Belated first post

Sorry to everyone who has been waiting to hear if we are still alive or have been beaten by saddle soreness and the company of only one person for days on end, but we have not had the chance to use the internet for a peirod long enough to update the blog with everything that has happened. The longer we leave it, the longer we need to put everything down which is a bit of a dilemma. We have thankfully found time today to write about everything that we have done so far. This is officially the first post 'On the road'.

Day 1 . 16.04.2009 Essen to Königswinter.

A good friend of mine, Gerald, volunteered to let us stay at his mother's house in Königswinter on this evening, so we set off from my flat in Rüttenscheid knowing that we had a definite destination and a warm bed for the night. After a blitzed flat clean and a short photo shoot we were off...

...for breakfast at a bakery 200metres from my flat.

We finally got on the way at about 10:30am, and we were very quickly out of the Ruhrgebiet and heading in the right direction.

Somewhere around Wuppertal we had to ask for directions as it turns out that our map of Germany is slightly too small to be able to actually see minor roads at all. A man came to the road to help us and he told us several different ways we could go, always ending his sentence with the words 'you could go this way...but you really have to know it well.' After 15-20 minutes of him arguing with himself I walked away because i was getting restless, leaving Thomas to listen to his repeated directions over and over and over. Eventually he decided that it would be better if he showed us the way himself and he told us that he had plenty of time to kill(It wasn't immediately clear what he was doing when he came to help us. We think taking pictures of streets and gardens, but we couldn't be sure.) So he got into his unmarked orange van(filled with photographic equipment) and said 'meet me at the end of this road'. We obliged and met him one or 2km up the road. There he gave us directions for 3 or 4km more and said that he'd meet us at the top of a hill. This went on for about and hour. He would drive off, turn on the orange lights on his orange van and meet us at some point down the road. Every time we arrived at the meeting point he was taking photos of the streets and gardens. After he was satisfied that he had taken us far enough we parted ways and continued on.

We followed the river Wupper from Wuppertal to Leverkusen and there it joins the Rhine, which we followed for the rest of the day really. Between Leverkusen and Bonn via Cologne it was relatively uneventful, apart from receiving free baseball caps from a lady and acid rain near Bonn which burned our eyes so badly that we almost couldn't see.

Crossing the Rhine at Bonn by evening was wonderful, and we were a bit disappointed that we didn't have time to spend some time in the city. We wanted to be at the house in the light as Gerald's mum was preparing something for us to eat and we didn't want to keep anyone waiting.

We had reckoned that from Bonn it would only be 15km maximum and so we could easily do it before dark. How wrong we were.

We were indeed in Köningswinter at about 9pm but we arrived at the house at a quarter past eleven. We had taken a longer route from the centre of Königswinter which took us on a 5 or 6km climb up a steep hill through a forest in the pitch black dark. We could not see anything at all. I could barely see Thomas a metre in front of me. And the hill just kept on going, steep and horrible. To this point in the trip that is still the only time I have had to get off the bike. I had no energy left at all. We still had a little bit of food left and the half litre of rhubarb yoghurt gave me the extra push I needed to finish the hill.

When we arrived the evening was very nice and we were glad to be there and to have delicious cooked food.

130km for the day.