Saturday 27th May - Rotterdam to Mainz (436 km)
This day was always going to be a long one – the plan was to cover around 300 miles into Germany allowing us to get to Switzerland the following day. Because was wanted to do the miles, we stuck to the motorways (autobahns) at a steady 80-90 mph.
The weather was nice so the riding was not bad at all. We had no problems adjusting to riding on the wrong side of the road, although I did still tie a bit of ribbon to my right mirror just to remind me!
We left Rotterdam at around 8am and arrived in Mainz at around 5pm. As before the campsite was superb. Nig had brought all the ingredients for his famous camping stew (which was renamed windy stew by the end of the trip!) so he cooked this up and it went down a treat.
We then got a few beers in and sat by the tents. When getting the beers I met up with some of the German people me and Daz had met on the Greek trip, and they were really nice and friendly as before. One couple even gave us a bottle of Champaign to toast the trip with.
Later on another German bloke came over to talk to us. He was an ex-biker (his missus doesn't let him anymore) and he gave us lots of advice on where to go and what to do. The best thing he told us was how to work out the temperature of the passes; for every 100 meters the temperature typically drops by 1 degree. Therefore if its 30 degrees at sea level then it will be 5 degrees at 2500 meters. He also recommended we visit the Black Forest - which we said we'd try and do on the way home.
