Cornucopias and Escargatoires
It’s raining in the morning, and there is no magic reprieve in the shape of a cancellation so we must pack up and ride after one of the best breakfasts on the whole trip. By best breakfast I mean bircher muesli, really good yogurt and fruit and bread with a bit of substance, not the smashed avocado kind we Melbournites are used to.
…Hump Day!
It’s hump day. Notwithstanding that today is Thursday, for this trip it’s hump day because today we go over the hump that dominates the profile of this entire trip.
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Auf Wiedersehen Schweiz, auf Weidersehen Rhein
Switzerland is a bit of an outlier in these parts. It is not part of the EU but is part of the Schengen Area which means all those border crossings we did yesterday and the one we will do today do not require pulling out a passport and answering questions. Indeed, those border crossings are pretty much non-events. You barely notice them.
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Where the bloody hell are we anyway? Switzerland? Germany?
It’s hard to know what country we’re in today.
The Rhine river forms a handy border between Switzerland and Germany, except over here in the area between Tiengen and Stein am Rhein, where the border becomes an almost arbitrary set of lines on the map. I’m sure there are long historical reasons for the border placement, but for a 21st century traveller it all seems a bit random. There is even a point here where you can be in Switzerland and look south (and also north) toward Germany.
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Whoa, we’re half way there / Whoa oh, livin’ on a prayer
Bon Jovi, 1986
Basel seems unwilling to let us go. There are two ways to leave town on EV6 – north of the river, where you quickly enter Germany, and south of the river, where you stay in Switzerland. After a quick consultation with an EV6 forum (sample group of three responses) we choose south.
The signage is terrible. We end up at a dead end at a ship dockyard and have to backtrack a few kilometres. We give up on the south-of-the-river route, cross the river and easily find the route out of town. (In our defence, we are not the only ones this morning to make this navigational mistake.)
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Was I ever here before?
Basel and I are old friends.
I spent the northern winter of 1987/88 in Basel. They were heady days. Basel was my first landing place in Europe, and as a young wide-eyed and barely travelled 24-year-old I felt like I’d been transported to another world.
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With much sadness today I bid au revior to France. She’s been a wonderful host, apart from her dogged insistence on sprinkling pig on everything except the sweetest of treats, and I will miss her culture and beauty.
However, Switzerland awaits!
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Lions!
There are places you don’t need to hang around in and L’Isle-sur-le-Doubs is one of them, though it does have a half-decent boulangerie for breakfast. The town is very busy with cars in the morning rush, but I’m not sure where they are going.
It’s an 80+km day today, so we get away as quickly as possible, hoping to get to Mulhouse before anticipated rain.
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A faux-Swiss fish massage?
I could swear we are in Switzerland already. Once we leave the vibrant and bustling Besançon (with a belly full of lunch ice-cream) we find ourselves rolling along beside Le Doubs, with vibrant green vegetation and the ground rising sharply on either side.
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I had to ride 1,000km in France to find a vegetarian restaurant
Margie Joyce, June 20, 2023, France
It’s a big day for we cycling tourists in France. After two-and-a-half weeks of riding, we are going to hit 1,000km today. It’s something we’ve done before on our Eastern Europe and Canadian trips, but this time we aren’t even half way! Budapest is still more than 1,500km away!
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