A long day, we did at least 100km, reaching the small town of Autrechene which is near Belfort.

We reached Basel early in the morning and enjoyed riding around listening to the church bells. Nice and quiet as it is a Sunday. Basel is interesting as the city spans three countries – Germany, France and Switzerland. It spans the Rhine and there are some lovely paths alongside the river and many bridges. There is alsoa large port.

Then we crossed over into France and made our way on a road (no bike path) over rolling hills. Very much like the Eastern Transvaal with a huge sky. It was quite hot in the middle of the day.

We reached Ferrette after a long but fairly gentle hill climb. It has a ruined castle on the top of it’s hill. There we used a tourist info map to map our route through small towns (about one every 2km) to Delle. This was the best part of the ride, very pretty rural landscapes and towns.

We felt sure we would find accommodation in a town the size of Delle, but found the two hotels had closed in 2010 and despite various directions from locals we couldn’t find anything.   The town seems to be going downhill as there are a number of derelict buildings. This seems to be as a result of economic conditions.  Eventually we moved on to the next town (Grandvillars) with same result and so on for couple of hours. Eventually we found a place after more advice from locals, but this was full. They phoned ahead to another place to confirm they could take us and directed us here. This was around 4km away. So we only found our accommodation at 7pm, having started looking at 4pm. We had visions of sleeping under a bridge at some stage. We were exhausted from riding for longer than desired, but still in good spirits.

Highlights:

• Poppies growing wild on side of road
• Beautiful landscape
• The accommodation we found is lovely – (Le Bambios) – it is at the top of a large house in the country surrounded by well kept gardens and far vistas. We have a large room and bathroom/ kitchenette. The decor is gorgeous, like someones home, and the lady owner very helpful. She has booked our next night accommodation and washed our clothes!

Lowpoints

• Kris broke 2 spokes in the morning and then another in the afternoon at Ferratte. We have concluded that his spokes must be from a bad batch. Probably we will have to replace all 32 on this trip, especially as the weight of Kris with his baggage is considerable.