Across the alps
Following the Old Roman Road over the alps is just magnificent. (Our experience was no doubt helped by the perfect weather we lucked upon.) On the Italian side, safe, off-road paths with a generally gentle gradient up the narrow valleys, with a new amazing mountain view at every turn. On the Austrian side, there were fewer off-road paths (some challenging) but the amazing views continued. Given, the fun steep descents into Innsbruck, we suspect that the ride north to Innsbruck was easier than the opposite direction would have been.
We took it easy getting out of the Inn Valley, with a short train trip across the Arlberg pass before a gentle ride along Lake Constance back into Germany. Back on civilised German bike trails, the climb over the big hill through the Black Forest was a highlight, before reaching our destination of Strasbourg for a week’s reunion with Ella.
Previous: Marche and the Po Valley
Day 1. Desenzano to Rivalta (53 km)
We were greeted by a beautiful morning to farewell Laura from Desenzano station. After she headed off, we had a coffee and cornetto in the station bar, walked back to our Desenzano pad, and headed off by 10 am. It was Chris’s fifth ride along the road to Pescaria, and the long stretches of under-construction bike lanes were getting a bit old. The busy paths along the lake were a relief in comparison, and we stopped for leisurely morning tea at the Beach cafe for a last ponder over Lake Garda toward the distant snowy mountains to which we were heading.
Our route from there took us inland up the back of Lazese and further up the hill to the Adige valley, our passage to the alps. Surprisingly, it was a much more pleasant ride along quiet back roads than the busy path along the lake.
After some climbing, we took a picnic lunch under a wind turbine, in the shade of the one pine tree casting a shadow over the clearing. Then down and across the valley floor and up to Rivoli Veronese, where we had our first view up the Adige valley. This was our reunion with the Eurovelo Route 7, the old Roman road over the alps.
We had originally planned to take the path on the east side of the river, but with cycle.travel warning us about restricted cycling times, we found on this website a warning of trail closure at Ceraino. So we decided to stay west of the river, which was fine. In fact, it was a very civilised, off-road path all the way to the Belvedere Hotel in Rivalta.
When we first looked at hotel options in Rivalta (and the bigger Peri across the river) on Google maps, the number of unavailable hotels alarmed us a little, and in a moment of uncharacteristic panic we booked accommodation a week in advance at the Hotel Belvedere (and the following three nights up the valley as well). But it wasn’t really necessary: we pretty much had Hotel Belvedere to ourselves. The unavailable hotels were most likely closed for the season. We ended the day with a cheap aperitivo in the wine bar up the road, and dinner back at the hotel: all good.
Day 2. Rivalta to Trento (61 km)
Another sensational day, made marginally less sensational by a bit of stiff headwind. But, with a new remarkable snow-capped mountain view at every turn up the valley, it would be churlish to complain. But if one was to be a little churlish, there could have been a greater selection of bars to stop for morning tea. We took a fruitless detour into Chizzola in search of a bar, but ended up having to wait until Mori, where we found a big roadside pizzeria for lunch.
The EV7 trail today was impeccable - almost all off road and almost all a lovely surface to ride along. And today, we noticed that the spring shoots in the trees, so noticeably absent just a week or two ago in the Po valley. Primavera is here!
Trento is another beautiful Italian town, and we managed a room with a view to the mountains for the night (after the compulsory aperitivo and dinner).
Day 3. Trento to Bolzano/Bolzen (65 km)
It was a little colder and a little cloudier today, but still magic. Another tremendous off-road trail all day (except for a 3 km section under construction - we clearly missed the sign at the start that pointed us to the other side of the river, and ended up on an SS road for a while. Wasn’t too bad).
We had better luck with morning tea today; in a funny little bar with rowdy day-time drinkers in Grumo, and then a particularly good lunch in a cafe in Newmarkt/Egna, where the German/Austrian influence was becoming more apparent.
