Bikepacking 2023 - Rest day #1 in Saarbrücken

Day #

20

State of Legs

:-)

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	Distance (miles)	Distance (km)	Ascent (feet)	Ascent (metres)	Punctures
Today	0 miles	km	0 feet	metres	0
Trip Totals	762.1 miles	km	24010 feet	metres	0

Today's Route

No Cycling Today

Route So Far

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Travelogue

We're in Saarbrücken, Germany, approaching the end of our third week away and enjoying the first of two consecutive rest days in an AirBnB apartment. 

We walked to a nearby bakery for breakfast this morning and paused to capture a photo of the attractive church at the end of the street.

After breakfast we walked to a supermarket and back and saw a little more of the place. Saarbrücken does have what looks like a nice, pedestrianised older part of the city near us but the area we walked through today, did remind us of Croydon! We'll leave it to you to decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing!

There's even a Primark

Since returning to the apartment, we've focused mostly on Trip Admin. This started with M1 studying the ascent and distance data for the trip so far, something he did on his solo European trip last year. 

It's can be interesting to identify the most challenging sections of the route, spanning several days in a row rather than just looking at individual days. M1 does this by calculating the cumulative distance and ascent in a moving window of three, four and five days. Here are the charts for the three day moving window.

Fascinating, or what? That's a rhetorical question by the way!

Of more genuine interest is the revelation that we are way ahead of schedule. We knew we were a few days ahead, but with 760 miles of an estimated 1200 - 1300 mile route already cycled, we're easily a week ahead of ourselves. So, after planning ahead and identifying accommodation for the next week, including an apartment for a couple of nights in Luxembourg City, we decided that we'd modify our route to head across to the French coast near to Dieppe and join Eurovelo route EV4 which we'd follow north along the coast to Calais.

The original route looked like this:

Whereas the extended remix version looks like this now:

Actually, the route we plan to take home in England differs a little from the route we took on the way out and that's not shown in either of these versions of the route, but that's a mere detail.

That's probably it for today.

Das Ende