Mainz to just north of Dusseldorf

I got my knickers in a twist a bit. The last entry was for Friday and Saturday and it should be titled Gambsheim to Somewhere Else Just Short of Mainz. It also means I missed out a whole section. You don't mind, nor do I, so let's press on. I was glad to leave the campsite on Sunday morning, which was not really a campsite at all - very few of these places in Britain, Germany or elsewhere (except maybe France) seem to have much to do with camping. Rather, they are just large carparks for caravans and mobile homes - I mean the caravans you can actually drive along without needing a car, whatever they're called. Please don't write in with the answer. In these places the caravans are parked up alongside each other and there they stay. Forever. The result is a sort of shanty town. Bits of corrugated plastic are nailed up on shaky trellises. TV aerials dangle and sway in the breeze (everyone is watching telly in the evening, everyone gets to listen). Bits of wood are fashioned into fences between the caravans to make little yards. Bingo, your summer holiday in a car park is ready. Turn up with a tent, however, and you're directed to an old weed patch that probably gets smaller every year. Luckily I'm not the sort of man who can sense a pea placed under as many as 21 mattresses, and who finds camping on terrain resembling a 4x4 testing zone an edifying, possibly formative, experience. But I like the place I'm staying to feel loved. It's important to do things with love, by which I mean pride, when other people are involved. I don't these places have always been carparks for caravans, though. The place I stayed at on Friday was one of these summertime favelas. It was by a lake (an old gravel pit), which would be pretty but at night the place was overlooked on one side by two giant columns of steam rising from some unseen cooling towers, the street lamps lit the billowing steam from below, giving them a toxic orange hue. On the other side of the lake red lights from a field of wind turbines winked through the night, each with industrial regularity but all out-of-synch with each other. I know this because I got up to take a leak, or was it a leek? This campsite had a huge, empty car park - enough for maybe 200 cars , and its little cafe restaurant had closed down and now appeared to be falling down. If the carpark was ever even half-full, then once upon a time people were coming and going every day, putting up their tents or using their caravans for one night, maybe, before moving on. Was there some golden age of camping and caravanning? Did youngsters stuff tents in hand-me-down backpacks and start wandering around the world like Laurie Lee? Dear readers, or maybe reader, I don't know. But wouldn't that be wonderful? And wouldn't it be better than buying one of those round-the-world plane tickets and spending one night in each country, which seems to be the preferred way to see the world these days, even though it leaves you just as milky-handed as when you set off? Aw, I don't mean that, I have quite milky hands myself. I just mean that it's not travel, in that it's not leaving something to look for something, not really, it's just a round-the-world jolly, without ever leaving anything at all. But don't think for a minute that my bike ride is some noble quest, let's not burden it with any meaning or goodness. It's not even particularly vegetarian. I'm still left with the question: with no tents in the campsites and the youth hostels full of retired people in their adventurous 'third age', how are the young folks getting their rites of passage? I need to ask some of them.

So, Sunday morning, campsite shanty town, showers made out of plastic sheeting and blu tac, glad to leave, enough said. The cycle route here follows the bank of the river, which by now is being a river again and looks alive and majestic. Steep, forested hills rise on either side, narrowing the channel sometimes with sheer cliffs and so quickening the current - the barges have to go flat out to make headway upstream, although I think they go flat out all the time anyway. It's starting to feel autumnal, mostly because we're now 600 km down river from Basel - there are lime leaves on the path and the sycamore leaves are curling, waiting. The river turns back on itself several times as it snakes through the hills. It's a beautiful ride on the smooth cycle path under clear skies. With a helpful following breeze, it's also very quiet, with only whatever squeaks of pleasure Raquel cares to make when we go over a bump. Many little villages line the river banks so I could often stop and take in the landscape, and maybe buy a strudel or a nussknacker (they're German cakes with nuts in, in this context) to keep up my energy levels (I need to eat A LOT of food). Or I might strike up a conversation in German to hone my skills in international relations and just to see what happens. Proceeding thus, it wasn't long before I reached the point at which Loreley, the beautiful mermaid with the gold comb and glistening jewels that Marcus warned me about, was to sing to me, causing me to fall in love and crash. Nothing happened. Maybe there's a delayed effect. In any case, Loreley appears to have been transferred to a new position as patron saint of the tourist industry, which is what the Americans call a 'sideways move' in career terms.

