I’d had to interrupt my journey and return to Maastricht because of a broken rear pannier rack on my new bike. Four days later I got the call from Velo bike shop that the replacement rack had arrived so I quickly rushed over to Aachen to have it fitted and returned by train to Karlsruhe to resume my journey across France.
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Friday 27 July, 2018. Maastricht to Aachen |35 km|
[It was 36°C – the hottest day of the year so far, and it felt like it!]
I zoomed over that 35 km in less than an hour 15 minutes, to be told they wouldn’t be fitting the rack until next day. It seems to me that the sales department and the maintenance department of Velo need to coordinate a little better.
So I checked into the Marx Hotel (€65) near the bike shop, bought a few more outdoor clothes at Sport Spezial Sportartikel, had a great meal at Burgerista in the main square and, together with a couple of hundred other people, watched the rising of the Blood Moon. Because of light pollution from the city, though, the moon very disappointingly appeared only as a barely-discernable dark red blob. Then I sweltered through a sleepless night in my airtight box of an hotel room with no air conditioner or fan.
Breakfast Saturday was more style than substance, but you’ve got to hand it to the old bird who owns the Hotel – with the flowery décor, matching flower arrangements and chintzy china – she sure has got a lot of style! The bike was done by 11.30, by Connie, an avid cycle tourist herself, who has even been around Tasmania and other parts of Australia going back 20 years.
Saturday 28 July, 2018. Aachen to Hockenheim (by train)|360 km|: Hockenheim to Karlsruhe (by bike) |45km|
I bought a train ticket at the Aachen Hauptbahnhof (main railway station, always written ‘Hbf’) for the 12.07 to Kehl, which is in Southern Germany along the French border opposite Strasbourg, with transfers at Cologne/Mainz/Mannheim/Karlsruhe and Appenweier.
This train journey was supposed to get me back, at 8.30 pm, to where I had caught the train the previous Monday, so that I could cycle the 5km back across the border into Strasbourg and resume my journey to the Atlantic. It only cost €56 too (including €5 for the bike) “because it’s the weekend” she said. (It was €118 going the other way).
But, as it turned out, the train didn’t get me there.
At a little siding just before Koblenz the train parked up for an hour and then we all got turfed off and had to jump onto a local train into Koblenz, where, after another half-hour’s wait we were all herded back onto the original train again, which had caught up with us once more (even with the same driver). But this time the train only just went as far as Hockenheim (home of the German Formula 1 GP) and terminated there. Apparently, there was an “incident” further along the line, involving a body on the railway track, or so the rumour had it.
So, I had to leg it on the bike the last 45km into Karlsruhe. And it was a really nice ride too, for the most part through wet-lands and forest and along the Rhine river bank levees.
It was late already by the time I got to Karlsruhe, and I checked into the first downtown hotel I came across, the Erbprinzenhof, which at €60 was actually pretty good value, with its clacky little fan providing some relief from the sweltering heat. I had a late dinner across the street in a yuppie hamburger establishment.
Sunday 29 July, 2018. Karlsruhe to Gerstheim |127 km|
I decided not to bother using the remaining legs of the train ticket to Kehl, and to ride the full 82 km to Strasbourg instead. And it was really great too!
I made good time of it and it was an easy and interesting ride, so I decided to continue straight on through Strasbourg and finished up riding for another 50 km, still following the Eurovelo 15 route.
This route mostly follows a canal called the Canal du Rhône au Rhin. I had to do a slight detour though, because I continued following the Rhine for longer than I should have in the direction of Kembs. Luckily, I stopped for a rest at a water tower and the German cycle tourist there gave me directions to back-track a couple of k’s and head off west.
Incidentally, he also provided the advice that the water towers in every village in France (“Chateaux d’eau”, they’re called) always provide free, cool, clean drinking water via a spigot at the bottom. Great advice – except it turned out to be totally untrue! I only ever saw only one other working and publicly-accessible faucet in the whole of France!
I was tired of riding by 6pm, and, after examining and rejecting several horrid-looking RV-type compounds, I did find a decent-enough private campground called ‘Camping Au Clair Ruisseau’ that was signposted as being ‘only’ 4km off the velo route but, as you can see from my spidery track, was actually quite difficult to locate, tucked in as it was among plain small-pasture holdings behind the village of Gerstheim.
It was OK, nothing special – nice swimming pool, but no restaurant nearby and so only 2 ice-creams for dinner. My friendly neighbors, who came along after me and pitched their massive tent so close mine that their guy ropes were overlapping mine, were a friendly German/ Venezuelan couple from Basel with 2 girls aged about 10 and 8, and I also shared a beer with the friendly German couple in their fancy Mercedes-towed deluxe caravan on the other side. But why they’d all chosen to stay in this particular spot for a week, as they said they were doing, is beyond me!
