Day 5: Attack of the Bulldozer

 The day started with climbing a "mountain" right after breakfast. While not my preferred start of the day, this was still ok. I had planned to visit a place, that looked peculiar on the map. Expecting a lake, I cycled some minutes along some kind of mining operation. No idea what's really happening there.

Cycling some smaller roads afterwards, some were nice, some were horrible. All in all those took much time and I did not make much progress. So I took some bigger roads until arriving in Breslau.

I had wanted to check for a replacement tyre in some bike shop. When I tried to find the adress I suddenly had no data connection and was unable to look it up. But after 300m there suprisingly was a bike shop right at the side of the road. Sometimes things work even without the internet ;) What didn't work was getting the tyre since the polsih distributor does not even import it. So no tyre in any other shop in Poland. Now I'm wondering if I will be able to continue to Romania with my current tyre and get a new one there (the plant producing the velomobiles is in Romania and I'll have to stop there anyway to pick up a new "Wartungslukendeckel"  -whatever that is in English)

Cycling in cities with a velomobile is not a lot of fun. You have a large turning radius and neither really belong on the cycling paths nor on the roads. Breslau is actually building a lot of cycling paths, but many are still not finished. 

So after missing a lot of turns and ending in some dead ends, I decided to just have a coffee with a nice view and continue afterwards.

Leaving Breslau was no fun either since th read was completely blocked by cars. So a lot of stopping and waiting and then accerating again.

In some roundabout I suddenly heard a cracking sound frm 50cm behind my head. The bulldozer that had been following me for the last few kilometers had expected me to enter the roundabout right in front of a truck, which I had found to be too risky for my taste. So his shovel hit the back of my velomobile leading to the crack. And then the a**hole just drove of despite me honking like a madman. So I raced after him until he stopped. But I could just tell him stuff in english and he just answered in polish. And neither of us understood anything. So at some point I just gave up, since the damage does not seem to be structural. I will still post a picture to the velomobile forum for the experts to judge if this might pose a problem.

Coming back to the topic from two days ago: Adrenaline also helps going futther and farther. After that incident the traffic got lighter and llighter so I was able to transfer some of the stress into mileage. 

I ended up on a beautiful campsite at the river Oder almost all by myself. So now it is time to relax and have a better plan for visiting the next city (e.g. parking the velomobile at a hotel and explore the city on foot.

You probably won't see this this post until tomorrow, since again there is no data connectivity in this remote place (and as I'm writing this, an ice cream truck comes by playing "Pippi Langstrumpf" at full volume. Whatever.)