The Three Castles of Ribeauvillé: How I Discovered I Don’t Know How To Ride A Bike
Last Updated on November 26, 2025 by Charlotte
The beginning was actually lovely. We pedaled past vineyards, through quaint villages on the Alsace Wine Route, past flower boxes overflowing with geraniums, everything exactly as Instagram-worthy as advertised. Our plan was flawless. We’d mapped out this perfect little circuit through tiny villages, stopping at family wineries tucked between rolling hills covered in neat rows of vines. We’d sip, we’d swirl, we’d discuss “notes of apricot and spice,” like we knew what we were talking about, and we bought a 16 euro bottle of Gewürztraminer to take home with us.
The day was brutally, oppressively hot from a heatwave, the kind of heat that makes you feel slightly nauseous and drenches you with sweat. By noon, we’d already hit two little villages that were supposed to be open but weren’t. Signs hung on doors: “Closed – Emergency vineyard maintenance.” Apparently, the brutal heatwave was literally cooking the vines, and every winemaker in the region had abandoned their tasting rooms to urgently water their grapes.
So there we were, two slightly disappointed tourists with fully charged e-bikes, nowhere to go, and sweat already soaking through our shirts despite it being barely past noon, when Travel Buddy spotted something on Google Maps.
“Hey,” he said, zooming in on his phone, “what about those three castle ruins up there? Looks like there’s a road that goes right up to them.”
I looked up at the Three Castles of Ribeauvillé perched on the mountaintops like something out of a fantasy novel, then back at the little blue line on the map that seemed to snake right up to them.
“Sure,” I said, because I am an idiot. “Let’s be adventurous.”
This was mistake number one.
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The Road To The Castles
The path was paved and gently uphill, the kind of ride that makes you feel athletic without actually being challenging. In the distance, a few puffy white clouds were starting to gather over the mountains, and we were relieved as the road entered the cool shade of the forest. Then, the pavement ended.
“Okay,” I said, because I was still in my optimistic phase, “dirt road. No problem.”
I was leading the way, making executive decisions about which fork to take, probably looking like I knew what I was doing. The dirt was packed, the road was wide, and I was feeling pretty confident about my navigation skills.
But then the dirt road started getting… more creative. Little rocks appeared. Then roots. Then what could only be described as small boulders. The path narrowed until it was clearly meant for hikers, not cyclists, and certainly not cyclists carrying backpacks full of wine. As I peddled, the thin branches of the trees whacked me in the face.
“Um, Travel Buddy?” I called over my shoulder, trying to maneuver around a root that was roughly the size of my arm. “I think we might have gone the wrong way.”
He agreed, and we turned back, egos only slightly bruised. We’d find the road, seeing as we must have gone the wrong way.
We found another route—a gravel road this time, wide and properly graded. This looked more promising. We passed a few other cyclists, which seemed like a good sign. Everything was lovely.
Until we passed the sign: “No Motor Vehicles Beyond This Point.”
The Great Unmasking
Here’s the thing about confidence: it can carry you surprisingly far before reality comes knocking. And reality, in this case, was a gravel road that was about to expose me as the cycling fraud I apparently was.
Beyond the gate, I was still feeling pretty good about myself. But as we climbed higher and the surface got looser and more uneven, something shifted. Suddenly, Travel Buddy was pulling ahead.
At first, I thought maybe he was just excited to get to the castles. But then I’d catch glimpses of him up there, and he wasn’t struggling at all. He was cruising. Meanwhile, I was gripping my handlebars like I was trying to strangle them, my bike wobbling slightly every time I hit a loose rock, sweat dripping into my eyes, and my quads burning.
The gap kept widening. I’d pedal harder (remember, these were supposed to be e-bikes that helped you!), but somehow he just kept getting farther and farther away, until he was basically a Travel-Buddy-shaped dot in the distance.
When I finally caught up to where he had stopped—panting, drenched in sweat, probably looking slightly wild-eyed—he took one look at me and said, with genuine confusion:
“I didn’t realize you didn’t know how to ride a bike.”
I was OFFENDED.
“EXCUSE ME?” I gasped, still trying to catch my breath. “I know how to ride a bike!”
He tilted his head, studying me with amusement, a smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. “Well… you don’t look like you know how to ride a bike.”
This was deeply insulting, and also probably an accurate assessment.
Before I could mount a proper defense of my cycling abilities, he looped around me in effortless figure eights, like a circling shark who had smelled blood in the water.
“Have you ever ridden off-road before?” he asked casually, completing another perfect loop around my stationary bike.
“No,” I admitted, watching him glide by. “Everything is paved in the city.”
“AHA!” He practically shouted it, like he’d just solved a mystery. Which, I guess, he had.
And then (and this is the part that still haunts me), he started showing off. Not maliciously, mind you. I think he was just so relieved to understand why I looked like I was fighting for my life that he got a little giddy. He started doing little tricks. Bunny hops over rocks. Riding with no hands while explaining something about weight distribution and center of gravity. And then—the ultimate display of confidence—he started taking selfies while riding hands-free on gravel.
