Donaueschingen to Fridingen

What are the ingredients for the perfect day's ride ? I guess you could start with lovely weather. Clear blue skies, moderate temperatures and no wind would be ideal. You could then add in a great bike in perfect operating condition. If it is an ebike, that is even better. Next you would need some good friends to share the ride with. Finally, of course you need spectacular scenery and a lovely smooth surface to ride on. That should just about be enough to give you an experience to remember for a long time to come.

And that is exactly what we had today. The Danube bike path from Donaueschingen to Fridingen surely must rank as one of the best cycle paths in Europe, if not the world. The Danube River starts from the confluence of two small streams - the Brreg and the Brigach. The Donau Radweg begins in the centre of Donaueschingen and closely follows the Danube (Donau) for hundreds of km.

On this ride we will only be following the cycle path as far as Ulm, a distance of around 200 km over a period of four days. As we rode along the bank of the Danube, we could see that it was only a modest stream. This is a far cry from the huge river that it grows into downstream.

The bike path is almost entirely sealed and wanders through the wide valley, passing a succession of farms and through beautiful small villages. When you first glimpse each village from a distance, the first object you see is the church steeple. The rest of the village is crowded around this central point.

On this early section of the path, the most significant location is the Danube Sink, where the river disappears completely into the porous limestone. It then flows underground for several km, before gradually emerging again from the river bed, We stopped here for a group before moving on.

Some distance further along we stopped at the sizeable town of Tuttlingen for lunch, before completing the day's ride to Fridingen by 2 pm. It was a bit of a nuisance that our luggage took another two and a half hours to join us. That meant we had to eat our dinner still dressed in our riding gear. But in the overall scheme of things, that really was only a very minor inconvenience.

It really had been a sensational day.Read more