In mid-April I transferred from the University of Stuttgart to the Technical University of Munich. Before this, I was in India (visiting Microsoft Research) from mid-March to mid-April.
My return flight from India to Stuttgart was on Friday, April 13th, and my first working day in Munich on Monday, April 16th. So I had two weekend days in between, and I decided that the proper way to move into my new home would be to ride there by bicycle.
Two weeks before, I started planning the trip. Since I was going to start at my old home in Kornwestheim, north of Stuttgart, the picturesque route through the Rems valley was an option, and I favoured it over the shorter route through the Fils valley. Further towns along the route were to be Aalen, Nördlingen, and Donauwörth. Unlike my usual cycling tours, I planned this one in detail, attempting to make the route as efficient as possible. I even used Google Maps' satellite-view feature to find information about the existence and surface of minor roads and paths (with limited success, as it would turn out) and wrote an instruction sheet for myself. In the end I remembered the route so well that during the trip I never needed to consult a map, and my instructions only rarely.
One week before the trip, the weather forecast started to stabilise and promised sunshine. Lots of it. The only bad news was that the wind was going to come from the east, and much of the trip was almost straight east.
After landing in Stuttgart on Friday, I could see that spring had arrived in full force. The weather was absolutely georgous, at least one month ahead of its time: cloudless sunshine at 25 degrees, the trees were blooming and starting to become green, and the meadows were full of flowers.
In the evening, I started to pack my things and store them on the bicycle. Even though I took just the bare essentials for surviving in an empty new flat for one week, the load was going to be heavier than usual.