France is closed, is Switzerland open?

Say it, don't spray it






Walter's feeling rather fit these days....

Day 11
710km

Rest day in St.Louis, France/Switzerland

Today we have the luxury of doing nothing, however, we are managing to keep quite busy, what with eating, laundry, eating, emailing, eating, drinking...as you can imagine, life's tough.

We arrived here in Basel, Switzerland, which is somehow St.Loius, France, depending on what side on the line you're standing on 2 km up the road from our hotel. We only had to ride 37km yesterday and arrived in the city around noon with lots of time on our hands.

The ride yesterday was an easy 37 km of relatively easy up and down. We went through about 6 towns in about a 15 km distance - seems everyone likes to be an individual municipality. Some of the names of the towns have more syllables in them than the town has inhabitants. Sometimes I feel like Walter must - trying to pronounce some of the names of these places is like clearing phlegm from your throat; you can practically see the wet SPLAT at the end of the word.

Yesterday evening, we were to meet my cousin, Alison, now living in Nschnekinbergschnoff-nikopff or somewhere (sorry, can't quite grab the concept of Swiss pronunciation yet), in downtown Basel around 7pm. She found us having our 17th drink of the evening in the 14th bar after about 6 hours spent roaming around the city. It appears that France is closed for the summer and to venture over into Switzerland proved less irritating - everything was open and there were actually people around!

One thing that's quite annoying here in Europe is smokers. Everywhere. You are hard-pressed to find a non-smoking establishment. We spent a few hours in a Turkish internet Cafe two days ago and sadly saw it's effects on Walter. He was coughing much more and even noticed some blood. Nothing a little rest day hasn't seemed to fix.

The other night in the campground, we had a visit from a nice English family who wandered over to offer us a donation. The man himself suffered from Asthma and was quite interested in our ride. These are always appreciated gestures and we thank everyone donating on-line as well!