Category Archives: bikes

bikepacking, bikes, Europe, GPS, history, travel

The hills may be getting bigger

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Well, my commandeered verandah may have kept me dry, but it was a rather broken night’s sleep. I still couldn’t manage to get away before nine – but when I did, I changed course south to cut across the bulge in Switzerland encroaching into France. I was off-road and with the overnight rain things were decidedly muddy. Quite by accident, as I approached the Swiss border I happened across Kilometre Zero – the start of the Western Front in WWI. At that time, before Germany had lost Alsace at Versailles, the German-French frontier was here with the Swiss to the south. The ruins of the German defences were still visible. The Swiss Army had recently reconstructed the wooden fort that they used to keep an eye on the belligerents.

I turned to the road for a while before laying my eyes on a ridge above the valley to the south. This whole time it had been overcast with just enough drizzle to mean that the jacket had to stay on – but with the warmth, the rain trousers didn’t last long. I followed a double-track gravel road to the top of the ridge – it was pretty steep and took me through seven and then eight hundred metres. There was a tiny ski field at the top, but a missing sign sent me on a big loop downhill and then I had to recover quite a bit of altitude – a little frustrating to lose an hour, but hey ho.

There was a big plunge down to the River Doubs, it was rocky, slippery and all kinds of good fun to ride down. It’s times like these that make it nice to have a mountain-bike with big knobbly tyres on such a tour – I do spend quite a bit of time off-road now that it’s drier than the Ardennes. Trying to get a few miles in for the day, I followed the river down the valley to St Hippolyte – a rather nice little town that had a potable water supply outside the information centre (many fountains seen so far today were non-potable) and provided the day’s bakery stop.

Every village has a church and it’s usually the most obvious thing to take a photo of – this one before the first big climb of the day.

The valley from which I climbed.

And into the Doubs valley.

St Hippolyte

The only way out of St Hippolyte, in the southerly direction I was headed, is a really big road climb – my biggest yet that took me up 400 metres on a rather busy road. After giving him a head start in town, I hauled in another cycle tourist – he for some reason had two rear panniers, a bag on the handlebars and a trailer usually used for towing children with who-knows-what in it. That some people manage to find so many things to take on tour continues to baffle me – he really was breathing heavily.

I read somewhere, it doesn’t seem believable, that this area was where the first pack horses were bred. This one certainly had a great deal of stockiness about it.

At the top of the hill it did seem that I was up on a plateau – maybe this is what Adrien was talking about. Through a mixture of roads, forestry roads and mountain-bike trails I continued south. Stopping in Le Russey for dinner I got chatting to a couple of mountain-bikers that were just heading out on their weekly club ride. I was tempted to join them, if I could find somewhere to store my rear bag, but truth be told I was too tired from the day’s climbing. For only the second time this trip I had hauled myself and my load (small compared to some, admittedly) through over two thousand metres of climbing. I didn’t last long after dinner before finding a camping spot – I hope my tent stays up as there’s been a strong southerly all afternoon (which was delightful), it’s just started to rain and the stony ground here was not at all receptive to tent pegs.

Oh, if anyone can tell me what these little towers are for I’d be most interested. I first noticed them back in the Ardennes, they were larger there. I thought first perhaps they were fire lookouts (always in forested areas), but they are much too short. The one on the left is tiny, the platform is barely a metre off the ground; the one on the right is more of a normal size for around here.

bikepacking, bikes, Europe, GPS, travel

Saint Louis south

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By the time I got off the train, it was mid-afternoon – so it was a gentle reintroduction to the saddle. Quite quickly I was out of town and steadily climbing up onto a ridge on nice gravel tracks as I just followed my nose heading generally south-west. Overcast, and at that nice temperature that it’s sometimes cool and sometimes warm (depending on level of exertion) it was perfect riding weather with no breeze. Soon I was in woods and bikepacking seem to make sense again. For what turned out to be only a forty kilometre day, I did a fair amount of climbing – and reached the massive heights of 650 m, shamefully the highest I’ve gotten so far. After dinner, the riding got even better with a big climb to get things going again and some nice challenging rocky fast descents – and a gently steady drizzle began to fall, even that was quite nice.

What houses are looking like now, opportunely taken while putting more layers on for the evening riding.

