Day 1 – Wednesday 30 July

Basel to Thann

Intended Campsite

Domaine de Champé, Bussang (http://www.domaine-de-champe.fr/)

Actual Hotel

Hôtel Restaurant aux Sapins, Thann (http://www.hotelrestaurantauxsapins.com/)

Notes

On Wednesday I awoke ridiculously early and walked across the grassy campsite to the somewhat grubby toilets and showers. I had hung up my washing over night on some communal washing lines but things were still wet. I took them down and intended to festoon them on my panniers, but it then began to rain and after packing up in the wet and rolling up the sodden tent I sheltered under the canopy of a seating area. I had locked my bicycle there last night and only now noticed that there was a sign saying bicycles were not allowed under the canopy.

I tucked into a breakfast of cold bread and cheese while other early risers come over to the only dry area on the site and prepared their own breakfasts. There was some amusement at my disregard of the notice and the fact that I intended to leave before the office was open without paying. I gave one of the people there €10 to cover the cost of one night. They had never seen RainLegs before (waterproof leggings that cover only the front of your legs and that only down to the knee but are really effective and don’t over heat) and we all discussed the foul weather and what we wore in an attempt to stay dry. In reality you never do, only hope that it will stop raining at some point so that you can dry in the breeze as you cycle along.

I strapped my cycling helmet to the back of my bicycle and set off with the hood of my jacket over my head. It’s dryer than the helmet so long as the traffic is light. I was heading for the cycle path along the Canal du Rhône au Rhin and my satnav took me to it without any fuss, where I switched it off and followed the map to Mulhouse where I needed it again to get through. The cycle path would have been splendid in dry weather as the surface was packed sandy shale. When wet it sprayed the bicycle with sand and grit that stayed there until later in the day when more heavy rain washed it all off again. Is there any wonder that I wasn’t really enjoying all this?

In Habsheim I came across a boulangerie with tables in the window serviced by a busy Madame doing a steady trade in coffee, baguettes and halting multilingual chat. It was good to be in France again where I was partially familiar with the way people interact. It is quite different from Italy, which I found a bit daunting. I’ll clearly have to go back to Italy at some stage to soak it up more. Later, on the other side of Mulhouse, I found a nice family restaurant where I sheltered from the rain for a good lunch of sliced ham, roast potatoes and sprouts. I never came across those in Italy.

I set off again in the rain. It let up a bit through Wittelsheim and Cernay but by the time I got to Thann it had started again as I was preparing mentally for the climb up to the Col de Bussang in the Vosges hills. By this time it was four o’clock and it would have been about six by the time I got to the Bussang campsite, when I saw a sign for a hotel down a side street. Oh well, I thought, here we go again, and I followed the signs to the hotel where they locked up my bicycle in an outhouse and showed me to a quaint room on the first floor where I washed everything and hung it up to dry. The restaurant fed me very well and I had a quiet night to recuperate from the rain.