A day of excitement and surprises! In Grein, by pure luck, we ended up staying in a nice pension (whoops, said that last card). Here we decided to part from the route described in the book. We followed along the described route for about 30 km, along some beautiful bike trails, then before Enns we turned south down the Enns River towards Steyr, but not before stopping for lunch in Mauthausen.

The stretch from Mauthausen to Steyr was the stretch of adventurous bicycle routes. There is a separate series of bike signs that seems to be intended for cross country bikes. The pavement kept stopping, but we braved it anyway. Passed through Ernsthofen!

Finally Steyr. We almost rode right by it, but saw a couple of nice buildings so decided to look around. Turned out to be the nicest "small" town we've seen. Had a beautifully spacious main street with some incredibly old buildings, a very nice Rathaus, and ornate plasterwork on virtually every building. A woman who accosted us said that it was mostly designed by a prominent Italian architect, so it was very Italian in flavor. Older people here love to stop and talk to us, regardless of whether or not we can understand them. Steyr also had a nice castle with moat, that is being turned into condos; a nice church (see front) that was under reconstruction and entirely empty inside. We spent too much time here before leaving for our final destination: Bad Hall. It appeared that there was a direct small road to Bad Hall; we missed it and went along a looping and very hilly (ouch) road, but beautiful, as the sun slowly sank into the west. We finally got onto the main road with 8 km left just as it started to drizzle. A lightning storm started directly in Bad Hall; we rode straight toward the bolts of lightning. Got there just as it started pouring and checked into the first guesthouse (w/food) we saw.