Day 1: Zurich to Basel
On Sunday Dan and I loaded up our bikes and set off from his house near Zurich with the plan to make it to Basel by evening. The bike performed well during its dress rehearsal, and its owner had a new and humbler approach to finding his way around Swiss bike trails. Fortunately, Dan knows the roads between Zurich (his home town) and Basel (where he went to college) very well, so direction finding shouldnt be an issue today. I was very glad to have him along for the first day, but he’d be heading back home to get to work again on Monday. Here we are taking a quick stop for some food and drink after leaving the city of Zurich.
We rode easily for 3 hours and made it to Dan’s grandma’s house for lunch. When we told her my plan to ride a bike to Paris, she looked surprised, and I thought this meant she was impressed. But it turns out she had ridden all over Switzerland back in the day when bikes had “no gears” at all, and even carried a palm tree on the back of her bike over the high passes between Italy and Switzerland on her honeymoon. So perhaps instead of being impressed, she was wondering why I was making a big deal out of a lazy pedal around the countryside. After a few more stories, we were back on the road and feeling good about our progress over the 40km in the morning.
The remaining stretch to Basel is along the Rhein, a flat and picturesque route of about 50km, so it seemed we would make it without any hurrying. Unfortunately it didn’t work out quite like that. First we underestimated the zigzagging route of the bicycle path when compared to the straight highways for cars. Second, we started to slow down, due to shortage of food, water, and — I’ll admit it— fitness. And the third element working against us was a repetitive warbling sound coming from my back wheel that suddenly got worse as we were passing by a field full of kale. Yuck.
The tube inside the tire had begun to push its way out, which would create a blowout soon. It’s good that we heard it first, but there was no way to fix it. Why? Because it turned out my bike didn’t use regular modern clincher-type tires, but the old style glue-on tires, and I didn’t notice until now. Yes, that’s a very dumb mistake and I have only myself to blame. Dan kept his cool in spite of my good ol American expletives, and we decided to walk our bikes back to the town we had passed through about 2km previously. We wouldn”t find any bicycle help (everything is closed on Sundays in Switzerland, even supermarkets), but we could get on a train to a better place.
We were at Laufenburg, which means “walking town” in German— quite an appropriate place to lose a wheel — which is at the end of the line for Basel’s regional rail system. So we took the train to Basel, locked up our bikes, had a very quick walk around and over to the youth hostel where I checked in, then got Dan back on a train to Zurich with his bike. Then I had the night to think about whether to continue with the bike trip (if I could get the tire fixed on Monday), or punt onto a train to Paris. To be continued…
(today we did 80km of bicycling + 40km on the train)
