Stockach

Greetings from near Lake Constance! Today we have tipped over the 500km mark and are almost at the western-most point of our route. The morning got off to a steady and sunny start, stopping a few times to marvel at storks and do some bike maintenance. (Scraping road dirt of the chain and re-lubing) . We then proceeded to run into a couple of navigational challenges; closed cycle routes with no signed diversions. We tried to calculate with our own diversion and hilariously ended up at the end of a piece of land with a river each side. The bridge we were hoping for didn't emerge!

The sunshine turned into a split sky - a huggge black rain cloud that seemed to be follwing our direction of travel. It was huge motivation to plough on and munch up some miles. Amazingly we avoided it totally, despite the campsite guy's assertion that it rained in the whole of Germany today.

We made the pretty disgusting discovery today that my camping mat had started to go mouldy! The first night in the forest was so damp that the mat became pretty gross wrapped in plastic on the front of the bag. Cue cutting out the manky bits and sticking the good bits back together so we have something to isolate from the floor tonight. Looking for camping shops tomorrow!
Bikepacking tip - always travel with black gaffer tape, as well as converting shoes it can also recreate camping mats!Read more