Meanwhile, I’m standing there straddling my bike, both feet firmly planted on the ground, watching this performance like I was witnessing actual magic.
“So here’s the thing,” he said, pulling up beside me, not even slightly winded. “I basically grew up on a bike. I spent my childhood mountain biking across lava fields in Volcanoes National Park with my Dad.”
LAVA FIELDS.
“Like, actual lava fields with rocks?” I asked weakly, “And in twelve years of being together, you never thought to bring this up?”
“Yeah! Rough terrain, loose rock, no trails—just pick a direction and go. It was the best playground ever.”
I stared at him. This explained so much. This was like discovering that the person you’d been trying to keep up with in a swimming pool was actually a former Olympic swimmer, except instead of a pool, we were on a mountain, and instead of swimming, we were risking our lives on loose gravel.
“What about you?” he asked brightly. “What kind of cycling do you usually do?”
“Um.” I gestured vaguely at my bike. “Commuting? Like, bike lanes. Paved bike lanes. Sometimes I ride on the waterfront path in Kakaako, which is also paved. Very, very paved.”
The silence stretched between us as this information sank in.
“That… actually explains everything,” he said, grinning.
What could possibly go wrong?
Our Final Climb To The Castles
Here’s the thing about determination and sheer bloody-mindedness: sometimes they actually work. Despite my complete lack of mountain biking skills, despite Travel Buddy having to wait for me every hundred yards or so, we actually made it to the castles.
And they were magnificent. Three medieval ruins perched on rocky outcrops, connected by hiking trails that wound through the forest. We locked our bikes and climbed up to explore the ancient stone walls, peering through arrow slits and imagining what life must have been like for the people who built these fortresses centuries ago. The views over the patchwork quilt of vineyards and villages in the countryside were worth the borderline heat exhaustion.
“Look at this view!” I said, spreading my arms wide to take in the panoramic vista of the Alsace valley spread out below us, as a warm wind tossed my hair around my face. Above us, the puffy white clouds had grown taller, like the watch towers of castles in the sky.
We explored the ruins, read the historical plaques, feeling very accomplished about our little adventure.
But then, I noticed that the light had changed. The sun, which had been beating down mercilessly all day, bathing the countryside in an amber glow, was now filtered through a thick layer of dark clouds.
“Hey,” I said, pointing up at the sky with a growing sense of unease. “Is it just me, or do those clouds look…”
A clap of thunder rolled across the valley, still distant but clearly moving in our direction. And suddenly, I realized we were very exposed on a mountain top with a major storm approaching.
Travel Buddy looked up from his camera and immediately shifted gears. “Okay,” he said, already moving toward our bikes. “We need to get down from here. Now.”
And that’s when our nice little cultural excursion turned into a race of man versus nature.
A Descent of Terror
Back at our bikes, my hands fumbled with the lock as I tried to get back on my bike. The thunder was moving closer, each boom echoing across the valley, as if nature was playing a game of Marco Polo.
“Char,” Travel Buddy said, and there was an urgency in his voice I hadn’t heard before. “We really need to get out of here.”
I looked down at the route we’d taken up, that treacherous wash of loose gravel and scree that had challenged me on the way up when I had all the time in the world. Now we had to get down it quickly, with a thunder storm bearing down on us fast.
“Right,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I felt. “How hard can it be?”
Famous last words.
The Most Terrifying Ride of My Life
What followed was, without exaggeration, the single most terrifying forty minutes of my entire life. We started down the trail. Loose rocks and scree spun out beneath my tires as I jittered along. As Travel Buddy peeled ahead, I was stragling behind, white-knuckled and clutching my handlebars like they were the only thing tethering me to this mortal realm. As I bounced over rocks and roots, my teeth felt like they would chatter out of my mouth, and my brain bounced around inside my skull. As we rode, thunder crashed overhead, with the occasional fat drop of rain. Ignoring the thunderclaps, I tried to focus on not dying, taking the trail one meter at a time. But the bike seat was slamming into my behind with every bump, and my legs felt like jelly from trying to hover above the seat.
As I fell further and further behind, Travel Buddy called out:
“Don’t use your brakes too much or your wheels will slide out!”
EXCUSE ME? Don’t use my BRAKES? The one thing that stands between me and certain death down this rocky cliff face?
“You have to let gravity do the work!” he shouted over his shoulder as he effortlessly navigated around a boulder the size of a loaf of bread. “Just control your speed with your body weight!”
I had no idea what this meant. I’m a city cyclist. In the city, you see an obstacle, you brake. You go too fast, you brake. You panic, you brake. The concept of “controlling speed with body weight” was as foreign to me as quantum physics.
My forearms started to burn from gripping the handlebars. Every three meters or so, I’d feel my tires skid slightly on the loose gravel, and my heart would leap into my throat as I’d wobble to keep my balance. I was going faster than I felt safe, but apparently not fast enough, because Travel Buddy kept having to stop and wait for me.
