You may have found this morning’s blog post, which was written while we left our stuff to dry in the bright sunshine.

Well, when we came back to our patch, we were in for a shock. First we discovered that another tent pole had broken (you remember about the first?), then that our front tyre was flat. Strange goings-on. Between our holidays (we are not complaining) Graham had tried hard to replace the broken segment and to get some spares. Since this was not possible, we have made do with splints and tape. Now we have to find a makeshift second splint and use even more tape. Strong wind and rain are forecast for tonight.

As for the tyre, we had a little gaggle of concerned people around us, who were trying to be helpful. There was no obvious problem, so we decided to just pump it up (did Rees Mogg say anything about split infinitives? I would like to use this opportunity to state how much I loathe the man. I will not mention him again) and see how we got on. At first that seemed to be the right call but we had to pump more and more frequently as we went along. So it was changing tyre time, by the side of our cycle path and the canal. Given what we have learnt about Germans on our trip, I sort of knew this would happen: within a few minutes a couple stopped and took over. Had we really looked that clumsy? I (but not Graham) felt that their intervention represented our failure, but we were not complaining. Anyway tyre was replaced successfully and bike put together again.

Monday.

There is more to say about the locks. There are 4 particularly deep ones – around 25 metres- near the highest point of the canal. To my untrained eyes that is quite an engineering feat.

We were surprised, however, at how little traffic there was on the canal. The odd massive barge and one or two cruise ships. By the time we got to Nuremberg -to the north of the 4 biggest locks- there were a lot of cruise ships, all pouring out tourists onto coaches. Nuremberg has of course an interesting history and we would have liked to view the stadium where Hitler held his rallies, but we decided to push on.

There is also more to say about the new canal. Graham, who is a wizz on google, had not found much information about it. One particular blog was rather negative about its looks. I feel defensive on behalf of the canal. There was a lot of pretty vegetation on its banks and majestic looking trees on the other side of our path for long stretches.