This morning, we left Basel, cycled roughly north and within minutes had left Switzerland and entered France.
Our route was a good mix of roads, paved cycle paths, and gravel trails. We crossed farmland, passed through small, largely modern towns and occasionally cycled by a canal. The Rhine was largely absent.
About 15 km from our destination, we screeched to a halt outside a very nice looking restaurant/ cafe and ordered ice cream with fruit and Chantilly cream and cold drinks. The ice cream was tye highlight of an otherwise nice but unspectacular day. And it would have been the key event of the day except that...
... Literally a couple of hundred metres from today's campsite, M2 disappeared. M1 cycled back around the mist recent bend to find her pushing her nameless bike and..... Holding one of her pedals in her hand! "It just fell off!" she said.
M1 looked and found the retaining bolt/screw thing had vanished.
DISASTER!
Quite possibly, yes. At the campsite the guy on reception told M1 there was a bike repair shop 5 minutes away (on foot) but that it would not be open until 2 pm tomorrow. Today is of course a Sunday.
M1 researched and found an Intersport a 10 minutes bike ride away or 40 minutes walk. It opens at 9:30 and some branches of Intersport do bike repairs.
So, the plan is for M1 to cycle to Intersport tomorrow on The Mule and ascertain whether or not they can help. If they can, he'll cycle back and then walk M2's bike to Intersport. If not, we have to wait until 14:00 for the other shop. If they can repair, we'll have to cycle into the evening and tomorrow is a 65 mile ride. If they can't, it's back to the drawing board.
We're taking a rest day in Basel having now cycled almost 1,000 miles. We didn't cycle quite as far in week #3 as in the previous two weeks but we made up for this by doing lots of climbing, especially in the Alps. Meanwhile, having put the Alps behind us, assuming this meant we were in for easy peasy cycling from then on, to our surprise it's not all been quite so simple. There have been steep hills and a headwind to contend with and the result is, we're pretty tired. So rest is the order of the day.
But so is tourism. You can't come to a place and not take a look around, can you? So we started our day with a self-guided walking tour that took us a couple of hours. The streets and houses in general are pretty but there are highlights like the Rathaus, the former parliament building and the munster, as well.
M2 particularly liked the Tinguely Fountain. She has a thing for dancing fountains :-)
We saw people floating down the Rhine, often with their flotation bags that also hold their clothes and possessions. Our Airbnb host had explained this tradition when we checked in yesterday. He even pointed out that the apartment was equipped with one of these flotation bags so we could give it a try ourselves of we wanted to. M1 had muttered something about exhaustion and drowning and it wasn't mentioned again, but it was good to have the practice explained.
Almost next door to our apartment is a fountain which we walked past today. Our ever helpful Airbnb host had explained that bathing in Basel's fountains in a hot day was very much the done thing and sure enough, yesterday right up into the evening, people were sitting in the fountain, sometimes with a beer. It's a very chilled place.
This morning, the streets were quiet and the fountains empty though.
After finishing our tour we crossed the Rhine on one of the city's ferries, anchored to a cable that spans the river and powered only by the currents. It was a very tranquil experience.
We're now relaxing for a few hours but we'll probably venture out this evening.
Status
How are we doing?
In short, we're doing well. Our route as planned is just over 1500 miles long and we've cycled over 900 miles along the route (actual distance cycled varies because of detours, e.g. to campsites).
So, it depends what rate we progress at now but if we progress in the way we did in our first two weeks, we could be as much as a week ahead of schedule. This will give us opportunities later on, perhaps.
This week we cycled in no less than four countries, as well. Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria and Germany! Borders are relaxed affairs and we sometimes didn't even know we'd crossed into another country!
Solar Power
As previously reported, a solar panel has been brought along for this trip. M1 is super impressed by it and running an experiment to see how long his heavily used smartphone and his Suunto watch can be powered from the sun.
The solar panel charges a Belkin 20000 mAh battery pack / power bank during the day and other devices are charged from the battery. So far, the battery pack have not once been charged from domestic electricity and has only been replenished using solar power. This is amazing. It's now 21 days since M1's phone was plugged into a wall socket.
The experiment will continue. Hopefully we'll continue to enjoy sufficiently sunny weather for solar power generation!
Mobile Blogging
M1 started this trip attempting to blog using his smartphone only. This was not always easy and for a while had been abandoned in favour of a return to using his trusty Chromebook which has been a faithful companion on all bikepacking trips so far.
But alas! Said trusty Chromebook is perhaps not long for this world. Yesterday, WiFi would not switch on and it looks like the wifi adapter component has failed. We can still watch movies on the Chromebook but in most other respects it is now useless. So, mobile blogging is back and so far, going ok.
