We biked from Salzburg to the Hungarian border for our 25th Wedding Anniversary in May 2001.
Our 25th wedding anniversary in the spring of 2001 provided the perfect reason to spend three weeks biking down Europe's most romantic river. The ride would have to be on a tandem, because vocal cord problems keep me from talking loudly. I had switched to a recumbent several years ago and hadn't ridden a regular bike since. A RANS Screamer TR recumbent tandem with quick-connect couplings caught our eye at Calhoun Cycle in Minneapolis. The price was staggering, but two birthdays, Christmas, Valentine's Day, and of course a Silver Anniversary, all rolled into one, would cover it.
Old barge towpaths have been converted to bike paths along many of Europe's navigable rivers. We ordered BIKELINE and other German-language guides from amazon.de and examined several routes. Biking the Danube from its source in Germany all the way down to Budapest is popular, but the route follows some rough, busy roads in Hungary. The Alps sounded too steep. We chose to fly to Vienna, take a train to Salzburg, and follow the Salzach and Inn rivers to Passau, and the Danube River down past Vienna, with a side trip around a steppe lake on the Hungarian border.
Both the bike and the route worked out perfectly!
The RANS Screamer TR travels compactly, re-assembles easily, is amazingly comfortable, and is the perfect conversation-starter in Germany and Austria. We packed the two parts of the frame into a standard Northwest Airlines bike box, figuring that the Northwest logo would protect us from airline reluctance to transport a tandem. The seats went into their original box, cut down as small as it would go, but still over the size limit for regular luggage. Between the seats, we squeezed in a seat-back bag. The helmets and tools went with the frame, with care not to exceed the weight limit. We each carried a pannier as hand luggage and wore a fanny pack into the cabin.
Departing Minneapolis on April 27, we checked in without problems. The change of planes in Amsterdam brought anxious moments as a single baggage handler lifting bags into a KLM Fokker 70 Cityhopper just stopped and looked at our big box. He was still thinking about it as we climbed the steps into the small plane. In Vienna, the bike box showed up in oversize luggage, a little battered but intact.
You can bike from the Vienna airport into the city, but we were met by cousins who drove us to the train station, helped assemble the bike, and negotiated the complexities of buying a train ticket for a tandem bike. Tandems are so rare in Austria that we saw only one other in three weeks, and the clerk was hard-pressed to decide whether it required one or two tickets. In the end, it went with one. With advance reservations or permission of the conductor, cyclists can load their bikes into the baggage car of almost any train. The conductor was fascinated with the bike, and he kept an eye on it as we relaxed in a nearby compartment.
Austrian railways run special bike trains - Radtramper - up the Danube from Vienna during the summer season; cyclists just wheel their bikes on and ride as far up-river as they like. Starting a month after we arrived, a Radtramper left the Franz Josef railway station daily at 9:20 a.m. and came into Passau at 3:10 p.m. Austrian Railways has a website (www.oebb.at) that lists several other Radtramper trains.
Useful cycling vocabulary in Austria includes "Rad" or "Fahrrad" for bike or bicycle, "Radler" for biker, "Radweg" for bike path, and the charming old Austrian term for a bicycle, "Drahtesel" or "wire donkey," the favorite term in railway literature.
The harshest Minnesota winter in years had kept us from training much, and a fully-loaded recumbent doesn't climb well, especially with tight switchbacks. We walked out of the Salzach river valley more than once. The planned two-day trip from Salzburg to Passau took four.
Recumbents forgive poor conditioning, and the RANS was most satisfactory in that regard. The seats were so comfortable that I successfully treated a luggage-related low back strain by riding for a day.
Our only mechanical problem with the Screamer began in the first couple days. The strut for the captain's seat developed a crack and started to tilt. I watched it nervously, but it remained stable.
The Tauernradweg starts high above Salzburg amid glaciers and waterfalls, deep-cut canyons, and breathtaking climbs and descents. We skipped that. Below Salzburg, it runs on a levees, towpaths, lightly traveled farm roads, and river-access routes, with a mixture of cement, asphalt and crushed-rock sections. Cobblestones in some of the towns made us glad we had opted for front suspension. Numerous old pedestrian bridges over the tributaries presented a special challenge to a long-wheel-base bike. Many of them had stairs with wooden bike ramps, but sharp angles at their peaks didn't allow for chain-ring clearance. A couple times, hikers or other bikers lifted one end of the bike for us.
From Salzburg to Passau we enjoyed wild river scenery, mountains in the distance, and the total lack of crowds outside the city. A skylight in our hotel room in Burghausen , Germany framed the huge lighted castle that dominates the town. A fox crossed our path by a farm field above the Salzach River. Cuckoos called from the woods. Storks stalked through the fields. Even Braunau, which we had known only as Hitler's birthplace, managed to surprise us. We stopped for directions and ended up eating dinner with a local family.