Monday 30th July, 2018. Gerstheim to Montbeliard |157 km|
It was flat going and pretty straight too, with a lock (“écluse” in French) about every kilometer or so (and so I was actually going slightly uphill all along here, at about 3 m per écluse).
I guess these canals were important transportation corridors for about 100 years, until the railways came along.
Here are some pictures of flowers growing next to a corn field. Corn is definitely the staple crop around here and in the whole of Europe. I hope they’re smart enough to just eat the stuff, rather than waste it on the inefficient conversion to motor fuel, like the Spanish and the Americans do [Ed: It’s all used for animal fodder, I later discovered]
The big drama of today, though, was that the bike started making a horrible clacking noise that sounded to me like it was coming from the engine case. It was only intermittent but sounded serious, like a broken bearing somewhere. The bike’s performance seemed unaffected, though, so I soldiered on, having no alternative than to risk doing more serious damage, as there was just nowhere to get it looked at. I fired off a couple of emails to Velo in Aachen about it, and just kept on going.
I and my – to my mind – now almost useless heavy piece of aluminium – finally got to a resting-place. In this case, the hill-top fortified town of Montbeliard, and where, due to general knackeredness, I broke the bank again and forked out €65 for a hotel room in Hotel La Balance.
Tuesday 31st July, 2018. Montbeliard to Osselle |119 km|
Next morning, stopping in at a local traiteur to get my staple daily sustenance – a baguette with cheese, a quiche and a slice of flan – I came across Karol and Madeleine, a Dutch/Canadian cyclist couple from Basel who were going my way, and we amiably rode along together and crossed paths a few more times that day. But then the heat got too much for them and they baled out and returned to Basel by train.
The clacking noise from the crank had abated somewhat and in a return email Fabian from Velo suggested it would be OK to just keep going until I came to a Riese & Müller authorized repair shop.
It was a pain in the arse (literally) this day: more canal, then some hills, then the Doubs River; stinking hot, learned the French term for the German term Radler (a glass of half beer/half lemonade, my beverage of choice these days), which is Panaché (which I’ll now have to remember all over again, because I thought it was spelt Pinochet, you know, like the Chilean dictator, only with an ‘a’), and generally just a bloody long hot tiring day.
I breezed right on past Besançon, below, without giving it a second thought, even though it had actually been my landmark destination for the past week.
I made some good distance in spite of the heat and only camped when I came to a very pretty campground called “Paillote Osselle”), some 15km past Besançon. It was the swimming beach in the river that beckoned me in, as well as the casualness of the place (and it was only €10, including electricity – a powered site is usually up to €5 extra). Plus they had an on-site half-decent restaurant (half-decent by French standards that is – truly excellent by Australian standards). Pity about the Spaniards next door playing their crap music until way past bed time.
Wednesday 1st August, 2018. Osselle to Verdun-sur-Doubs |110 km|
I was up bright and early, in spite of the late-night Spanish entertainment, and even packed away a dew-drenched tent in my eagerness to get moving at 7.30, but alas it wasn’t to be – that inviting grass had resulted in an ever so tiny pin-prick from a blackberry prickle (they’re not thorns, apparently) in the rear tyre that caused a flat. I had to wait a while for some other cyclists to begin stirring before I could borrow a pump after finding and patching the leak, so it wasn’t until around 9 that I finally got moving again.
Then it was more of the same as yesterday – great riding, hot day, and still trying to work out whether to follow the bike’s GPS or the confusing signs that promoted either the canal or the river (it mattered because at some point the river and the canal diverged, and if you’re on the wrong side of either it can be a long back-track to find a bridge).
Thursday 2nd August, 2018. Verdun-sur-Doubs to Digoin |93 km|
I took off early from the rather plain campground at Verdun-sur-whatever, and had covered the 28km to the large industrial city of Chalon-sur-Saône by 9am where I promptly got a Pasta salad and Orangina for breakfast from the first Boulangerie I came across, on an industrial estate, and then, when prospects of a feed looked better later on, a salad baguette and burghul salad at another boulangerie the other side of town. It was a confusing day, navigation-wise, at the time, but an examination of my track afterwards showed me it wasn’t really all that bad. Just need to have a bit more confidence in the bike’s GPS!
I got to the very average municipal campground at Digoin around 7pm. At least they had an on-site restaurant of sorts, where, as my introduction to the Loire Valley, I was keen to be able to sample that highfalutin-sounding classic Burgundy dish of Boeuf Bourguignon, which is basically stewed offal and looks like it! But delish’ anyway 🤩.
-ends-
#46 The Canal du Rhône au Rhin: Karlsruhe to Digoin |686 km|