Black Forest Tour

A few weeks ago on a Saturday tour, we found out that we have a common week of vacation. We, that is Brigitte and Hartmut Krist-Priem, we were on Mallorca in spring this year. So… what not ride a black-forest tour? Like ordered, the sun came out today, after two cold days, and presented a nice summer day. After my weekly biking announcement, another cyclist joined, Michael Strang.

So we started out at 10, still a little cold. After the first downhill, the first real UPhill section, from Station Teinach to Sommenhardt helped to warm up. The typical black forest terrain, up, down, up, down, … helps to stay warm further 😉

We reached Simmersfeld early enough, shortly after 1pm. I had announce that here we can decide how to continue… as we felt OK, we decided for the slightly longer tour. So we took the downhill to Enzklösterle, nice and freshly paved, I was here 2-3 years ago the last time. The uphill via the “Poppeltal” is not steep, rolling upwards easily pedaling.

After the next downhill part, we reach Erzgrube, where we can refresh with some cake, coffee, and typical local mixed fruit drink (“Schorle”). Re-charged, we continue the fast way down to Altensteig, Nagold, Wildberg… we had enough hills now. Just a last climb via Gültlingen to Deckenpfronn and then rolling home.

In summary: 161,9km with 24,5 kmh average 1545m altitude.

I think all of us liked it, for sure I did! 🙂

(German version including GPS-Track also on our RSG-Website)

Migrating the multi-languange plugin

In the last 2 days I did some maintenance work on my Web-site (as I’m on vacation 😉 ). About 2 years ago, when I started using WordPress, after an evaluation phase, I started to use qtranslate as WP-Plugin. It did exactly what I wanted, lightweight, and well supported, making it easy to blog in multiple languages.

About 6 months later the author obviously got a new job and had no time anymore for the plugin maintenance. Soon after the problems started, and it became a pain. With WP 3.6 it will stop working altogether… so I had to migrate.

So I had to go back and evaluate plugins and decided for WPML. I bought the “CMS” Version and since yesterday work on the migration of the live-site. Sunday/Monday I did several test migrations on my laptop to verify what needs to be done.

Conclusion: it works, but the migration causes a lot of manual cleanup work.

Current status: the “pages” should all be OK (meaning status as before), but the blog-entries are not yet “clean”. Some of the German entries contain all 3 languages beneath each other, but the entries do not show up at all in their respective translated versions. This needs to be cleaned manually.

If I have time and feel like it after finishing the work, I may write a more complete report, how the migration worked step by step.

Black-Forest Tour via Altensteig and Simmersfeld

The tour today: from the bike-club in Böblingen via Ehningen, Kuppingen, Mötzingen, Iselshausen, Unter-/Oberschwandorf, Egenhausen to Altensteig. On the road downhills from Egenhausen to Altensteig there is a great view on Altensteig, good opportunity for a small break and calorie-intake in form of a Banana.

Blick auf Altensteig

Afterwards down to Altensteig, but immediately up the hill again via Überberg to Simmersfeld. From there onwards via Aichhalden, Hofstett and Neuweiler to Bad Teinach. From there it’s one last uphill section via Wildberg and Gültlingen to Deckenprfonn… and then rolling easily back home via Gärtringen and Ehningen.

After the flat but very fast tour yesterday (Saturday), this was a pretty heavy tour today, pretty tired legs in the end. But it’s always very, very nice in the black forest, worth it, every kilometer: 127,6 km with 1340 meter altitude and avg speed 24,2 kmh.

First time black forst tour this season

The first weekend with really great weather this summer… After a easy-going tour (70km) yesterday to warm up, a first highlight today: a real black-forest tour. We are two as three others were bound otherwise and could not come with us.

So starting with the usual way via “7-Tannen” to Station Teinach, the side-way up to Sommenhardt and onwards direction Oberreichenbach. Before reaching that, turning left via Agenbach to Neuweiler (found a really nice side-road here) and on via Hofstett and Aichhalden to Simmersfeld (picture).

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We reached here in record speed… just about 12:00, so we continue to Besenfeld. Well, the main road has a lot of motor bikes, but OK. Than the fantastic down-hill section to Erzgrube, and already announced here “motor-free upper Nagold-Tal” today!

So we continued the downhill road to Altensteig together with thousands of bikers (non-motor!) and Inline-skaters… not a single car or motor-cycle, fantastic!

The usual break in Altensteig… Cake and Coffee … onwards in more record-breaking speed via Nagold until Wildberg, the motor-free section continued until here, almost 50km in total! So with free road and wind-shade riding, we reached 27 km/h as total average. After Wildberg we split up. Otfried was in better shape and we would split after the climb anyway, so no need for him to wait for me.

Total: 155km with 26,4 km/h average, roughly 6 hours riding time with 1375m altitude. Not bad 😉

… about all and nothing …