Even though I spent almost an entire day in Basel, I didn’t get to see too much of it. I was preoccupied with the usual to-do list now that I was once again in a city and a new country. I had a SIM card to buy, Swiss Francs to withdraw, and also needed some new brake pads for those soon-to-come Alpine downhills.
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To the hills
Four days after my arrival in Nancy, I was back on the road and heading southeast towards Switzerland. Finding Couchsurfing hosts in this part of France had proven to be difficult, and so I was to be camping out again. Not that I’m complaining at all, the scenery had changed totally after Nancy and gone from plain to remarkably beautiful in no time at all.
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Nancy
I hate to repeat myself, but again, just like at the last few borders, crossing over into France could hardly have been less dramatic. If it wasn’t for GPS I’d have totally missed the fact that I’d just made it over another border. This time there were no signs, no pillars, and no change in road surfacing. Just green fields ahead and green fields behind me, with a muddy path snaking through them. It really was the dissolution of internal borders at its finest (to be fair, I was just a few kilometres away from the town of Schengen itself).
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One month in
As of the 26th August, I’m now a month into cycling from Maastricht to Malta. I’ve crossed 5 of 6 borders and covered 1200 of 2837 km. I’ve come a long way, and a lot has happened already.
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Campers no more
Our first stop on our grand Luxembourgish tour was to be at ALDI, located quite conveniently right on the border. According to my GPS, the car park was actually Belgian territory while the store itself was in Luxembourg. And it showed, just over the border and already an entire section of the store stacked with cheap cigarettes and alcohol.
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