The ups and downs.....

Following the Danau, extremely crowded with touring bikers as it is again paved, flat and slightly downhill, we planned to meet our friends Christine and Matt in Linz, the first big city we would hit in Austria. This story I am about to tell is a bit scary but pretty hilarious, that is if you can really try to imagine the entire scene. I spoke with Christine to let her know when we would be in Linz and she asked if we would feel comfortable with leaving our bikes outside their place, locked up of course. "It's really safe in Austria," she says. No problem. We normally don't like to leave our bikes unattended unless they are at a campground as we would be totally shit out of luck if something did happen. Anyway, the next night, our first night in Austria, we are at a campground that sits right along the Danau bikepath. Normal routine, ride to a store, cook dinner, drink wine, sit by the river, go for a walk, read our books in our tent and lights out.

As we have now spent about 100 nights in our tent, we have our routines down. I always put my book in the same place, right next to my head ontop of my bag that holds my socks and underwear to prevent my book from getting damp. On the hot nights, we each roll up one side of the rainfly for air circulation, our tent has two extrances (which I would recommend if you plane a long trip of sharing a tent with someon). I wake in the morning, roll over and notice that my book is outside. That's strange, and it's still on the same page I was reading . And my tent door is open maybe a foot on the upper section. I look around, "Where is my bag?" We were both completely dumbfounded, and Ryan was sure that I had put my book out there by accident and didn't even bring this bag into the tent but left it in one of my panniers.

We take the tent apart and I look in the 7 panniers that were left on our bikes (I brought one and put it in my vestibule for some unknown reason). Now, as most of your know, I loathe rodents. And by rodents I mean mice and rats, chipmunks, squirrels, basically anthing that even slightly resembles one. I unclip the top part of my pannier that is in the vestibule and what runs out about an inch from my hand, A MOUSE!!!! It runs over my bag and right under our tent. Of course I let out a few high pitched screeches and start jumping back and forth from leg to leg. Mind you, this is 8am, so the entire campground now has their eyes on me and is probably wondering what this strange America is doing. I run about 10 feet away as the mouse scurries away and all we can see is this little buldge underneathe the floor of the tent. Oh yeah, did I mention that this little rodent shit about 100 times on my bag?!?!?!?! My lord! How does one small creature poop so much?

As I keep backing away from our tent, Ryan moves in, making his hands into a 45 degree arch, guiding this mouse out from under our tent, and I am of course no help. Now I am standing on the bike path trying to explain to our neighbors that all this rucuse is all over a tiny, itty bity mouse. Fortunately, as we are standing there, we see the frightened thing run across the road toward the water. One down, now where is my bag?
Ryan dips my pannier in the water to rid it of mouse poop. We come to the conclusion that someone must have gone into our tent while we were sleeping, assuming our most important possessions would be kept by our heads. We fooled them! They only got away with socks, underwear, a bathing suit and receipts. Still, frustrating and scary. We have our typical breakfast of yogurt, granola, fruit and coffee sitting a bench along the water and decide that whomever stole this bag must have been pretty bummed withthe contents and probably just chucked it once they realized it was a bag of nothing. Ryan walked down the bike path maybe 200 yards to a group of trashcans. No luck. I'm standing on the road watching him walk back as he looks to his left and says, "Hey hun." In the bushes maybe 20 feet from our tent is my bag! All closed up and all contents still intact! Can you believe it? A good lesson for us. We now intertwine our zippers together as night so the only possible way to get in from the outside is if they tear our tent. We leave our camera in Girona, our iPhone gets stolen in Germany and now our bag gets taken in Austria. Hopefully our bad luck of threes is now over!