Part II. The Journey to Heidelberg

We arrived at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport on September 2oth with our bikes all packed up in bike boxes I had scrounged from the Performance Bike Store in our area. Since we had only our two panniers as carry-on luggage, we had to stow all of the bike tools, e.g. screwdrivers, and large liquid containers, e.g. toothpaste, that might be confiscated by Security in our bike boxes. To accommodate these I sewed up some small bags that carried these items and tied them onto the bike frame. Each piece of the bike that had to be removed from the bike, e.g. the front wheel and seat, were securely tied with cord to the bike frame as were our helmets thus making sure all the parts arrive at your destination.. (These bike boxes can be pretty battered by the time they have been opened for inspection by the TSA and then loaded and unloaded on the plane.)

In arranging this trip I had talked to an American Airlines AAdvantage representative about the costs of taking our bikes to Europe. She assured me that since the bike would be our only checked bag and we were allowed on free checked bag on the flight, there would be no charge for the bikes. Well, so much for the assurances of an anonymous employee. When we checked in we told that we would have to pay $150 for each bike! The rep on the phone had failed to tell us that there was a size limitation on the checked bag and the boxed bike exceeded that limit. I was fuming for quite a while, but finally realized that they had us over a barrel and if we wanted to go on this trip, we had to pay the piper...which we did.

Luckily for us the flight was non-stop all the way to Frankfurt where we arrived the next morning at about 9 am local time--2 am our body time. We were able to get a few hours sleep on the plane and felt fairly good by the time we cleared customs, retrieved and assembled our bikes, hit the ATM for some gozintas (a term coined by a friend on a sailboat traveling down through the Eastern Caribbean having to exchange dollars for the local currency at each island, not being able to remember the name of each currency and finally realizing that all he needed to know was how many goes into a dollar), and made it out of the terminal to the street. Then the fun began!

Our bike map showed that there was a bike route from the airport to a town called Langen where we could take the train down to Heidelberg. Very helpful policemen directed us around the airport where we found a route to an intermediate town. From there we got completely lost and were only saved by two bikers who showed us the way to Langen. Once we got to the train station we found that the ticket office had been closed, but were able to buy tickets in a machine for Darmstadt where we could buy another ticket on to Heidelberg on a local train. With little difficulty we found our hotel, The Hotel Am Kornmarkt (http://www.hotelamkornmarkt.de/), where we had reserved a room for two nights. (Here's a good place to point out a distinction in hotels in Germany. If you go on their website, you will see that it is called a "garni-hotel" which means that it serves only a breakfast to guests. You're on your own for other meals.) The Kornmarkt turned out to be a very convenient place to stay as it was near the University, the Neckar River, the Schloss (castle), and within easy walk of downtown. The odometer on Linny's bike (ODO) read 21.7 km. (I will give the odometer reading in kilometers at end of each day's riding. All signage and other distances are given in kilometers so we changed Linny's odometer to report in kilometers. Conversion is easy: 5 miles = 8 kilometers.)

The two days there were very enjoyable. We walked along the river and to downtown where we visited the local ADFC office right across the street from the Hauptbahnhof (the main train station). I purchased some more up-to-date maps and found out how we would begin our trip south on the HSB Radweg. The second evening in Heidelberg we had dinner at a lovely Italian restaurant where we packed away good portions of pasta for the next day's beginning of our grand bike adventure.