It's officially now the worst spring since records began, and that record keeping out here began a long time ago.
Last month my place in Switzerland got over 350 mm of
rain - normal would be less than 130 mm, and on top of it temperatures were significantly below average.
If you think that June brought any improvements, then you are right: it has warmed up to oppressively hot and humid temperatures, and instead of
persistent land rain we had persistent flash floods, thunder and lightning plus severe storm warnings in place all over Central Europe for the last
ten days non-stop. The conditions are
no different today, but as stable weather conditions in Europe are obviously unlikely to occur until shortly after the next ice age, I have no other choice.
The bike is serviced, the electric gremlins have been sorted out, the faulty brake light switch is replaced, the tyres are new and the bike is sitting
fully kitted out and ready to go in my garage since last Friday.
The way westwards is blocked, since a certain country basically self-disqualified itself for motorbike touring due to that still ongoing industrial action,
paired with a few million
soccer buffs heading for that fuel-deprived place
for the
2016 UEFA European Championship from this week onward.
After spending hours brooding over the weather charts yesterday I have decided to go north again and set out a 8 am. Right at the first
traffic stop I notice that the radiator fan is switching on far too early and that the temperature gauge in stationary traffic is climbing
up far too rapidly than is normal. This is a clear indication that Hans, my mechanic, has screwed up; he has improperly bled the cooling
system, leaving an air pocket in the system that is causing the rapid heating up of the engine.
This problem is a show-stopper; with this kind of cooling performance the engine will overheat in more serious conditions than a balmy
morning at 17 degrees on a Swiss country road. And I rather fix this problem in my cool, shady garage equipped with all the necessary tools
rather than a dark hotel parking space somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
So the biking day is over after less than 50 km and I return home. The coolant is 18 month old, and changing the fluid is no more work than
bleeding the system, so I opt for a complete coolant change.
By 5 pm the work is done and I am back to brooding over the maps again. This was certainly not what I expected for the first day of the fourth leg
of this years spring journey.
After the lost day yesterday I set out early, before 0800 hours. Needless to say that the cooling system is working
perfectly now.
A lot of my weekend biking takes place in Germany,
so most of the countryside south of the
Danube river is well known to me.
To bypass that I take the infamous German Autobahn for
the first 300 km. My North American readers should really have a go at that; plodding along on your bike at 100 kph
behind a truck, nothing
to be seen in the rear mirrors, but just one second later a big Merc or Beamer zooms past at 250 kph or more -
more a contrail than a car.
And of course all perfectly legal in this country of speed-crazy petrol heads...
Once I am beyond the range of my weekend exploits I switch to country roads and the scenic bit begins.
I am quite keen to get some mileage done, so lunch is done the German quickie way at a Turkish junk food trailer:
I am roughly following the border between Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria, the two southernmost states. Most people know Bavaria for Oktoberfest and Lederhosen, but they also have some of the finest roads in Germany and the towns and villages look very pretty:
The locals would probably protest when being called 'Bavarian', as really this area in the North-West of Bavaria is known as Franconia. But the Franconians usually fancy the same goodies as the Bavarians do:
A few miles beyond Coburg I enter Thuringia. My last ride into the former East Germany a month ago has convinced me that the local wildlife out here is much dumber than the wildlife further south and west, so I take good care not to get run over by another roe deer here in the Thuringian Forest. I succeed and end the day after solid ten hours on the bike and nearly 600 km just outside the town of Ilmenau.
Today will be another day of dodging storms and gambling with the weather. The hot, humid air that has produced plenty of
weather disasters throughout Central Europe during the last two weeks (yesterday a
tornado struck the city of Hamburg) is being
pushed south by a cold front coming in from the north. Hot, humid air does not like to be pushed by cold air, so this
pushing won't happen peacefully. This morning the storms produced by the front are about 50 km north of Ilmenau - it's high
time to get out of here.
I set out at 0900 hours, and after an intial short hop north towards
Erfurt I turn east and let the approaching front disappear
in my rear mirrors. I include a brief visit at my employers German office near
Weimar to briefly say Hello, but soon I am
back on the road. At
Gera my weather calculations have me turn north
into the lowlands of Saxony-Anhalt via
Dessau and
Magdeburg, interspersed with a brief
lunch-break at a "Feldküche", i. e. a converted field kitchen of the former East
German Army:
These things are everywhere in the East and for me the big advantage is that I won't have to wait - the food is
always ready to go and the lunch-break is over in under ten minutes. Four Euros buy you as much food out here as one can muster
and the
food is always excellent and much more healthy than the stuff on sale in the Turkish junk food parlours in the west.