The entry into Bolzano slowed us down a little, with the masses of cycle traffic: it’s a very bike-friendly town. We stayed in an impressive old guesthouse off the street in its own compound with a view to the Dolomites.
We spent an hour or two in the Iceman/Ötzi museum, which is great. Ötzi’s story had us thinking the rest of the way up into the mountains - not nearly as high as where he ventured on his last day 5000 years ago. Unlike Ötzi, we were able to retire for aperitivo spritzes in the big piazza in the sun, and dinner at Restaurant Anita, where German was the dominant language.
Day 4. Bolzano to Bressanone/Brixen (46 km)
After an unsuccessful attempt to take the cable car up to SopraBolzano for a ride down the 1000 m descent (closed for a month), we had a leisurely morning before heading off around midday armed with sandwiches for a picnic lunch further down the trail.
It was a lovely trail again today up a much narrower valley criss-crossing the autostrada, the SS road and the railway all the way. It is quite extraordinary how they pack several transport corridors, cities and agriculture along this narrow valley.
We were getting a bit weary with 12 km to go so stopped for what we thought was going to be a chinotto at Klausen, where everybody was speaking german, and chinotto was taken to mean tonic. Oh well: it was refreshing enough.
After our break, Chris had to nurse a deflating tyre into Brixen (the German name seems more apt, as Italian became even less common here). Our hotel (Jarolim) had a nice garden out the back for bike tinkering and the tyre was changed with much less stress than the last time in Randazzo (thank goodness). The hotel also had a sunny terrace bar for us to take our daily aperitivos. We wandered back into the old town for dinner, and lucked upon Fink: an old monastery turned rooms and a restaurant serving beautiful unusual, locally sourced food (monastic style they called it). The forest sorbets with fermented pine cones were wild.
Day 5. Brixen to Colle Iscaro/Gossensaß (41 km)
Another mostly magnificent day on off-road trails, with more magnificent views. The one exception was an annoying deviation at Varhn, 5 km out of Brixen. The sign suggested that the veloroute would be suitable for mountain bikes, and road bikes should take the SS12. We were curious to investigate what “suitable for mountain bikes” meant, so we rode a couple of km into the unsealed section that started well, but soon hit a road under construction with access closed. It looks like this might be a good bike route in the future, but certainly the track that followed the road under construction was too rough for us to contemplate. So, with a calibrated sense of what a ‘mountain bike trail’ means, we retreated back to the SS12. It looked like it might have a reasonable verge. Sadly that withered to nothing after a few hundred metres, making it a fairly hair-raising couple of km sharing with trucks and buses until we could rejoin the trail.
Italian became almost useless today, with German seeming to be the default.
We stopped for morning tea at Franzenfeste/Fortenza, sadly with not much of a view, forced inside by the smokers on the enclosed terrace. However, lunch at a bakerei on the side off the hill at Stilves did provide us with another magnificent view. Our hotel at Gossensaß was great - also with a great view (of course) of the mountains of the Austrian border. We settled in to spritzes (then dinner) to watch the sun set over the mountains at Hotel Lorenz.
Day 6. Gossensaß to Innsbruck (54 km)
We chose to follow the bike trail up and around the valley all the way, rather than cycle.travel’s steeper shortcut up a road from Colle Iscaro. It was great to spend longer riding up the valley we had been looking at all evening from our hotel. The riding up the trail was easy with only one steep pitch where the track turns around the valley.
The trail along the valley was obviously an old railway line and it was a remarkably easy ride into Brenner, where we stopped for a coffee. After a walk down the main drag of Brenner (almost tempted by the massive Outlet Direct shopping complex), we jumped on our bikes and rolled across the border, surprised to find we were back on a road, having been used to the consistently off-road trails all the way up the Italian side.
The road was fine for a 9 km roll down the hill, until a turn-off onto an unsealed section. The unsealed trail shortly turned steeply up a narrow tunnel under a railway bridge. Two-thirds through the tunnel, we both managed to lose it and come off our bikes. We decided that we had found an unsealed gradient that it was wisest to walk up with laden bikes. We gathered ourselves together and walked our bikes up out of the tunnel and shakily decided to carry on along the unsealed trail: steep at first, but nothing like the 20% gradient through the tunnel that caused us to come a cropper.
