30km, 23-37deg, find and hot. Brekkie in our room again this morning and then we headed off about 8am to beat the worst of the heat. It was easy finding our way to the River Neckar bike path where we spent most of a fairly short day. It was a gradual downhill (the Neckar River flows down into the Rhein River at Mannheim) with a tailwind all day. On spec, we changed over to the other bank and rode away from the river a few 100m to a place called Ladenburg, a gem of a medieval village with many fine examples of 12-15th century architecture and remnants of the town wall. The people there had been very clever and built a lot of houses in/on the town wall using the same coloured stone and brick; giving the effect that the houses were always there. This village is seriously old; it dates back to 3,000BC. The Romans took over in the first century and made it a military/farming base. Even thought it was early we stopped for mornos. Like the Romans, we also moved on eventually. We arrived at Mannheim well before lunch, dumped our bags at the Hotel reception and went for a walk to see the Rhein for the first time this trip. It's a lovely wide river with clean flowing water which always has plenty of boat traffic. Hundreds of river-cruise boats go up and down the Rhein from Rotterdam, Holland to Basel, Switzerland. After lunch at a large shopping centre on the Rhein, we walked (all the time baking in 37-38deg) back to the hotel to check in. It was not until we got to our rooms that we discovered that the aircon was close to useless. When Wendy checked she was initially told that a technician was fixing it but on pushing the point was told that no one could fix it today. And seeing tomorrow is Sunday it is not likely that anything will be done then either. We didn't feel like racing around for another hotel so we stayed, but Mick and Kate moved to a different hotel. At 8:30pm the outside temp was 37deg and in our room it was 27.8deg. Tomorrow is expected to be hotter so that's going to be interesting. Dinner was traditional Mexican, picked mainly for the fact that it was inside an aircon restaurant. It turned out to be great food. The cocktails weren't too bad either. Only because it was hot some of us had a small icecream for desert on the way back to the hotel.