Cycling to Chemnitz/Saxony 2009-07

For a change, this year I also challenged my cycling skills with a nice multi-day trip.

The route took me from the Rhein-Main-Area to Chemnitz in Saxony, about 400km in four days.
Route was straight forward, the main challenge was crossing the Thuringian Forest. This time unfortunately I took no pictures, because I just enjoyed the trip. Will definitely repeat this kind of cycling!

Planning

This time I did the preplanning with http://openrouteservice.org, because they support a lot of hiking/cycling tracks already. Planning was much straight forward, looking for the shortest way and just with minor adjustments. The disadvantage was that I sometimes ended up on main roads, fighting my way through cars and trucks. Especially after the Thuringian Forest, when the cycling tracks became less and less. Fortunately this were only small stripes, most fo the time I went small side roads or through the forest altogether. More planning effort could have improved the situation even more.

The planned route I then put with map2navi on my Garmin eTrex, which was affixed to my cycle, and then just followed the track. The eTrex is a mapless navigation device, so the disadvantage was that I could not change my route on the way. On the other hand it's cheap, and with good batteries (the standard ones) it lasts for about 17 hours. I was quite happy with the device, and did not really missed the map material. Especially as with a bicycle you ususally can also cross road construction sites, so it's not required to take detours.

For transporting my stuff I used the Ortlieb Back Roller Classic bike packs, which proved to be sufficient in both size and stability.

How about staying overnight? I again had my Acer Aspire One on board, this time equiped with a GSM USB Stick. So every evening at about 6pm I stopped, looked up the next bigger village on my route forward, searched private lodging there and called them up. Usually the first or second one had a free place and a nice price, so I just continued going there. This is one of the advantages going on trips in east germany's countryside. I usually spend about 25€ a night, including breakfast. It was not luxury, but a bed and roof and a shower was included. What else do you need after 10hours of biking a day?

The Route

The planned route looked like this: Planned Route

Overnight stops I made in Euerdorf, Neuhaus am Rennweg and Crimmitschau, dividing the daily trips to about 120-100-110-40 km.

Height Profile (as from http://openrouteservice.org)

The scale does not fit ...

With detours, I finally followed this route: Route Taken

Statistics

Improvements

What can I do better next trip?

• 13km luggage is too much for minor training and steep hills
• Better try to get some cycling training before going to the multi-day trip. The last days were really hard for me.
• Approx 80km a day should be more then sufficient for a pleasant trip

Another alternative would be to explore some area (like Thuringian Forest) from one place, returning the evening. Thus, I could travel much lighter in luggage. This sound's like a good plan for next time!