I had hoped to keep riding until after eight, but when I came across a log cabin locked up for the season, the roofed veranda was too good an opportunity to pass up – no need to get the tent out and get it all wet in the heavy rain that is forecast tomorrow morning. But stopping early does leave a bit more to do tomorrow if I’m to make Aosta on the weekend. I think I’ll head through a bulge in Switzerland tomorrow before heading back to France to skirt the border. Although, Adrien did say that if you get up onto the plateau of the Juras at about 1000 m you can stay up there for a long time and it’s really nice – maybe I’ll have to see if I can find what he was talking about.

bikepacking, bikes, city, Europe, GPS, history, travel

A Strasbourgian Birthday

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I’ve a hour or so up my sleeve while I wait for a train to Basel – yes, a train. But I’ve been convinced that the cycling from Strasbourg to the Basel/Mulhouse area is none too exciting and while pleasant, the ride from Wissembourg to Strasbourg was enough of the flat Rhine valley to see. From there, I think I’ll skirt the French-Swiss border through the Jura range – if I can handle that & whatever the weather does – and somehow get over/through the Alps to Aosta in NW Italy.

As mentioned, Saturday’s ride into Strasbourg was not too thrilling – pretty flat (only a hundred metres of climbing in over ninety kilometres) as I paralleled the Rhine upstream. A lot of it was road too, with not many dedicated cycle routes to be had. It rained quite a bit, but nowhere as bad as the torrents that fell from the sky in Belgium. As I was sitting eating my lunch, through another shower, I saw a couple of Italian flags flying past on the back of touring bikes. Eventually I caught up to Giorgio & Nora sheltering under a shop awning from another shower. From Umbria, they were a week into their honeymoon cycle-touring from Amsterdam back towards Italy – I think they were sick of the same weather that I was.

While we mostly conversed in English as we shared the ride into Strasbourg, it was fun to try out what Italian I can remember. Just as we approached the city, there was a cycle-path off the road and this one was most definitely riding along the top of the Maginot line – it was raised like a stop-bank for the river, but every couple of hundred metres there was a concrete bunker/pill-box. I bid my Italian cycling buddies arrivederci as we neared their campground and I my first warmshowers.org experience (like couch-surfing, but for cycle-tourists).

Adrien greeted me warmly, we managed to get my bike in the elevator up to the sixth floor (29” wheels are almost a bit much for small European elevators) and I even got a loaned a pair of house shoes (slippers) for my stay. Thankfully, Adrien graciously let me stay an extra night to what I initially proposed – this meant that I could have my birthday completely off the bike – and cooked me dinner and made tea. Like a lot of border town/cities around here – Strasbourg has at different times been German & French.

More TPHS history classes here: Germany lost Alsace (the region of which Strasbourg is the largest city) and neighbouring Lorraine back to France after Versailles, I’m unsure how many times before the area has changed hands. So there is a big German influence in the city’s buildings and language. In fact, Adrien is a primary school teacher and he shares two classes of six to seven year olds with another teacher – he teaches in German, while the other teacher teaches in French (I think I’ve got that correct). But Adrien is from Brittany, so not a native German speaker – but then Europeans do so much better at learning languages than Kiwis.

I slept well on a proper mattress, slept-in & missed birthday calls from family back home, returned said calls, slowly got organised and headed into the city for a leisurely look around – snacking regularly on various baked goodies. A climb up the cathedral (also called Notre Dame) tower was the most strenuous my day got – but 330-odd stairs take a little effort. As it was Sunday, there were only really tourists around but the city gradually woke up and was nice to walk around looking at the buildings and canals. I sat writing postcards, finally, with a beer looking up at the cathedral.

I did enjoy looking at all the steep roofs from the cathedral tower.

The view from Adrien’s apartment

Upon my return Adrien & his mate had returned from a couple of hours of road riding to the west towards the Vosges. I had suggested that I take him out for dinner as thanks and also for my brithday – but he was keen to cook crepes and somehow with the help of his ex-flatmate, it turned into a dinner party of nine. We rearranged the kitchen and living area to try and hold nine people and then Adrien dragged out his crepe hot-plate, for want of a better word. Bretons take their crepes seriously – this hot-plate was a 30th birthday present and it was hefty, weighing in at eighteen kilograms! That’s getting up there with my loaded bike. A vast amount of batter was made up, with buckwheat flour – this is best I’m told and gradually people started arriving.

