Day 9

August 12, 2003

Faaker See, Austria to Pirksdorf See, Austria

75 Kilometres

On Tuesday we headed back to the main road. We decided to stick to it, because you just don't make good time on the bike route.

We hadn't gotten far when my derailleur cable snapped. I pulled over into a rest area. I had a spare cable with me, and although I'd never replaced a derailleur cable before, I'd seen it done, and it didn't seem that difficult. I removed the old cable. I got out the new one. And discovered that it had a steel ball on the end that needed to be taken off before you could thread it through the housings. And I didn't have wire cutters. I tried using my pliers, but it didn't work. Ursula tried to no avail. I tried again. Then I noticed that we were working on the wrong end, and had put a kink in the good end.

I convinced Ursula that I could ride without the rear derailleur until we found a bike shop. Just up the road we found an auto repair shop, and we borrowed their wire cutters. I had trouble getting the cable into the housing at the rear of the bike, but Ursula got it in. I tightened everything up, but I couldn't get the whole range of gears. So I settled for the lowest three or four.

We stopped in St. Jakob at a bank so I could cash some traveller's cheques. Ursula asked the teller if there was a bike shop in town. She said there wasn't. She asked a colleague where the next bike shop was. He said there was a guy in Weizelsdorf, but that he was hard to find.

We rode on to Weizelsdorf. When we got there we weren't sure which was the centre of town. We went one direction. We passed and old lady walking her grandchild, and Ursula asked her. She gave Ursula directions, but we still couldn't find it.

We decided to go back to a grocery store we had passed to ask directions. We went in and spotted a guy stocking shelves. Ursula asked him where the bike store was, and he asked her what the problem was. Ursula explained it to him, and he said he'd look at it. I thought the problem might have been caused by the kink we put in the cable, but he said that wasn't a problem. He looked, and where we had had trouble getting the cable into the housing, some of the strands had come unthreaded. He brought out a portable bike stand, and got to work replacing it.

Meanwhile a local couple rode up, wanting him to look at her bike. They told us that he had been a bike mechanic in a shop in the city, but that his mother was getting old, so he had to come home to run the store. But bicycle repair was his love. He fixed my bike, and only asked 1.50 for it. I tried to give him 4.00, but he only took the two.

We had been thinking about going through Slovenia, because it meant a 300-metre/8% climb, rather than a 1000-metre/15% climb, but Ursula was wary of Slovenia. She asked the couple about it. They said it was fine. Slovenia was trying to get into the EU, so they were making nice to travelers.

We rode on to Ferlach. I was riding ahead, so Ursula didn't see a curb, and hit it and fell over, hurting herself quite badly. Especially her wrist, as well as her hip and knee.

During the trip I had been occasionally dropping the chain when shifting into the granny gear. I kept meaning to adjust it, but kept forgetting when we got into camp. Now the rear derailleur was dropping. So I adjusted it. Ursula suggested adjusting the front while I was at it, so I did. But later, when I tried to change into the granny gear it wouldn't drop. So I adjusted it, but then it dropped right off, so I adjusted it again, but then it wouldn't drop into the granny. It was very frustrating.

We hit a 13% grade, and it was very steep. And hot. Before hitting the biggest part of the pass, with a 12% grade, we stopped by the side of the road on a hairpin turn for lunch and a nap.

After a couple of hours we headed up. The day was very hot, and with all the problems it was taking its toll on us. Then I discovered from the map that the campground was several kilometres off the main road. At Pirksdorf See.

At the office the guy gave us a list of sites to choose from. Two of them had cars parked on them. One had a camper on it. And one had really bad ground. We found another site that was unoccupied, and set up there. Ursula checked with the guy to make sure it was okay.

There was no place to put the bikes on our site, so we leaned them against a wooden porch that had been built in front of a trailer in the next site. As we were unpacking, the chef came out, and said in a very hostile tone, that the boundary of our site is a line from the light post to the electrical receptacle, and nothing is to be on the other side of that line.

By this point Ursula was so tired that she didn't want to go for a swim in the lake. We had dinner in the campground restaurant.


Day 8	Home	Day 10