Who needs gears?

Down one hill, up the next, shifted from big to little ring - actually shifted from big ring to bottom bracket, screwed around a little to get the chain back up onto the big ring, put some power on and promptly shifted my rear derailleur into the spokes.  Fortunately, I've got a spare derailleur hangar along.  Unfortunately the hangar was in my bag in a truck - who knows where.  Along comes Lloyd - my hero - with a full-on geeked out bike, including a chain breaker and a master link.

Unfortunately, I had forgotten to wipe down my chain after lubing it last night, so the whole thing was a greasy mess, but when done, I had a very nice single speed bike - well, except for not having a chain tensioner and sort of being half a link off on correct tension, so a bit of slopping about.  Fortunately it wasn't a very hilly ride, but 70 or 80 km on a single speed wasn't my idea of a ride for the day.  The good news included guessing correctly on what gear to put the single speed on.  The bad news included the derailleur itself being banged up a bit, and the LBS having only a mountain bike derailleur to replace it - we'll see which works better tomorrow.

Fortunately, the accident happened after the short 24% grade hill.  Interesting and thankfully short challenge.

We're in Ulm - home to a church with the tallest steeple in the world - 530 ft.  Pretty neat.  (If there weren't churches to talk about, this trip would be a bit less interesting.  I'm curious as to what building all these ginormous buildings in the 11th through 14th centuries did to the local economies.  Did it suck out of productive economic activity, or did it serve to expand the economy much like the New Deal projects did during the Great Depression, and the infrastructure projects  of recent years that had no apparent direct economic use - bike paths, art, etc.)  Anyway, it's very large, very massive, and very interesting.

The bike paths here do seem to have an important economic purpose - in the cities they make bicycling quite a bit safer and attractive so that quite a bit of intracity travel, shopping, commuting seems to take place by bike (including lighting on bike paths, presumably to deal with the long dark winter nights for commuters).  And, there are large numbers of tourists traveling on the bikeway - some camping, some doing the B&B's, and some in hotels.  There are many hundreds of these tourists on the bike way - and ads for bike shops, cafe's, hotels that are supported by and support the bicycling tourist trade.

Walking home from dinner tonight, we watched a concert by an accordion orchestra - 23 accordions, a drummer, and a string bass.  Most accordions I've ever seen in one place.  Different.

Rest day tomorrow .