Floating On

Day 1 - July 30

As I have already biked the Semmering and the Wechsel mountains south of Vienna several times, I decided to take an early train (at 6 am) from Vienna to Graz and at around 9 am, I was already on the saddle. I am not a fan of big cities and getting out of Graz in the morning traffic was not so much fun, but luckily, I bumped into a biker (not literally…) who directed me to a flat, albeit rather boring bike route, running south along the railway line. I promise you this trip will get more exciting as you (hopefully) will read along, just that on this section there was not much to write about. It was getting rather hot so I took a dip into a small lake called Waldschacher Teich. This swim was well-timed: right afterwards it started getting hilly - not only hilly, but outright mountaineous. Eventually I reached the the southern town of Eibiswald, a place I had passed through on another bike trip a few weeks prior to this one. It was funny stopping at the exact same spot to take a photo of this picturesque town.

After taking a break with some refreshers from the local Unimarkt, it was time to take the first real challenge: the Radlpass, which I thought will be an easy one with an elevation of just 650 meters. I could not have been more wrong - it was a grueling climb, with some really, really steep grades, I was forced to take not one, but two rests. was glad to have reached the top.

On the Slovenian side, it was a nice downhill ride for a few kilometers, to the River Drava (Drau in German), where I heard was a perfectly built bike path. Well - not quite there where I was. First, I rode down a couple of hundred meters right next to the river, where construction workers told me the road ended (probably they were building the path), so I had to backtrack, which was rather disappointing. Then I found the signs to the bike route, crossed a bridge - and after that, never stopped swearing at myself. Yes, this was a bike path, no cars, but it was a dirt road climbing and falling, twisting and turning - not much fun with all my luggage. The next town, called Dravograd, was only about 20 km away, but I needed like two hours on this gruesam patch of road.

I was glad to be in town, where I found a nicely cooled Lidl store and refreshed my supplies. Now I was once again heading south, on a really very nicely built bike path, with quite a few families taking advantage of the flat terrain, flanked by hills on both sides. I was thinking of climbing into the hills, but by that time, I was getting rather tired, so I stuck to the plains. There were not many places of accommodation in this area, I therefore found a spot in a clearing within the woods not far from the bike path to pitch my tent. As I was about to do that, I heard thunder in the background - not something pleasant when out in the wild (in Vietnam, I managed to get really soaking wet in a tropical storm). So I decided to move along and look for a covered place. It was almost dark when I found a restaurant, the locals told me there was a small hotel a mile or so away, in a village called Mislinja, they even called the owner. I found it and just when I reached it, at about 20:30, it started drizzling.

The lady at the hotel did not look very encouraging, she told me all the rooms were booked. However, the guests of the last room had not yet arrived. Should they not make it to the hotel by 21:00, the room is mine...my fingers were hurting, so hard was I crossing them for the next 30 minutes or so, I had no appetite of going out into the wet, dark night. To kill the time, I drank a glass of an excellent white - for just 90 cents! At the top of the hour, she smiled and told me the room was mine! It was a rather rickety room, but I loved it. I watched the thunderstorm - yes, that is what the drizzle turned out to be - from the window, lying on the bed, soon falling asleep.

Here is the map of that day, it was some 112 kilometers, with close to 1,400 meters of climbing.