Author: Brian Burger

Short and straightforward ride through Switzerland today, mostly along the Rhine from Schafhausen to a farm near Bad Zurzach.

“Schlaf im Stroh” means “sleep in straw”, and I originally thought it was just the name of the B&B/lodging program for Swiss farms, but here with the Schneider family outside Bad Zurzach it really does give you the chance to sleep on straw: clean straw packed into frames in the loft of a converted barn. The ground floor is a very nicely set up group dining room and washrooms, and there is also space on the lawn for tents.

It’s still a working farm, too, with a couple types of cows (including a herd of hairy Highland cattle), crops, and a couple of goats.

Good weather for most of the day, except for a short but very intense rain squall which we could see coming up the valley toward us in time to retreat to the covered cafe terrace of a local thermal bath/rec centre. We had an afternoon coffee and watched it piss down for about half an hour then stop, which was much nicer than riding through it!

Random biking in Switzerland moment from today: rolling through the forest just above the Rhine (which is the Swiss-German border as well) and turn the corner to see a substantial concrete bunker, still in very functional shape, peering over the river toward Germany.

We had a chance to briefly meet one of the senior people in SwissMobility, Lucas, who joined us for the day’s ride. Hopefully he got some good feedback from us on what we’ve seen here in Switzerland and earlier on the trip.

Off to another lodging farm in Switzerland tomorrow, then finally France on Saturday when we pass through Basel and spend the night in Mulhouse, France.

Left Germany this morning, starting with a 20km or so ride from our Protestant hostel to Uberlingen, then down the shores of the Bodensee to Meersburg, where we caught a small car ferry to Constance, which is still in Germany but right against the Swiss frontier.

The ride from Constance along the Rhine to Schafhausen was really nice, through the usual mix of small villages, the occasional small town, farmland, and a couple of pieces of woods.

The Swiss have a well marked series of cycle routes which are generally simple to follow, and so far Swiss drivers seem as generally well housebroken as their German and Austrian counterparts, with the usual slight question mark for delivery drivers and any Audi you see…

We’re staying in a very interesting hostel inside Schloss Laufen, which is directly beside and above the famous Rheinfall, where the entire Rhine crashes over a really dramatic waterfall. The hostel is… old-fashioned. Really genuinely antique, there are ten people in our room in a sort of massive bunk with five on the top deck and five below. Apparently one of the rooms on the ground floor has eighteen in it. It really is like they set this place up in the 1920s (or possibly earlier…) and haven’t changed a thing since.

Also, Switzerland makes the rest of Europe look cheap. More on that later…

Off deeper into Switzerland tomorrow, to some sort of farm hostel further along the Rhine. No idea if WiFi will be available, so this place might get quite for a day or three.

We left the Danube behind today and climbed up and out of it’s valley and to the Bodensee (Lake Constance).

We had been warned about the climb up and over from the Danube to the Bodensee, but the route we chose (largely by accident) involved a slightly longer route but a much, much shallower, easier climb.

The descent on the Bodensee side was awesome, several kilometres of descent on easy, curving nearly car free back roads.

We’re staying in a Protestant-run hostel about five km outside Uberlingen. Uberlingen has, unfortunately, the worst drivers we’ve seen since starting the ride: aggressive, crowding and acting most unlike the housebroken, polite road-sharing drivers we’ve gotten used to!

Comparing this Protestant-run hostel to the two Catholic ones we’ve stayed at, the Catholics are coming out ahead so far. They have far more interesting buildings in better locations and slightly better food; the Protestants have better WiFi…

Tomorrow we’re off into Switzerland, which is a first for me, and we start with a ferry ride across the Bodensee, which should be fun.

Short ride today, just 34km or so, but a bit of a slow ride, both because we stopped quite a bit and because a lot of the riding was up and down on gravel paths, gradually climbing into the hills where the Donau starts.

We’re spending the night at an old hunting lodge turned guesthouse about 8km upriver from Beuron, Germany, about 20km east of Tuttlingen.

The Donau abandons all pretence of being a navigable river just outside Siegmaringen, where we started this morning, and quickly enters much more rugged and hilly country, with limestone bluffs along the sides of the valley and a couple of dramatic schlosses up on the bluffs.

At the Jagerhaus we’re spending the night at, the Donau is only about four metres wide, you can wade across it and only be wet to the knees, and if you don’t want to get wet a nice line of big rocks has been arranged as stepping stones.

Quite a change from the massive river we started biking alongside in Vienna just over two weeks ago!

The one minor downside to this Jagerhaus is that they’re not really equipped for groups as large as hours, so four or five of us are sleeping out on the balconies. It’s actually quite comfortable, I have a good sleeping bag, and there’s even a plug to charge my phone at overnight!

We depart from the Donau tomorrow at Tuttlingen and head south to the Bodensee (Lake Constance) to spend the night at Unterlingen before heading into Switzerland for a few days.