After four days of good music, stifling heat, portaloos and stinky & overexcited adolescents, we pedalled sleepily away from the festival and dragged ourselves to the nearest campsite to become rested and clean again. Then, functioning human beings once more, our final stop in France was Mulhouse, near the French border.
Sweet statue and Matthew in Mulhouse
The next day was au revoir to France, who chose to farewell us by closing all shops for lunch (12:00 til 2:30pm) and leaving us to starve. Everywhere closes for lunch every day in France but we never learnt and it kept catching us out. Matthew has had many a lengthy diatribe against France for this inconvenience - but actually I really love the way they stop everything and enjoy lunch together every day, and wish we had a similar perspective back home. When I try to express this to Matthew, he replies "Oh hogswash! I don't give a hoot about community wellbeing when it gets in the way of 24 hour megastores which can feed this badboy at any given hour" (pointing to stomach).
Basel is an impressive city with the Rhine rushing past its stately buildings. The Rhine moves quickly and we noticed people jumping in clutching a floaty and drifting downstream with the current before popping out somewhere else, often quite far downstream. People were doing this and just chatting away like they were going for a stroll. Usually the floaty was a clever little bag which carried their things (purse, shoes, towel etc) so they could just carry on from where they drifted to. We thought this would be a great way to commute to work (but it would only work one way).
Basel from above, me swimming in the Rhine.
At our Basel campsite, we were approached by a big, curious hedgehog one evening who sprung up under Matthew's pannier and peered through poor-seeing eyes at us for a while before running off into the bushes where we could hear him crashing about long afterwards.
Curious hedgehog, Matthew wishing he was one of the gang outside Basel's hippest nightclub "Friends bar"
Sweet statue and Matthew in Mulhouse
The next day was au revoir to France, who chose to farewell us by closing all shops for lunch (12:00 til 2:30pm) and leaving us to starve. Everywhere closes for lunch every day in France but we never learnt and it kept catching us out. Matthew has had many a lengthy diatribe against France for this inconvenience - but actually I really love the way they stop everything and enjoy lunch together every day, and wish we had a similar perspective back home. When I try to express this to Matthew, he replies "Oh hogswash! I don't give a hoot about community wellbeing when it gets in the way of 24 hour megastores which can feed this badboy at any given hour" (pointing to stomach).
Basel from above, me swimming in the Rhine.
At our Basel campsite, we were approached by a big, curious hedgehog one evening who sprung up under Matthew's pannier and peered through poor-seeing eyes at us for a while before running off into the bushes where we could hear him crashing about long afterwards.
Curious hedgehog, Matthew wishing he was one of the gang outside Basel's hippest nightclub "Friends bar"
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