Switzerland part 1: Freiburg–Orbe

Leaving Freiburg, we cycled switftly along the Rhine to Basel and crossed the border into Switzerland. It is the first time that the Biketour visits Switzerland, it hasn’t ever been there in 27 years. We expected beautiful landscapes and good roads, expensive shops but full dumpsters. The first two days in Switzerland were hard. We had to cross the Jura mountains and took mostly small roads which were very steep, but the landscapes and villages were beautiful. The first night we slept on a lawn just outside a small town, next to a garage for repairing cars and a small…

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Freiburg – excursion to Germany

Under a pleasant and strong summer sun we cycled about 30 kilometres from our camping place alongside the Rhine river to Freiburg based in the south-west corner of Germany. We found drivers to be much less polite than in French Vogese and Elsass Regions, people passed grumpily with less safety distance despite empty roads, looking out much less for cyclists (and pedestrians) and beeping their horns at actions that resembled little more than people safely enjoying a cycle ride. *and one driver freaked out when one Ecotopist crossed a red traffic light, that was to manage car traffic and not…

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From Bure to Freiburg (now with pictures)

Cycling out of Bure went without any problems caused by the police, but the first difficulty of the day came up not much later, when one of the people in front cycled downhill hands-free, the handle bar turned, and the whole bike flipped over its front wheel, bending the wheel to an unusable state. Fortunately some of us had left late and had just passed La Gare, which is the second base of the resistance in Bure a bit further away from the forest, and they had a lot of bike parts lying around. We found a good new wheel…

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