Biking along the Main
Frank has been talking about a bike tour along the Main River for years now, but we have never gotten around to it. After our Easter plans for a week in Paris were squashed by events beyond our control, we tentatively decided to sample the tour. We had to wait until the weather cleared up though so it wasn’t until the middle of the week when we hopped on a train with our bikes and bike packs and headed for Bamberg. It took us several trains and several hours because we had to use the local trains. If we had been more organized we could have taken a faster train, but with bikes you have to reserve at least a day in advance and you can’t do it online. Next time we will arrange for speedier travel.
We left Wednesday around lunch time and were in Bamberg in the late afternoon. I had chosen a hotel from the internet that looked very nice and reserved a room (Brudermuehle). It was such a nice hotel I would go back to Bamberg just to stay there. We had a corner room so we had a view to two sides.
Right outside one window was a lock (at least I think that’s what it was) with lots of water rushing through it. It was very loud but it was nice once we got used to it. Especially during the night it sounded like we were sleeping underneath a waterfall.
To the other side we had a beautiful view of the old town hall. It was built right on the water as you can see and the bridge practically goes through the building.
The room was very nice with a lot of attention to detail. In one of the window casements on the wall was this very useful figure. If you look closely there is everything you might need to do a quick clothes repair.
We had a very nice meal in the hotel restaurant. We don’t usually eat at the hotel we stay at because it’s so unadventurous but the smells coming from the kitchen convinced us that we should make an exception. After dinner we went exploring. Frank wanted to see the cathedral, which he didn’t tell me or we might have found it, but in that case we would probably never have made it to the top of one of the seven hills that Bamberg is built on. There we walked around the monestary and had a beautiful view of Bamberg in the twilight. We wandered back to the hotel through the old town and had a very good night’s sleep.
Breakfast the next morning was just the way I like it. There was a lot of fresh fruit, yoghurt and all sorts of grains and nuts to make muesli and there was even fresh strawberry sauce to put on top of it. Of course I ate about five times as much as I normally eat because it was all so delicious, but we were about to start biking, so it was easy to convince myself that it was necessary.
Well, actually, before we started on our biking tour we wanted to see the cathedral. It turned out to be only about a five minute walk from the hotel and when we got there we found out that there was a guided tour at 10:30, which we decided to take. It was one of the best and most interesting tours we have taken recently. The young guide was very knowledgeable and had a lot of interesting things to say. The cathedral is famous for a number of reasons.
Founded in 1007 by Heinrich II, a Holy Roman Emperor, it contains his tomb, where he lies along with his wife, Kunigunde. (I love that name. My daughters can be happy I never heard of it before they were born!) Both of them were sanctified but Kunigunde is considered the more important saint.
Their tomb was sculptored by Tilman Riemenschneider, a very famous German artist most known for his wooden carvings. It's hard to imagine how anyone can create such plastic images out of stone. 
These two pictures are details from their lives from the sides of the tomb. In the picture above Kunigunde is walking over hot plowshares to prove that she is innocent of adultery. In the one to the right Heinrich is being judged by the Archangel Michael and there are demons on one side of the scales trying to influence the judgement and send him to Hell. They didn't succeed though. The other half of the scales was heavier.
Another reason the cathedral is famous is because it contains the Bamberger Rider, a full size statue of a man on horseback from around 1230. Even I had heard of this statue, but the reason it’s so well known is that the Nazis used it for propaganda purposes. For them it was a symbol of the German soul or something like that and it appeared in school books and on posters and basically wherever they could make use of it. No one is really sure who the Rider actually is and I’m not sure it would be so well known without the help of the Nazis.
There was quite a bit more to see, for example the tomb of Pope Clemens II, the only Pope buried north of the Alps, and a crypt. After the tour we returned to the hotel and picked up our bikes and bikepacks and headed out of town along the river in the direction of Würzburg.
The first stretch still within the town is called “Little Venice” although “Teeny-Tiny Venice” might be more appropriate. 
An hour or so after we started we stopped for a picnic lunch and Frank finally had a chance to read the newspaper. I know it doesn’t look very comfortable – it wasn’t. But Frank didn’t seem to mind!
The bike path was often quite idyllic, especially when it led us right along the water. 
The route took us through some nice towns, although I'm not even sure which town this was without studying the map. 
We spent the second night in Hassfurth. The only really good thing about this little town was it had a very good bike shop and they took in Frank's bike for an overnight stay and made it well again. It had fallen over several times and the hand brakes were scraping the tires. We also bought Frank very nice new bike packs there. However, we had a hard time finding a decent place to eat and in the end, after eating at the best place in town, decided there probably wasn't one.
All the nicer when we found a good spot for our picnic the next day.
We reached Schweinfurt and had a look around. It's not a particularly nice town, having been destroyed in the war, but there is a fairly new museum there that we spent some time at. It's the largest private collection of 19th century art in Germany, which belonged to Georg Schäfer, an industrialist, and in 2000 the city of Schweinfurt built a large building to house the works. We particularly liked the works shown of Carl Spitzweg. Saturday morning we had just decided to continue along the Main, although the next rather long stretch offered no possibility of hopping on a train until sometime Sunday afternoon in Würzburg. While we were sitting at the breakfast table, there was a loud clap of thunder and soon it started raining. So much for continuing on. We waited for a while, hoping the rain would abate. We biked for about 5 miles to the train station which was quite a ways outside of town, unusual for a German town, and got pretty wet in the process. Luckily it wasn't very cold. While we were standing in the station waiting for our train, Jenny called to ask if we would be home any time that day. She was invited to the birthday party of a very close school friend on Sunday and she had considered flying, but decided to drive, which meant that she could spend the night at our house. So it was all for the best that our bike tour was cut a little short by the rain.
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