Category: Blog

Three countries in 10 minutes

After breakfast in the room, we got the road on a purposefully shorter day. Afternoon riding is almost unbearable. In fact, stopping for just one second is intolerably hot. At a steady pace at least you make your own breeze. To stop at a traffic light in the full glare of the sun brings an immediate burning sensation.

So as usual we aimed to put distance in early, trundling through Mulhouse and up to the border, where we rejoined the Rhine – still impressively fast and wide.

Here we crossed from France to Germany to Switzerland all in about 10 minutes.

In Basel we had a supermarket lunch on a shady bench by the river.

A common pastime in Basel is to get into the river with a dry bag or float and simply let the current take you downstream, past all the sights. A lane in the river marked by buoys had been set up for this purpose. Scores of people floated past us. No wetsuits. It looked fantastically cooling.

We only had another 15-20 kms after lunch to our pre-booked hotel. Cheap enough to lack air conditioning and sandwiched between the railway and a road!

Now that we are in Switzerland, the crossing of the Alps via the Gottard pass is looming psychologically, if not geographically yet. Three days from now…