The route from then on was along the side of the valley, mostly on sealed road. It involved a lot more climbing than we were expecting. We stopped for a lunch of very nice rolls at a Bakerei at Matrei am Brenner, and then continued our undulating ride down the hill, once again being treated to new spectacular mountain views at each turn. Five km from Innsbruck, at Vill, the path opened to a wide open meadow like Maria used to like singing on in the Sound of Music. The road down the hill from there was steep and straight and long, and was something of a buzz before turning off to cross the Autobahn. There were some steps with a bike ramp to navigate before a civilised ride through town to Hotel Neuepost.
A good night was had catching up with Tim McMahon, who introduced us to Ratskellers. So good, that we decided on a rest day at Innsbruck. The breakfast room in the hotel was pretty spectacular with a view of the mountains to the north. But then, Innsbruck has spectacular views just about anywhere, including the laundromat we visited in the morning. That afternoon Maree took the tram and the cable car to the top of the mountain, while Chris sat in the Botanical Gardens admiring the view from below.
Day 7. Innsbruck to Imst (61 km)
A little entranced by how extraordinarily beautiful it all was, we headed out of Innsbruck on a beautiful Sunday morning, not thinking too much about how quiet it was.
The bike path up the River Inn was busy enough with locals out for their Sunday morning rides and walks, but as we rode on, we realised that most everything was closed, and lunch was looking like a challenging proposition. At Stams, the restaurant in the fancy castle was pumping with locals (and its offerings a bit more than our need), so we ventured a further 7 km to a quiet ‘sports cafe’ at a soccer field. The lovely lady there served us our first currywurst.
We stopped for a ponder 8km from Imst, at a lovely beach on the river. When we set off, Chris found his back tyre had gone flat again, so we had time for a further ponder while he changed it. This ended up being more complicated than expected, but we eventually got on our way. The final ride into Imst continued to be picture perfect…almost too perfect…
Our hotel for the night at Imst was a 3-storey affair, and we need to push our bikes up a path around the back of the hotel to get to the bike room (and our room) on the third floor. This proved a sufficiently difficult challenge late in the day that it made us question our ability to make it over Fernpass to the north the next day, with its 3 km of steep gravel path.
Chris was not feeling 100% (later we realised it was a mild case of shingles), and Maree was not feeling confident. So, we lay on our bed, uneasy, rather than heading out for our usual passegiata. The internet was not a great help for gauging just how difficult Fernpass might be. The route over the Fernpass was going to require some long days’ riding to get to Strasbourg on time for our date with Ella. It all seemed to push us beyond our commitment to taking it easy. So, we hatched a plan to ride an easy 20 km up the valley to Landeck, where we could catch a train over the Arlberg pass to Bludenz1.
With a new plan hatched, we ventured downstairs into the busy hotel restaurant for a passable dinner.
Day 8. Imst to Feldkirch (20 km to Landeck, 64 km train trip to Bludenz, 23 km to Feldkirch)
It was an easy 20-km ride to Landeck station through more picture perfect alpine valley scenery. We arrived 11:10, and bought tickets for the 11:30 train to Bludenz. Of course, the elevator up to platform 2 was out of order, and we had to lug the bikes and luggage up the stairs to the platform. And, of course the train was a single door, 4-step-up job, just like Trenitalia’s intercities, and we had to hang our bikes up with the other 4 bikes already in the train2. This manoeuvre was made more difficult because we followed OBB’s (Austria’s train network) instructios to leave batteries in e-bikes. Another exemplar of why we avoid taking our bikes on trains when we can.