After lunch I am turning north-westwards, always with a weary eye on the sky ahead. Another weary eye is on my dwindling fuel
supply - the area is so sparsely populated that petrol stations are far apart.
I soon realise that my weather game has worked; I can see giant thunderstorms on my left in the south over the
Harz
Mountains, but ahead on my route I can only see blue sky. I also find a petrol station. There is a handwritten note on the pump. With my luck it will probably tell me
that they are out of fuel. Surprisingly the note informs the customers that due to a technical glitch today only the 102 octane
premium fuel
will be sold for same price as regular 91 octane. I must have a lucky break here, first the storm dodging works brilliantly
and then I find fuel at a 20 percent discount.
I am again in Volkswagen country and even ride through Wolfsburg. I notice that out here the invention of roundabouts has
passed just as unnoticed as the invention of emission reduction catalysts for diesel engines - many times I have to wait at
perfectly useless traffic lights which should have been replaced with roundabouts decades ago.
I end the day at 1800 hours after another 530 km ride at the Bothmer Manor House, a fine hotel halfway between
Celle and
Nienburg:
In the evening I check my webcams at home; it is raining cats and dogs in Switzerland.
The weather forecast for today is for a slightly overcast situation, no rain and temperatures starting at 12 degrees in the
morning and reaching a high of about 19 degrees. So far for the theory.
When I set out at 0900 hours the weather is slightly overcast with 14 degrees - the forecasters are bang on. When after about 50 km
I reach the area where yesterday the heavy thunderstorms unloaded their fury onto an already soaked ground things change drastically; the
cooler air can't handle that much humidity and forms a layer of high fog, no more than a few hundred feet thick, even with the sun
coming through at times. Cloudbase is less than 400 feet above ground, and even the thin fog layer is unable to keep the humidity
at bay with that much more water soaking the ground - it starts to drizzle out of that fog layer.
It's not much, often not even enough to get the tarmac wet, sometimes enough to form puddles on the road banks. I know when
the weather gods have beaten me, so during a refuelling stop near
Bückeburg I get into my wet gear - for the first time
this year.
The drizzle is with me for nearly 200 km, ensuring that Tigger and my kit get rather filthy again. The fog shielding the sun
also means that the temperature prediction of 19 degrees is out of the window; in the drizzle the mercury struggles to make it
above 11 degrees centigrade.
Once I reach the hills of the
Sauerland near
Marsberg the low fog has lost out; it can't climb those hills,
so the drizzle
immediately stops, the cloudbase lifts and the temperature rises steadily to the 19 degrees originally predicted.
During the ride I also encounter a number of large diversions, with some obviously put in place in haste; this is the
result of two weeks of weather disasters, with mudslides, washed out roads and other obstacles. As a result my progress
today is frustratingly slow - once near
Bad Berleburg I have to take a 40 km diversion to get
back on track.
In spite of biking for another nine hours I only manage to do 450 km today and end the day in
Bad Schwalbach, near
Wiesbaden, in the
Taunus hills.
It's a glorious summer day with ideal temperatures for motorbiking - and based on the weather models the last such day for a very long time. So by 0900 I am on the road heading south towards the Rhine river. There is no bridge here at Ingelheim, but a ferry gets me over the river in about twenty minutes:
I continue south through the sparsely populated
Palatinate - this is bikers bliss. Then follows a brief excursion into
France, only to cross the Rhine again at
Gambsheim. The Rhine bridge at
Karlsruhe further north has been neglected
by the responsible authorities to such an extreme extend that the bridge has been closed for heavy vehicles - such is
the state of road infrastructure in Germany nowadays. Decades of incompetent bureaucracy controlled by soporific
politicians have left
vast parts of this country with a road, rail and internet infrastructure that any third world
country would be ashamed of. As a result the bridge here at Gambsheim is choked by trucks having diverted from
the Karlsruhe crossing.
Next ahead is the
Black Forest. Compared with the great ride
through the Palatinate the Black Forest is only the
runner-up; badly potholed roads, lots of traffic and the increasing habit of closing whole sections of the best
roads to motorcycles during weekends and bank holidays has long led me to spend my hard earned cash elsewhere
during my weekend outings. But today is Friday, so the road closures do not affect me and I enjoy the road in
spite of the often abominable condition of the tarmac.
After a ten hour ride I arrive back home at 1900 hours. From the west I can see the haze of the approaching
bad weather. After the intense storms that battered Central Europe for two weeks now the meteorologists are
baffled by the next weather event; the complete breakdown of high pressure over all of Europe. Below is the
precipitation and pressure prediction for next week Tuesday:
The charts for the entire predictable period, at least for the next 10 days, look just like the chart above. The worst spring since records began is about to end in style...
Below is the usual map with my GPS tracklog.