Seniors on the Danube

That first night at dinner in Passau, Germany, I said to myself, "Oh, oh -- what have I gotten myself into?" My 18 friends were spread over three tables in the beer garden, having just flown in from the United States for a 210-mile bike ride along the Danube to Vienna I'd arranged with the help of a local tour company found on the Internet. The holiday was fraught with risk.

Many in the group knew only my wife, Sandy, and me, not each other, and I worried about people not being compatible. Some could grind out a century (100 miles) before lunch; others hadn't been on a bicycle since high school. Was the distance we'd ride each day -- about 35 miles -- too little or too much? After all, most of us were professionals in our 60s, slipping into retirement, and we counted among us a few replaced hips and sundry other warnings of age.

So, when we gathered that first evening in that ancient city at the confluence of the Inn, Ilz and Danube Rivers, I gave everyone a name tag with instructions to throw it away after dinner. "After five hours of biking tomorrow, there won't be any strangers," I told them. We decided we'd leave the hotel as a group, after getting our bikes and a briefing from the local tour company the next morning, but ride as individuals so everyone could set his or her own pace.

We crossed the border into Austria at mid-morning. "Hey, can you tell me how to work the gears?" one of my 18 friends asked. Ahead lay one of Europe's most popular bike rides -- downstream all the way to Vienna, a wide, paved, riverside lane that follows a path over which horse teams once towed barges. It meanders past farms and vineyards, by stunning castles and abbeys, through quaint villages. This might not be Lance Armstrong's cup of tea, but for our group a ride with no hills and every turn clearly marked by a sign was good medicine for a sedentary lifestyle.

By the time we reached Engelhartszell, 15 miles from Passau, the dynamics of our group had started to take form. One biker was a loner who raced off, ignored the signs and got lost on a state highway with heavy traffic. Three couples were strong cyclists and disappeared into the distance. A dozen of us were dawdlers. We stopped for a leisurely lunch in a riverside cafe, then boarded the bicycle ferry to pick up the bike path on the quieter, northern side of the Danube.

As is apt to happen in a shared adventure, even a tame one, a congenial cohesion had taken root. If a biker or two fell far behind, others waited for them to catch up. If there was a tricky turn, you could usually count on someone stationing himself there to make sure no one missed it.

Groups formed, decomposed and reformed. At each stop, we compared notes from an invaluable cycling guide the tour company had given each of us -- "Danube Bike Trail 2, Austrian Danube" (find it on Internet booksellers by typing in the ISBN number 3-900869-82-0). My fears of incompatibility faded.

If you're interested in gathering friends or family to bike the Danube -- or to take any one of scores of cycling excursions offered throughout Europe -- this might be a good place to share some lessons learned. In the past 15 years, Sandy and I have organized customized trips in Ireland, England's Cotswolds, New Zealand, Sweden and France's Burgundy and Bordeaux regions by using local tour operators found on the Internet. We've done it on the cheap without sacrificing comfort, never been cussed by friends who signed on and never had a bad experience with an operator.

I started researching this late-spring bike trip in January without a specific route in mind. The choices were perplexing. Florence to Rome? Budapest to Krakow on the Amber Trail? Holland by bike and barge? The Danube bike path?

At some point I clicked -- literally and figuratively -- on Bike Tours Direct. The small Tennessee-based company is a one-stop resource, representing European bicycle tour agencies in 30 countries that offer more than 200 routes. For the next few months, through e-mails and phone calls, I worked with Jim Johnson, the company's founder and an avid cyclist, putting together a customized itinerary. Then I e-mailed a gaggle of friends with an invitation to join Sandy and me. Eight couples and two singles did.

Johnson believes his is the only American company that acts as a personalized broker for European cycling firms. He and his colleagues did all the heavy lifting, working with Donau-Radfreunde in Austria to customize our trip, but charged the same amount I would have paid had I booked directly with Donau-Radfreunde. By the time I'd upgraded our accommodations from basic to three-star hotels and inns, added five prepaid dinners and a few other amenities, our costs had climbed to just over $900 each, including bicycles, six hotel nights with breakfast, luggage transfers each day, emergency road service, maps and travel information. A five-star bargain by my reckoning.

I built into the itinerary plenty of time to smell the roses -- and to take side routes for hearty souls who wanted to bike extra miles. For the weary, there was a nice option: Simply bring your bike aboard one of the many trains or tourist boats that link the string of Danube towns and watch the world flow by.

We lingered silently at the Nazi concentration camp in Mauthausen, ate huge banana splits at the Schorgi ice cream shop in Grein, explored the vineyards of Wachau in the Danube's most beautiful region and viewed from a distance the ruins of Durnstein castle where England's King Richard the Lion-Hearted was held hostage in the 12th Century.

We biked the last day in soft rain the 25 miles from Tulln to Vienna. Families of white swans idled on the river. We warmed up with double espressos and steaming apple strudel in a cozy cafe. It dawned on me that during the entire week, I had heard not a single complaint. Three or four people who hadn't biked in years and doubted their ability to complete the journey turned out to be among the heartiest cyclists.

That's the beauty of a bicycle. Unlike a tennis racket or a pair of skis, it rises to meet you at your level of ability. It gives you a sense of intimacy with your surroundings. The difference between driving through the region in a car and biking it is the difference between watching a movie and being in one.

Our farewell dinner was at Heuriger Reinprecht, a noisy, fun restaurant with violinists and accordion players in the Vienna suburbs. Only a week earlier most of our group had been strangers. Now everyone was exchanging e-mails and rehashing the trip over bottles of wine, kidding the dogged wife who followed her husband on a grueling side trip up into the mountains of the wine region.

"So," one of the stalwart bikers said to me, "where do we go next year?"