From Passau, the Donauradweg follows the Danube 200 miles to Vienna, then continues on through Slovakia and Hungary to Budapest. There are almost no unpaved sections and few difficult bridges. There is a downhill slope and often a tailwind. The Danube's hydroelectric dams and several ferry boats shuttle bikers between the right and left banks. For variety, bike ferries or regular passenger ships will also take cyclists down-river. Charming wooden bike ferries on the upper part of the Danube self-load by a ramp at one end. Below Vienna, the hiker/cyclist ferries depend on the ferryman's muscles to get the bikes in and out. Floods can shut down the ferry service, particularly on the lower stretches of the river in the spring. In May, there is plenty of room in the restaurants and hotels, but reservations are recommended in the summer, when twenty thousand cyclists can be underway on a single weekend.
Most of the route signs are small, and they always seem to be just past the turns or hidden in the bushes. The path was unambiguous along the river, but through the towns or around the dammed areas, it was easy to get lost. We considered bringing a GPS receiver, but the available maps didn't include bike paths, and border-crossing routes required separate country maps. The BIKELINE map books with route information stored nicely in the back of the captain's seat and were easy to read while riding; English-speakers could pick out much of the useful information. We had a European cell phone to keep in touch with family members at home and to arrange meetings with friends and call ahead for accommodations and information.
The novelty of a tandem recumbent brought out the Austrian Gemütlichkeit, and it reached unheard-of proportions when we were identified as German-speaking Americans, celebrating our silver anniversary by biking through Austria. Two decades ago, when we lived in Vienna with our infant daughter, we thought a baby was the ultimate conversation-starter, but the Screamer had us sitting down to meals with local wood-cutters in a roadside cafe, being offered free drinks several times, exchanging addresses with other bikers, and generally having more fun and friendly conversation than we had ever experienced on the road. People just broke into grins or actually laughed out loud when they saw us. Strangers hugged us when we explained why we were there.
Scores of cyclist-friendly (radlerfreundliche) accommodations line the routes, distinguished by secure bike parking and willingness to allow one-night stays. On the Passau to Vienna section of the Donauradweg, a consortium of hotels operates under the name "Top Rad Stop." For a small fee, they transport bikers' luggage from hotel to hotel. They also have clothes-drying rooms for guests. We discovered them too late to be of use to us. Coin-operated laundries and one-day washing services, which were ubiquitous in our student days, have all but disappeared from Austria. Quick-drying clothes, hotel sinks and a hair dryers, a helpful guesthouse proprietress who ran a load for us, and a two-day laundry service while we were off on a side trip kept us presentable.
The Euro will simplify European money and cut down on exchanges in 2002. Credit cards are good in four-star hotels and up-scale restaurants, but everybody else prefers cash. Nobody wants traveler's checks. The Austrian cash machine called Bankomat reliably recognized our American cash card.
We reached Muckendorf ("mosquito village"), upstream from Vienna, in flood season. A phone call alerted us that the downstream ferry was running, if we could outrun an approaching storm. The bike path beyond Vienna tops a long, straight levee. Racing against black clouds and lightning, we miscalculated, hit a soft spot, and tipped the bike. The crack in the captain's seat strut widened, and the seat tilted alarmingly. I watched the crack while Dale rode without leaning back. The ferry was still running when we arrived. We forded a flood-relief outflow on the south side and walked the bike up the high riverbank. In a small wine-garden, we discussed renting a car to finish the trip, then biked to our cousins' village.
Cousin Wolfgang looked at the broken strut, and miraculously pulled a one-inch bicycle seat tube from his junk box (in metric Austria). He held a piece of strap steel across to show how he could weld a replacement. "Consider it fixed," he told us. He drove us to Bratislava, about 20 miles away, and we spent a couple days with old friends. It may have been lucky that we didn't bike there, since Slovakia's paths still need a lot of work. Back in Austria, the bike repair had succeeded, and a good part of the village had already tried it out. We set off for the Neusiedler See, a big, shallow lake on the border between Hungary and Austria. In 1970, when I was a student in Vienna, barbed wire, mines, and guard towers marked the border, and the dusty villages were crumbling. What a difference the last ten years has made! There is a paved bike path around the whole lake, and some of the old guardposts serve as wildlife observation towers. On our actual anniversary, we stopped on the border by a field of Flanders Field poppies, showed our passports to the nice border guards, then marveled at Hungary's explosion of flower gardens, windowboxes, and new construction. A freshly-paved bike path with excellent signage carried us past happy-looking kids, nicely-kept yards, and - for variety - a haywagon pulled by a fat mare with her yearling beside her. As we stopped for the night in the Austrian town of Rust, nesting storks traded incubating duties with a beak-clattering dance. Another day of riding through sun-drenched vineyards brought us back to our base at Wolfgang's house. We wandered around Vienna on foot, missing the easy socializing that the Screamer brought us, then disassembled the bike and packed everything to go home. Again our boxes made it through the two flights, and we and the bike arrived home fine.
We would recommend both the bike and the ride highly.
