Xanten cycling Xanadu

The town is a typical tourist town it has a big church with a square this church appears to be on some sort of pilgrims route i was to pass a group of them later with a flag and a cross,I really didn't have much of a choice except to stay here as i wasn't carrying any camping equipment the whole religious thing and roman ruins made the town very old school tourism it was all couples in their 50s upward i typed into google best pub in town it showed a bar that i walked nearly a mile to find it was shut down! i went back to the square and chose a street cafe, the menu was all in German i opted for schnitzel no sauce as i am doing a year zero beef or dairy. it came loaded with cheeses i scraped it off it was fine, but these sort of street cafes are my idea of hell, OK hell is a strong word but i just dont feel comfortable being served, i quickly learned to say milchefrei from then on
       

  after dinner i took a stroll back toward my hotel  as there was a restaurant right below my room i could possibly sit in the street typing while enjoying a beer but alas there was zero WiFi signal in the bar area even with my hotel WiFi code, It was an early night especially for the Friday before my birthday! The Hotel breakfast was good I spend 70% of my life in hotels so i know a thing or two about hotel breakfasts! i enjoyed this one it was much more continental in choices not a lot of warm things but i enjoyed it, I got myself a good feed it was my birthday and the sun was shining i had cash in my wallet and an open road life was good, which i told the ladies at reception  and fished for compliments for how i never looked in my fifties birthday no way lol
    i took my luggage down the elevator to the garage to get my bike and exited once i had loaded the bike up and entered the garage door key code to open the electric door
       The cycle away from Xanten was down to the Rhine and through a nature reserve along the side of a flood dyke,all very pleasant but my knee was hurting i had a cartilage injury twenty years ago skiing in Austria the physio i seen at the time said that it will require to be operated on at some stage, but that was twenty years ago I only really get trouble from it when cycling and even then if i make an adjustment on my seat post length it can sometimes stop it, that`s what i decided to do stop have a snack check my map adjust my seat post
 the spot i chose to stop in was at a sign showing two ways to get to the next place i was aiming for called wessel as i was checking the map fixing my seat etc. a german couple stopeed i asked them which was the best way to wesel after a bit of poor broken conversation i discovered they were following vello route 15 the rhine and the cycling sign posts have a little blue euro sign for that route i should have spotted this sooner but this was the first real time following the rhine due to yesterdays road works,
           This plan should have been ok but once at wesel the blue signs pointed both over the bridge and along the Rhine as you can choose either direction to get to Duisburg my next destination i went over the bridge lost the blue sign and ended up on the main roads cycle path which was fine it was probably quicker but it took me right through a huge industrial area, i was brought up in grange-mouth and thought it was a large industrial town, this area had much bigger factory's and chimneys A huge steel works plus docklands
        I eventually got to Duisburg and stopped for lunch it was my birthday and i had two beers with lunch, and by then had my sights set firmly on Dusseldorf, I eventually rejoined the vello 15 just outside the city but then lost it again i have no idea how and ended up on a dirt track it was fine i could see the cycle path i just wouldn't get back on it for a distance,
      once in the outskirts of town i started to notice a lot of cyclists with the same tops on more and more until i was nearing the local football stadium and realised i was in fact in the football traffic i have never seen so many cyclists ever! it took me ages to weave through them all but it was fun there was a happy atmosphere to it all