Rain chances stay mainly on France's plains

Today was a long, great day. I started a little late again. After being wide awake at 5am I fell back asleep and woke to the hotel frau knocking on my door. Later she would tell me in broken English, "I don't know you dead". But breakfast was still waiting for me downstairs, a fine collection of breads, cheeses, and sliced meats - and kickass coffee!. I bet the french are rubbing off on them since they're so close to the border. Kind of like us and fajitas.

I got out of there at 11am or so, and made my way south to the Rhine. Once there I realized that there's a dirt trail down the entire length on the French and German sides. Sometimes it's interrupted by a factory or something, but they usually provide a way to get around. But it was dirt, and I wanted culture, so I tried to go from town to town and go south. Even tried going over to the french side again to see if it was easier. I will say that the French give more attention to bike trails, next to roads, etc. But as soon as I got over the bridge it started to rain. Really wasn't that bad, but somehow I associated it with France. I wanted to get back to Germany more than ever!

After finding the bridge in Chalampe I just wanted to cover as much ground as possible to make it even remotely possible to get to the Bodensee tomorrow. So after going through a few small towns and losing track a few times, a found the Rhine trail again by accident and just got on that dirt road. Cycling tip: your average speed drops to 11 or 12 miles per hour when you're on packed wet dirt, but you can cover more miles per hour when they're kilometers, so it kind of evens out when you're on the Rhine trail.

I was able to make it to Weil am Rhine, which is roughly as close as you can get to France and Switzerland without leaving Germany. Since I got here pretty late I didn't have a lot of time to look around and I'm basically staying in a German truck stop Gasthaus. Pretty shady outside, but standard German deal happening inside. Great food, better beer, and lots of people loud and boisterous at the dinner table. Next time someone calls me a loud American in Russia I'll remember this restaurant. I just hope my bike is still in the biergarten in the morghen!