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Travelogue
We left the Mulhouse campsite (a very good campsite, it has to be said) at about 8:00 this morning and cycled directly to the nearest bakery that lay on our route. This happened to be inside the main Mulhouse train station. We parked the bikes outside and M1 went in. You'd think ordering two large coffees, one with milk, one without and two (or sometimes three!) pastries in French would be well within his linguistic abilities by now, but for some reason today was not his day. After a couple of goes, the teenager behind the counter switched the conversation to English (with a cheeky smile!). Well done her! M1 vows to work on his French language skills, never to be defeated like this again!
After fuelling up, we continued, following M1's route of 2022 which we'd recovered from Strava. Leaving Mulhouse in 2022 had proved tricky, due to a complicated convergence of roads, cycle paths and canal. Today, things went more smoothly apart from the almost obligatory Road Closed sign we almost immediately encountered. There seemed to be a lot more cycle path signs now than there were in 2022 but that just might be M1 making yet more excuses.
Not too far out of Mulhouse we joined an excellent cycle path that looks like it is a former railway line. We followed it for about 15 km. On leaving the cycle path, we proceeded on roads until we eventually neared the Swiss border. We passed the unoccupied border control booths and entered Switzerland and the city of Basel. Hooray!
Cycling in Basel proved a bit stressful. M1 remembers it as a quiet place from his 2022 trip. But he passed through early on a Sunday. Today, it was busy and so cycling and navigating whilst avoiding the numerous hazards such as cars, tram lines, trams themselves, car doors and pedestrians was a tough job. But we made it to the centre and took some photos from a bridge over the river Rhine.
We crossed the river, for no other reason than we could see some cafes on its other bank, found one we liked and had cokes and a cookie each. For nearly £20! Yep, we're definitely in Switzerland!
We headed away from the centre of the city. The roads were quite busy with cars and lorries and drivers don't seem to have the same respect for cyclists or cycle lanes as they do in France. For quite a while, it was not fun!
But we survived this too and after a tiring ride, eventually arrived at today's destination, the small town of Gelterkinden.
Finding a campsite at just the right distance from Mulhouse proved impossible, so we are in an AirBnB apartment tonight. M1 had experienced the same problem in 2022 but solved it by cycling 70 miles that day and as a result, fell asleep at 7 pm that day! There's also a significant series of hills a few km from here. In 2022, a Swiss cyclist M1 rode with had called them "a small mountain range" so we'd rather tackle them at the start of a new day with what we hope are fairly fresh legs.
That's it!
Photos
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| Gelterkinden, waiting to get access to our apartment |
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