Category: Travel

A stream of consciousness post of things missed or that a camera simply can’t capture.

The uniform hum of multiple bike tires on pavement when you’re in a fairly tight group at a good speed.

The enterprising farmer who put a Coke vending machine, a small table and and umbrella at one corner of his barn next to the EV6.

Standard Bavarian village skyline: church steeple, construction crane, tree on pole. Repeat every three to six kilometres across most of the Bavarian part of the trip.

Bavarian men of all ages really do wear lederhosen unironically, often as part of their Sunday best, but sometimes just to cut the lawn.

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.

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…)

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!