07.08.2017
One day in June my excellent in-laws had taken my daughter and her friend from next door down to the spa in Bad Radkersburg for the day. As a change from my usual relatively short hilly rides I had the idea of riding down there, having a dip with them and riding back. It would be about 86 km each way but essentially flat, and there are railway lines all the way, so it’s quite possible to bail and get a train home.
However this would have required setting off early in the morning, but early in the morning it turned out to be raining heavily and thundery. Watching the weather reports (see http://wetter.orf.at/oes/ and click on one of the Landeshauptstädte for the detail on each Bundesland http://wetter.orf.at/steiermark/) I saw that the belt of bad weather was moving steadily to the south, so when it cleared up in Graz I headed off – at about 11 am.
Graz is surrounded by hills to the north, east and west but the Mur has made itself a somewhat wider plain to the south. In this section the Mur bike trail (R2) doesn’t indulge in any extra bumps beside the imperceptible gradient of the river. The route I took has a little spike in the middle because the bike path along the bank of the river was closed for some kind of work between Wildon and Lebring. Since this is the one point where the river is right up against a hill, the detour via the main road involved a little climb.
The trail is stitched together out of bits of quiet public road, often passing through the back end of sleepy villages; sections of standalone bike path through the fields; works roads belonging to the several hydro power stations along the way; one or two short bits of roadside bike path; and several sections of macadam path. This is pretty typical of the way tourist bike routes are made in Austria – with minimal expense, maximum use of preexisting roads and paths, and quite a lot of general twistiness. Not made for getting places in a hurry!
The macadam surfaces are quite commonly used here, especially where a sealed surface isn’t allowed for environmental reasons. They are mostly pretty good and to my mind ‘gravel’ suggests something worse. I’ve always used 32-mm tyres, so as long as the surface is firm, everything’s fine. There may be the odd patch of looser gravel where the surface has been damaged a bit. When the macadam surface is wet, though, it splatters everything with a pale-coloured sediment, and when it’s dry, everything gets dusty. I know that the city of Graz is trying out porous asphalt in sensitive locations; we’ll have to wait and see whether it starts appearing on the overland routes.
Using my smartphone tracking app I carried on down to the border and by the time I had passed Spielfeld and the tracker was showing 60 km covered, it was already about 2:30 in the afternoon and the folks in the spa weren’t responding. So I sat down on a bench to eat my sandwiches and turned around to head back to Graz. The day was fairly hot and I needed water, so stopped into a little pub by the bike path for an Eiskaffee and got my bottles filled. Right next to this is the Rollfähre or cable ferry across the Mur. It’s essentially a kind of raft resting on twin hulls and attached by pulleys to a cable across the river. They can hook the boat up alternately by one bow or the other, so that it hangs at an angle in the current – and then the current drives it across the river! A hundred years ago, there were five of these along this stretch of the Mur. This is now the only one; it was revived some years ago as a tourist attraction and partly as a symbol of the open border: from Spielfeld to Radkersburg, the southern bank of the Mur is in Slovenia.
Since my smartphone tracker as usual didn’t work properly, I plotted the route on Strava afterwards and found that I’d done 126 km there and back. It was enough at the time, through I may have a go at Graz-Radkersburg-Graz in the autumn, since it is almost exactly 100 miles. My wrists were a bit sore by the end, which has prompted me to get a pair of gloves. We’ll see if they help the next time I do a longish ride.