Over a few hours the crepe hot-plate was in constant use and over good conversation (although I was lost whenever it strayed from English, which was often) and three bottles of champagne a most memorable birthday was rounded off. Somehow during the course of the evening my named morphed to Brian – to which there is only one answer. “I’m not Brian!” – of course that is slightly wrong with the negative, but it’s always surreal to me to be discussing Monty Python with people from foreign-speaking countries, for some reason.

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Adrien with the tools of the trade

By the time I ran a few errands this morning (another kilogram shed from my luggage and rear bag structure now more secure), it was getting close to noon – Adrien has definitely gone out of his way to accommodate me. What a great stay and a nice break from the bike (only two weeks in), thanks Adrien and au revoir.

bikepacking, bikes, Europe, GPS, travel

To pretty Wissembourg

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Another leisurely start to the day, I was riding by nine. Descending out of the forest that sheltered me for the night, I headed south towards the French border – most of the day’s riding followed the rough outline of the border, just a few kilometres to the north. To start with it was quite chilly, but by about ten o’clock I had my fleece off (never to be seen again – I can’t for the life of me figure out where it has gone, it always goes in the same place in my bag) as there was a little bit of climbing to be done. The first part of the day was through reasonably open farm & cropping land – sometimes it was worth stopping to admire and take a picture.

Shortly after, I stopped to do the big battery changeover for the GPS – replacing the six now charged batteries, with the six empty ones that have powered my navigation for the previous day and a half. Except this time, the ones in the unit were not charged. This had happened before at the start, but as I got it all sorted eventually I assumed it was user error – this time definitely not. This led to quite a bit of time pondering how to sort all this out and get where I wanted to go. Thankfully, I keep some spares so I’m good for a day or two – but either I source a wall-charger & become more dependent on the grid, hope mine becomes a bit more reliable (not much chance), buy copious amounts of single-use AAs – or go without a GPS, but I do rather like knowing where I’m going and where I’ve been for future reference. It’s little problems like this, & losing one’s sweater, that become much bigger than they should when you are travelling solo and don’t have anyone to discuss them with… There was a big long downhill on off-road tracks that took me down to the bottom of the valley.

About a third of the way through the day’s riding, the terrain turned much more forested. I was still mostly on dedicated cycle paths and they seemed to following rivers, so any climbs weren’t strenuous and everything was pleasant. It is, however, difficult for me to take photos of riding through forests that capture just how nice it was – all you ever end up seeing is some trees and the mood is not conveyed at all. With one little climb after lunch at a beer garden – which while the beer was cheap, didn’t really serve food, oops – the rest of the day was also pretty easy.

Mention must be made of firewood stacks – they’re everywhere out here and some of them really are quite large.

I’d previously decided that I’d find a hotel in Wissembourg so that I could get organised for the TransVosges route – which would probably be four or five days of riding (from what I could tell by looking at the elevation profile & distance). As a wiser person than I mused, bikepacking might not be all that fun for him as the performance of the bike would suffer and take away from the enjoyment of the riding. With my experiences so far, while the exploring facet of my trip has been great, the mountain-biking in the purest sense has not got me excited. Plus, once again, being solo, the prospect of four or five days without anyone to share the highs or lows of such a big route with is just too much. Add in that doing the TransVosges would greatly increase the chance of me spending my birthday alone – any desire to head to the hills just now has gone. I must have got this all wrong – I’m not quite cycle touring and I can’t quite get this solo-bikepacking thing to work.

The fool in me thinks everything will be OK once I get to Italy and I can at least hold a halting conversation in the local language. But, not being the most outgoing of people, I’d really have to force myself to engage a bit more – which may be a bit drastic or require drastic steps! But as it is, I’m tired of just passing through seeing really nice places and not having any real sense of what is happening in said places. Anyway, I’ll head to Strasbourg, which I’ve wanted to see for a while and then work out the best way to get to Italy – proabably train to Turin.

Wissembourg surprised me, which wasn’t hard as I knew nothing of it, by being very pretty – perhaps the prettiest town I’ve seen yet on this trip. In the Alsace region (here comes WWII history classes again) there is a fair bit of Maginot Line history around, so that interests me. I wandered around the delightful streets in the late afternoon sun, had my first gelato of the trip & yet couldn’t really shake the malaise. After catching up on the mammoth photo dump for the previous post I tried to order my dinner in Italian at Pizzeria Chianti – but the French proprietor wasn’t having any of that!