds had closed for the day.
Nights two and three were spent in one of our favourite towns in Belgium: Dinant. Once again we stayed in La Merveilleuse, an hotel which also hosts the Leffe Museum. Naturally we were obliged to sample multiple glasses of Leffe in various styles, including blonde, brune and ruby, plus an excellent ‘prestige’ brew.
As we’ve explored Dinant thoroughly before we confined ourselves to a single outing, on an electric boat on the Meuse. Dinant, for those who’ve never visited, was the birthplace of Adolphe Sax, inventor of the Saxophone, and colourful giant saxophones adorn both sides of the bridge across the Meuse.
The town is also very easy on the eye, especially the rocky south bank, where sheer cliffs are overtopped by a fine citadel.
Night four was in Sarreguemines, our starting point, in a lovely hotel which was only about three hundred metres from the German border. We dined at a simple but excellent pizzeria, where the French waiter very sweetly congratulated us on the England victory in the third-place playoff – how generous!
And so to the cycling. Our first task after breakfast was to find our car park, and then to assemble the tandem nearby. We duly navigated to the Indigo car park which we’d booked and paid for online, only to find that it was ‘fermée’. Fortunately there was another one nearby, next to the river, so we parked up and set to work.
Reassembling the tandem went smoothly, and a short test-ride in the car park showed that all was working well, so we crossed the road to the riverside cycle path and set off.
The first ten kilometres or so were in France, running parallel to the border with Germany which followed the centre of the river. It was a delightful start – bucolic, wooded and serene, with dappled light playing on the river and the cycle path, herons swooping across the river, people out rowing and the occasional pleasure boat pootling along.
The legs were working well and, considering how little cycling we’ve done recently, we kept up a good speed. We passed fields full of enormous sunflowers and ripening maize. Soon we crossed the unobtrusive, almost un-signposted border into Germany.
There then followed a section of industrial grot! We knew this was coming as we’d followed much of this route in the car yesterday, and seen the steelworks and scrapyards along the eastern side of the river, around the town of Saarbrücken which, as its name suggests, has many bridges across the Saar.
Happily the cycle path was set below all of this ugliness, and it was still an enjoyable section to ride. The path is clearly very popular, and we soon settled into the habit of greeting each passing cyclist with a taciturn nod, which seems to be the norm in these parts.
After the industrial zone things quietened down again and we enjoyed the remaining ten or so kilometres before diverting into the town of Saarlouis, a cheerful and welcoming place. The Stoker deployed her German language skills while I looked on in awe, and in gratitude that I didn’t have to contribute, and we checked ourselves and the tandem into a fine hotel not far from the ox-bow lake which runs through the centre of the city.
Tomorrow we continue along the Saar river to Mettlach.
Here’s today’s route:
…and a short video