Tears pricked my eyes, and I sniffled back a mix of terror and frustration. The combination of heat exhaustion, fear, and the growing realization that I was completely out of my depth was overwhelming. I was trying to stay focused on riding, but tears kept blurring my vision, which obviously wasn’t helping with the whole “navigating loose rocks at high speed” situation.
And while I’m having what can only be described as an out-of-body terror experience, what is Travel Buddy doing? TRICKS. He’s bunny-hopping over obstacles, riding with no hands while taking selfies, and at one point, I swear he did some kind of controlled skid stop that looked like it was straight out of a BMX magazine.
“Just lean into the turns!” he called back to me as he effortlessly carved around a curve that I approached like it might be my final resting place.
The thunder was getting louder and more frequent, a promise that a serious storm was about two minutes behind us.
“Almost there!” Travel Buddy shouted, but “almost there” in his vocabulary apparently meant “still several hundred yards of loose rock death trap to navigate.”
By the time we finally reached the bottom of the hill and the blessed relief of flat, solid ground, I was fairly certain I had aged several years. My hands were cramped into talons around the handlebars, my legs were shaking, my shirt was completely soaked through with sweat, and I may have still been sniffling slightly from the lingering terror and relief.
“See?” Travel Buddy said cheerfully, looking like he’d just finished a pleasant warm-up ride. “That wasn’t so bad!”
I stared at him. “I think I saw my life flash before my eyes. Twice.”
“Really? I thought you did great for your first time on that kind of terrain!”
This was either the most backhanded compliment in history or proof that his definition of “great” had been seriously warped by his adventurous childhood.
Survival and Pursuit
If you’d thought that making it down the mountain would be the end of the story. You’d be wrong. Because as we caught our breath at the base of the hill, those storm clouds that had been chasing us decided they weren’t done with us yet. They kept rolling in our direction, following us like a meteorological stalker.
“We need to get back home,” Travel Buddy said, looking at the sky with the same expression I imagine people use when they’re calculating whether they can outrun a bear.
So began the second most exhausting part of our day: racing back to Riquewihr while trying to stay ahead of what was clearly going to be a major downpour.
I am embarrassed to admit that I’d expected e-bikes to be more like mopeds, where you can just sit back and let the motor do the work. And on this day, I discovered that e-bikes are still very much BIKES. The electric assist is exactly that, assist. You still have to pedal. You still have to work.
And after the mountain bike adventure, my legs were already screaming. My back ached from hunching over in terror. I was overheated, dehydrated, and emotionally drained from my mountain biking experience. And now I had to pedal, hard and fast, for several milometers back to safety before the storm.
Travel Buddy, meanwhile, was riding alongside like he’d just had a nice gentle warm-up for his debut on the Tour de France. Occasionally he’d glance back at me with what I can only describe as concerned confusion, like he couldn’t quite figure out why I looked like I was dying.
“You okay back there?” he’d call.
“FINE,” I’d gasp, because I was too proud to admit that I was having a complete mental and physical breakdown.
The storm kept pace with us the entire way back, booming ominously on our coattails but never quite catching us.
Lessons Learned and Wine-Soaked Wisdom
We made it back to Riquewihr just as the first real drops of rain began to fall. We returned the bikes with what I hoped looked like casual nonchalance rather than the desperate relief of someone who had just survived an ordeal. It wasn’t until we were safely back in our room in our wasp-infested apartment that I opened my backpack to discover that my carefully packed $16 bottle of Gewürztraminer had somehow survived the entire ordeal completely intact. Not even the cork had shifted. The wine had been more stable and reliable than I had been during our entire adventure.
We opened it that night and drank it while watching the storm that had chased us finally unleash itself on the valley below. It was, I have to admit, delicious, with notes of apricot and spice, just like the wine books promised.
“So,” Travel Buddy said, raising his glass, “what did we learn today?”
I considered this question while lightning flickered in the distance.
“Well,” I said finally, “we learned that Google Maps doesn’t distinguish between ‘bike trail’ and ‘hiking path that might kill you.’ We learned that e-bikes are not mopeds. We learned that childhood mountain biking experience in volcanic terrain creates a very different skill set than city commuting.”
“And?” he prompted.
“And we learned that sometimes the best travel stories come from the moments when everything goes completely wrong.”
He clinked his glass against mine. “To bad decisions that make good stories.”
“To surviving our own stupidity!”
The Gewürztraminer was perfect. The company was excellent. And the story? Well, the story was going to be told for years.
What We Learned
- Google Maps has a very loose definition of “biking route”
- E-bikes are still bikes and they will make your legs scream if you’re out of shape
- If your travel buddy was raised doing BMX tricks on volcanic gravel, do not trust their assessment of what constitutes “easy terrain”
- $16 wine tastes even better when you’ve risked your life to transport it
- Sometimes the best adventures are the ones that terrify you completely
- Alsace is beautiful, but she’s not above a little light hazing of overconfident tourists
The moral of the story? Sometimes being adventurous means discovering exactly how un-adventurous you actually are. And sometimes that’s the most fun you can have while being absolutely terrified.