Nevertheless, it was a very scenic 1-hour train trip through snowy Arlberg pass. We managed to get off the train and out into Bludenz without any further trouble. We headed to the old town, somewhat underwhelmed by the lunchtime cafe options. The ride down the valley to Feldkirch was lovely, past some very blue waterbodies.
The hotel at Feldkirch was a rambling old maze of a place, with a certain old-world charm. The old town of Feldkirch was also charming, and we found a not-bad Mexican restaurant for dinner
Day 9. Feldkirch to Arbon (54 km)
The alps looked spectacular behind us as we rode out of Feldkirch down the flat lands along the river Ill and along the Swiss border.
Lake Constance remained elusive for 40 km or so, and while we were keen to get there, we finally gave up and had our picnic lunch by the lower end of the river before heading back to the kiosk at the fairly uninspiring ‘camping idyll’ for a coffee.
Soon after hitting the lake proper, we were in Switzerland, and it was a short ride into Arbon. Our hotel there was in a spectacular location, but it was less than spectacular.
Suddenly, now we were in Switzerland, everything was twice as expensive (including our fairly basic accommodation, and an aperitivo, which we forewent). Our Italian dinner in Hostaria was pretty good. Switzerland surprises continued back in the hotel room, where we discovered that our Netflix plan (with ads) was blocked.
Day 10. Arbon to Orsingen (63 km)
It was a pleasant ride along the lake, but with a surprising lack of cafes for our morning coffee break. We found our first lake-side cafe just before the German border, without realizing we were so close to cheaper coffee. It only occurred to us that we were in Germany as we rode past the somewhat grungier Konstanz railway station. Suddenly we felt more at home!
We stopped to eat our expensive pre-bought swiss sandwiches by the river in Konstanz marvelling at the bike traffic. We joined the trail of bikes for the ride out of town, and onto very civilised bike trails all the way to the little town of Orsingen, with its one guesthouse and in-house Greek restaurant. It was pretty good.
Day 11. Orsingen to Villingen-Schwenningen (61 km)
Beautiful off-road paths to Engen. From Engen, it was a quiet road up a big hill to Stetten where we had to take even higher backroads around roadworks. Then back onto to bike trails further up and down the hill to Geisingen for a backerei lunch (after a bit of a hunt to find an open one).
More off-road trails to Villingen, including through the impressive Schlosspark at Donaueschingen. Our hotel was in the old town of Villingen, where we had a pleasant aperitivo.
Day 12. Villingen-Schwenningen to Ohlsback (73 km)
Today, it was a ride through the Black Forest. The forest began soon after leaving Villingen— a lovely ride up into the high forest onto some unsealed roads until we encountered an electric fence gate. We decided we needed to go through it, and that took us down a steep unsealed trail to a house where the trail turned sharply into a sealed road.
After stopping to squeeze by a tractor clearing wood from the road, it was a long steep roll down to Hornburg, where we had lunch in a cafe in the sun (it was suddenly warmer as we had dropped a good 500 m). From there it was less steep and more urban along the Gutach and Kinzig valleys to our destination for the night.
Ohlsbach was too small to have a supermarket, so we stopped at Gengenbach first for dinner and breakfast provisions at the supermarket (and an aperitivo up the road). Our accommodation for the night was a cute loft in the countryside, where we had our first home-cooked meal for a couple of weeks.
Day 13. Ohlsback to Schiltigheim (Strasbourg) (34 km)
A short ride along more beautiful German bike trails. It was a warm day—no jackets required. Morning tea at Offenburg in a backerei in the bustling main square. Off-road trails all the way to our house for the week in Schiltigheim, where we were soon joined by Ella. Just in time for the weather to turn after two perfect weeks!
Next: Strasbourg to Dijon
Footnotes
The ride from Landeck to Bludenz seems like it would be a good way to go closer to summer (and with more time than we had): sealed almost all the way, and no very steep unsealed sections, but the 1850 m elevation would have meant riding into the snow when we were there.↩︎
This was an OBB RJX train. Certainly some other OBB trains we saw looked to have easier bike access.↩︎