Author: Brian Burger

Now that we’re in France the local authorities and bike groups are starting to pay attention to our ride, organized as it is by a French group, the AF3V.

That resulted in a total of three official receptions for us yesterday, and a certain amount of faffing about that became a bit tiresome.

We only had 60km to go, and first event was fun, a meeting at 1100 about 20km from our start point at an old Alsace farmhouse where the locals served up local wine and some treats, including creme de cassis and white wine apertifs, which are quite a thing at 1100 in the morning…

We were then told the next event was only 20km away and not until 1530… We could have walked that distance in the time available, but chose to do a picnic lunch beside the canal and sleep off the apertifs in the shade for an hour or two.

We usually try to get the cycling part of the day done before the hottest part of the day in mid/late afternoon, and in hindsight we really ought to have blown off the second reception and gone straight to Belfort. It was held in a playground with inadequate amounts of shade, and at the end of it we were told we were all to ride as a group into Belfort, which was still nearly 20km off.

We had been joined by a number of new members in Mulhouse and an large number of local cyclists had joined us for the day to ride with us to Belfort, and 60+ cyclists is far, far too many to keep in one pack.

We had been told to stop at the brand-new, very shiny TGV station enroute to Belfort but when we showed up the station some employee started yelling at us to move our bikes, so most of us kept going into Belfort.

The local organizers insisted on keeping the mob of cyclists together all the way through town, which really wasn’t wise given the size of the group.

This resulted in two accidents, one a collision with a bollard by one of the local cyclists, the other one if our ride members, a lady from Hong Kong, being clipped by a car. No serious injuries, but neither accident would likely have happened if we had been following our usual practice of riding in small groups at our own pace.

The final reception was up at the massive and impressive citadel above Belfort, a fortress started by Vauban in the reign of Louis the Fourteenth and expanded until the beginning of the 20th C.

That was a good dinner and a pretty good end to a very, very long day, but the whole thing was a bit of a gongshow. Thankfully the rest of our ride schedule has no more days as heavily scheduled.

Long ride tomorrow, 85km to Baum-les-Dames.

Short day of riding today and another Swiss farm stay, sleeping in the straw again.

The ride was the now familiar mix of farmland, villages, woods, and the occasional town, with warm but not hot weather – and unlike yesterday, no mid-afternoon rain.

Leaving Switzerland for France tomorrow, which also means returning to the familiar Euro instead of the Swiss franc, which has been a nuisance!

Left Switzerland for France today, which was probably good timing for the French nationals in our group after last night’s 5-2 thrashing of Switzerland by France at the World Cup.

Straightforward ride from the farm we were staying at near Möhlin, along the Rhine through Basel, a half-kilometer trip through Germany to the “Bridge of Three Nations” (an elegant EU-funded footbridge over the Rhine) and into la belle France, and also back into the Eurozone – no more messing around with Swiss francs!

The rest of the ride to Mulhouse (pronounced something like “Mull-ooze”, if you wondered) was mostly along old canals and through small villages. It was hot but not unpleasantly so, but the dust on the unpaved stretches of the old canal towpaths was the worst we’ve seen so far – we all arrived at the Mulhouse hostel covered in fine white dust. I just washed the bike off in Switzerland, too…

Now that we’re in France the official receptions have started, the AF3V being a French organization. We got to listen to the mayor of Mulhouse go on in French for a while, had a couple of mercifully brief remarks from others, then got some free samples of local beer and wine. We have a bunch of these over the next weeks in France; providing the alcohol supply and quality are kept up they’ll be survivable!

Off to Belfort tomorrow and Baum-les-Dames the day after, but internet is likely unavailable so expect another flurry of backdated posts in a few days!

(The title comes, of course, from Casablanca, and no, the line is not “Play it again, Sam”. Go watch the movie again if you don’t believe me…)

My grandmother pointed out in a email that I hadn’t talked much about the other people along on this tour, so here’s a very general introduction! The group is roughly 50 people, but we’ve sorted out pretty much by language.

First is the French-speakers, mostly actually from France, including our hard working chef du course Marc, who works for the AF3V, a French organization that helps organize cycle routes, including the long distance international EuroVelo routes like the EV6 that we’re following. Overall there are about twenty French, with a number of them only doing a few weeks of the ride instead of the whole route, which included a few Belgians who were with us the first week or two of the ride.

The French include a sub-group of three polio survivors and their support riders. The polio survivors are all riding hand pedaled lightweight trikes – I’ll get a photo up when I can, they’re fascinating machines.

The next largest group is about 19 strong and are all from Hong Kong,  a number of whom don’t even speak much English, nevermind other European languages.

Finally there are currently ten English speakers, five Yanks, two Brits, a Kiwi couple, and some arrogant twit from Canada.

During the day when we’re riding we tend to ride in groups of two to six or so. Bigger groups of cyclists tend to be awkward, in my experience. We tend to sort by both language and riding ability/comfortable cruising speed on the road.