Mulhouse to Mohlin nr. Basel Suisse (!)
69 km 42 mi
Quiet Sunday morning after a marvellous sleep saw us once again get into our morning ritual of packing all our worldly belongings onto our bicycles to roll still further East...
By now we have each established a pattern, an MO as it were.... Paul glides around the campsite with a calculatedly calm demeanor, a man with purpose, in an agonisingly repeatable fashion..... much as a male cob swan would circulate about a pond of his own.... no flap, no fuss, just getting the job done in a timely predictable fashion.... Doug, on the other hand creates much more of an air of....🤚🤚🤚....hey, just you hold on a minute there, comparisons of this nature are unhelpful, non constructive, breed descent in the ranks, and do little to create a strong team.... but I freely admit that a Seagull's general level of tidiness is probably cloer to the truth than some 'House of Windsor' Swan....but I do seem to make 'that Genie disappear into that bottle' in not too tardy a time frame.... it's called the non-iso-entropic packing strategy... as our Chemistry Prof Dr. Eberhardt used to say 'the MixedUppedness of the system!! I gotta give Paul create, he's pretty damn good at mashalling his gear first thing in the morning though!!😎👍 My forthcoming autobiography, will give far more detail of the vagueries of Doug in this regard.... it is being ghost written by my dear wife, Maria, and ahall be entitled, 'The Errors of his Ways'! 🤣🤙
We rolled out from Mulhouse imaging a shortish day of 45km as we delibrately 'overshot' a short day yesterday so as to enjoy the fruits of Mulhouse..... and the fruit was good, very good indeed!! It's a beautiful city, as so many of France's second and third tier cities are.... a great square, beautiful architecture, a café culture, not to mention water and quiet streets all aound!! In the morning a 15,000 woman strong event was about to begin in the form of a Breast Cancer Marathon according to the Marshalls Pierre,Victor, Christophe, and two other guys of such unusal names that neither of us could remember their names!! It was shaping up to be a great event!!
Coffee between 'Landseer, and Dietwiller' left me in no doubt I am a Landseer and not a Dietwiller as we tucked into untold delicious patisseries!!🤣👍
For those of you that know my navigation preferences, it shall come as no surprise that I took Paul on an unusual paryial circumnavatigation of Basel Airport!!🤭🤙
But our day turned out to be longer than the planned 45km.... not due to our own errors,I hasten to add!! You see we got to Basel in the midst of a Charity Bike Fun Ride or something.... there must have been 10's of 1000's of riders.... we got bogged down a bit, but ended up going with the flow all the way into one of the refreshment stations compleye with live music, a bier garten alsi selling German Sausahe Hot Dogs!! Before we knew itwe were dragged into the centre of attention as our heavily loaded bikes garnered considerable interest of nit only fellow riders, but also the organisees, camera people, the band itself....well we both got interviewed and then photographed, and the asked to become some kind of living karaoke singers to the live band issuing out tone deaf renditions of 'Hey Jude's' chorus... DaDaDa Dadadada ... on so it went! The crowd was impressed at our ambitions ,and intentions, and gave us a rousing reception!! We both left there feeling like SuperStars, they were all so fabulous natured!!
So off we trundled to Basel Centrum along the Rhine to the website which was further unconsidered 10 km from our lunch stop.... we had to do 6km of that 'swimming Upstream' as it were of this same said Cyclc Fun Ride....Eventually we gotbto the campsite at 1430h only to be told it was closing for the winter in 1 hour, 'so clear off' our nearest next campsite in the direction of travel was over 20km to theeast.... so onwards we trundled into our nowquite familiar headwind!!
We set up camp and reviewed the weather forecast... aka 'Warnings' for the next 24 hrs and so we are now hunt/gathering a solid roof over our heads for tomorrow night!!
Our day ended at a busy 7pm... we went about on foot to get a Thai meal which was fantastic ... but added over 4miles to our walking legs.....🥵
Tired now at 1130pm!!
TTFN,
Doug&Paul
PS - First 1000 miles on Route2&EV6 for Doug!! Trip@30%.....!!
Paul at 827 miles on EV6 alone at c. 25%.... Boy's getting stronger each dsy, carrying a better pace as time passes!!💪😎👍
Both bikes in great shape, spare pannier racks brackets (Type 2) just in from Doug's log cabin via Maria, and CycleFixDennis (Type 2) spares due Wednesday, so after that the pannier problems will be all but completely sorted.... although an Ortlieb solution may well be lurking in it's home country of Germany.... hoping to source those components during our 10+ days in Allemagne (sp).....
No comments:
Post a Comment