Day 75 Tuesday 14 august 1984
Wald, near Krimmler Wateralls . Austria. Rainey Valley riding.
1ripped tyre, 1 puncture.
Its still raining in the morning. I take the tent down, and Guy repairs the front tyre. A rip in it is too big for the puncture patches so we use a new inner tube which won’t inflate because it’s faulty. We breakfast on muesli in the church yard, trees, wet benches, wash the cups in a sprinkling fountain. Take a busy road heading west – a constant stream of holiday traffic in both directions. We have coffees and mohnschnittel – poppyseed cake, – very good. Then continue upwards towards the Krimmler waterfalls. A loud hiss and a sinking feeling heralds the onset of another bout of bike troubles, my tyre is bust and the inner punctured. (We also discover that the bike shop boy put the wheel back in wrongly and have to make adjustments) I throw the tyre away beside a bus stop shelter where we lunch and recover from grumpiness. It begins to rain and we agree to call is a day for today. A nearby campsite at Wald, expensive for what it is – a field, a weird lady who tells us where to camp and gives me a conducted tour of the toilets, basin by basin. She tells me that tomorrow is a bank holiday so I go out a second time to buy food.
We are travelling in a valley surrounded by spectacular sounding mountains, they are always in cloud and I feel frustrated not to be able to see any of them, the Grossglockner, Grossvenedig, Zillertaler Alpen.
Ah, a long-distance bike trip! This is definitely one of the things in our bucket list.
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