Where's Bertie? He's in the same car park as last night.
Weather: Mainly sunny. Warm.
I had a good night's sleep, oblivious to anything going on outside, and would describe this spot as a nice quiet one, with very little traffic passing at night (it's a dead-end road, that leads only to the car park of the Strandbad recreation area).
Mick, on the other hand, did not sleep well, although on analysis, probably only because he was too highly alert for anything going on outside, rather than because anything did go on.
As a result, when I sprang out of bed just after 6.30, deciding it was early enough to have some breakfast before running at 9am, Mick continued to slumber - or as much as he could with me banging around making porridge and tea.
The ParkRun surprised us by taking a slightly different course from the one shown on the website (and thus different from the route we recce'd yesterday), but it was good and enjoyable - for me at least. I finished having beaten my previous overall ParkRun PB (set at Toulouse in December 2016) by 18 seconds.
Unfortunately, it was an understandably grumpy Mick I found when I crossed the line jubilant at my success. He had suffered yet another recurrence of a calf pull that has plagued him for years.
About two thirds of today's participants were locals, the rest Brits, and when we went for coffee at the Strandbad restaurant after the event we found ourselves sharing a table with some of the former. Perhaps a good thing from an 'immerse yourself in the local culture' point of view, but a bit tricky when you seem to have forgotten most of the limited German language you once knew. Thankfully, the chap next to whom I was sitting spoke good English. His son was around 14 so mainly communicated by grunting...
ParkRunners chowing down on breakfast. The terrace proved to be a good place to watch passing traffic on the Rhine.
Looking upstream from the beach outside of the restaurant.
We had been the first to arrive for coffee and were last to leave, just before noon.
A decision then had to be made: where to go next? We looked at a map. We pondered. Then we moved all of half a mile back down the road to last night's location. It's a nice area, and Mick was going to be resting his leg for the rest of the day (employing our bag of frozen peas well), so why not stay?
Canoeists and other people too
I took another stroll this afternoon, taking me first to another section of the river, where people were out canoeing and water-skiing, then looping around to the area behind Bertie. There I found a community that looked to me like it was originally allotments with large and substantial sheds that have now been converted to houses (weekend houses?). The plots are all very modest (allotment sized, really), and most of them are growing fruit and veg, with the rest sporting well-tended lawns. All of the pedestrian avenues that criss-cross the community are gated, but with the gates mainly being open today I walked through. All very neat, twee and nice.
Now we're sitting around for the evening (in a balmy 30 degrees inside Bertie as I type this; that dress I bought at the start of the trip is getting plenty of wear!) we should probably look at the map some more and decide where we're going tomorrow. In reality, we'll probably do that about 10 minutes before we leave in the morning.
Weather: Mainly sunny. Warm.
I had a good night's sleep, oblivious to anything going on outside, and would describe this spot as a nice quiet one, with very little traffic passing at night (it's a dead-end road, that leads only to the car park of the Strandbad recreation area).
Mick, on the other hand, did not sleep well, although on analysis, probably only because he was too highly alert for anything going on outside, rather than because anything did go on.
As a result, when I sprang out of bed just after 6.30, deciding it was early enough to have some breakfast before running at 9am, Mick continued to slumber - or as much as he could with me banging around making porridge and tea.
The ParkRun surprised us by taking a slightly different course from the one shown on the website (and thus different from the route we recce'd yesterday), but it was good and enjoyable - for me at least. I finished having beaten my previous overall ParkRun PB (set at Toulouse in December 2016) by 18 seconds.
Unfortunately, it was an understandably grumpy Mick I found when I crossed the line jubilant at my success. He had suffered yet another recurrence of a calf pull that has plagued him for years.
About two thirds of today's participants were locals, the rest Brits, and when we went for coffee at the Strandbad restaurant after the event we found ourselves sharing a table with some of the former. Perhaps a good thing from an 'immerse yourself in the local culture' point of view, but a bit tricky when you seem to have forgotten most of the limited German language you once knew. Thankfully, the chap next to whom I was sitting spoke good English. His son was around 14 so mainly communicated by grunting...
ParkRunners chowing down on breakfast. The terrace proved to be a good place to watch passing traffic on the Rhine.
Looking upstream from the beach outside of the restaurant.
We had been the first to arrive for coffee and were last to leave, just before noon.
A decision then had to be made: where to go next? We looked at a map. We pondered. Then we moved all of half a mile back down the road to last night's location. It's a nice area, and Mick was going to be resting his leg for the rest of the day (employing our bag of frozen peas well), so why not stay?
Canoeists and other people too
I took another stroll this afternoon, taking me first to another section of the river, where people were out canoeing and water-skiing, then looping around to the area behind Bertie. There I found a community that looked to me like it was originally allotments with large and substantial sheds that have now been converted to houses (weekend houses?). The plots are all very modest (allotment sized, really), and most of them are growing fruit and veg, with the rest sporting well-tended lawns. All of the pedestrian avenues that criss-cross the community are gated, but with the gates mainly being open today I walked through. All very neat, twee and nice.
Now we're sitting around for the evening (in a balmy 30 degrees inside Bertie as I type this; that dress I bought at the start of the trip is getting plenty of wear!) we should probably look at the map some more and decide where we're going tomorrow. In reality, we'll probably do that about 10 minutes before we leave in the morning.
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