Another early morning and another new town to explore.
Bregenz is my favourite to date, lots of winding cobbled streets to get lost in, twisting to reveal surprising architecture with ancient villas surrounded by ultra modern cubes of glass, steel and wood. In fact based entirely on the fist 15 minutes of exploring I am in love with Bregenz.

There’s art everywhere from street sculpture to a massive art gallery right on the Lake front. There are pavement cafes where folk are sat, reading Goethe, drinking cappuccino and smoking. Or drinking beer.
At home only the inhabitants of the local park are comfortable with al fresco drinking first thing in the morning, and then their preferred tipple is sold in, and drunken from, cans.  Here (and to be fair in Germany too) al fresco drinking seems a lot less frowned upon and far better supported.

Street Art

(The more observant reader will have spotted the 993 lurking in the garage in the background…)

Unfortunately my search for a supermarket draws a blank but I find a bakery for morning croissants and a local market for some fresh fruit.

Yes, a local market! There I am confidently strolling round with a battered pannier looking exactly like someone who lives there (except for the hat). So much so that as I’m queuing to buy a punnet of blueberries I’m asked to arbitrate in an argument.
A scary woman at the front of the queue is claiming her disabled mother gave the innocent young farm girl running the stall twenty Euro whilst the farm girl is claiming it was a tenner. There’s shouting, gesticulating and lots of flushed cheeks as they both look to the rest of the queue for support. The woman in front of me saw nothing and turns to me (we’d been studiously ignoring each other until this point as she pushed in) to arbitrate, probably because she’d heard about my adventures in Friedrichshafen with Norma from yesterday and recognised me as a fearless consumer champion.
Whilst it seemed obvious to me that the stall owner, who bears more than a passing similarity to Alison Brie in “Community”, is innocent I stare at my feet and mutter something about being English. Fortunately this brings the argument to a close and the scary woman, who looks like her husband works in the scrap metal industry and probably breeds those dogs that sometimes accidentally eat children, stomps off pushing her upset mother over the picturesque but wheelchair unfriendly cobble stones.

So buoyed I cycle back to the flat and once more regale my family with tales of my heroic consumer affair battles and bask in their utter disinterest.

We’re just being tourists today and thus there is very little cycling content. We head up the mountain on the cable car and mooch round a truly awful zoo (3 deer and a goat) on top of the mountain in the blazing heat before heading back to the lake…

I can see my house from here.

(Our flat is the one in the right of the photo with the orange balcony.)

Pedalo plus CuNim.

I really like bikes and I really like boats so a pedalo should be my perfect way to pass the time. Yet pedalos are RUBBISH. Go figure. We pedal round the Lake in the blazing sun, decide if we jump into the lake to cool down we might not be able to get back in the pedalo, so we explore the stage for tonight’s opera and take it back. (Sorry folks that’s it for cycling content today).

Turandot.

Obviously the headline event after our lazy day is Puccini’s Turandot with a backdrop of the Alps and the Lake. I mean it’s alright. It’s only the second opera I’ve been to and this was MUCH better*. More ducks for starters.  <Spoiler alert> Immediately following Liu’s death scene as her song finished there was a beat or two of silence followed by a perfectly timed quack from a duck who’d swum between the stage and the audience. That sounds quite dull written down but trust me it got a BIG laugh on the night.

Stunning setting and performance that makes me question how exactly we all ended up so lucky.

More cycling content tomorrow including PERIL and a chase through a FOREST in the DARK!

*A pedant writes. It has been suggested that you mainly used the opera as a chance for a bit of a nap.