Sunday in summer in Germany and it's time for brass bands in biergartens, mostly playing swing music but slowly and without dancing. If you own a small biergarten and can't afford a band, then the done thing is to hire a man in a Hawaian shirt with a Casio keyboard - the sort we all wanted in the 80s that plays a bass line for you in the key you press while you play a melody over the top. He sets it going - um-pa um-pa um-pa-pa um-pa - and then sings. I saw this going on on Saturday and pulled up to watch. It's like Chas n Dave electronica but without Dave and in German. Naturally, I thought this can't be for real, but on Sunday I saw another man in another Hawaian shirt, albeit of a different design, doing the same thing 50 miles away. They are therefore spaced at 50 mile intervals all over the country. The second man was really going for it. One of the lyrics went, 'On a sunny day / All the little birdies are in the trees'. I thought that a song can't possibly have a line that bad in it so I looked it up and it turns out to be a Paul Simon song called Was A Sunny Day and it's about a (completely different) girl called Loreley. What are the chances? Anyway, that's what you do if you can't afford a brass band. I wanted to take a photo but my battery had run out.

I've been doing a bit of gongoozling and the more I watch the barges the more I like them. Their engines roar like wild men, they move slowly like royalty, and they turn in graceful, sweeping arcs like women (but not as elegantly as Raquel). Please don't send postmodernist letters accusing me of essentialising the masculine and feminine, or unreconstructed socialist ones accusing me of supporting the royal family - I won't have time to respond to you all. I could watch the barges' slow and steady work all day. They have intriguing names: Aqualite, Terra, Forens (also Forenso), Poyam, Eiltank 28, Oleander, Chamsin, Barbarossa, Wilhelm Betther, Somtrans XI, Fiducia, Oostsee, Bohemia II, Maria Louisa, Libel, and my favourite, LRG Gas 82. At sunset I saw one of these beauties punching the current with one chap at the helm and one sitting on a deckchair on the front deck watching the sun go down. That has to be a good job. On another boat a man was pumping iron on the roof. All the boats have palacial-looking quarters at the stern and every one has a smart car on the roof and usually a speedboat sitting next to it. The biggest ones, and they're all big, have telescopic bridges that can rise above the cargo, however high it may be heaped. The cargo is everything that won't go off in a few days: cars, coal, oil, gas, scrap metal, containers, grain, sand, whatever, maybe baked alaska, hair nets, smurfs and things. Going upstream they make not much more than walking pace, downstream they're going at 13 mph. I measured it using my cycle computer because although I didn't care how fast they went I knew you'd want to know. They're up to about 100m long and about 10m wide, and in Koblenz I saw a block of four bigguns tied together heading upstream, covered in assorted containers. These barges are passing where I sit now (just north of Dusseldorf) at a rate of about one barge every minute. Please raise an impressed eyebrow now because I'm done with this subject for the time being.

And there's been sunshine all the way until today. Last night it poured with rain but not before I had hung the washing on Raquel, which led me into a late-night dash - first to find the light, then the underwear, then the zip, then the other zip, then the other zip, then to rush out and get the washing in. In the morning it looked like it was clearing so I set off, then it chucked it down non-stop until midday. It was a brutal onslaught from the gods. I passed through Cologne stopping only at a cafe, where I watched a German rap video called Sexy Ice Cream while I waited for the rain to stop, which it did until I set off again. Again the gods tried to break me but I said no, I will ride through Germany's industrial heartland in the mercilessly heavy rain. They sent thunder and lightning but missed. They sent Loreley to sing for all she was worth but I could see through her shallow mind game with its jewels and its gold comb. Gee up, Raquel, there be power stations to circumnavigate, vast docks to bridge, gordion knots made of motorways and railways to cut through, and so finally I rounded the Ford factory with Promethean hubris, victorious, and with squelching feet and soggy map. Wait, I can hear rousing music... Yes, there's music... Here it comes... 'On a sunny day / All the little birdies are in the trees...'