All I wanted was a USB mini cable. Plain old, everyone has a bin full of them USB cable. I do, but stupidly I grabbed the wrong one. And to be clear, the stupidity isn’t on me but as usual Garmin. Some cables cause the computer to shut down as if connected to a computer, some don’t. No way to know but boot up (about 2 minutes) plug it in and see. I’d tested one then packed a different one. Derp. Okay, part my stupidity.
1.05 Franc
“Funf Franc”
How do I say get fucked in Switzerdeutsch….
American thrift stores would have a bin full for a quarter. I quickly gave up on the half Franc I’d hoped to spend and set out for 1. Which at current exchange is basically a dollar.
3. Nein.
2. Nein.
3. NEIN
Nearing the end of the loop I’m starting to wonder if I’ll actually get one and as I literally had 1.05 Franc in my pocket I couldn’t pay two if I wanted. Test another… Ask the lady who’s son is singing next to me, “Ein Franc?” Curiously she looks at him and asks the same. He looks up at me, twists his face in a moments consideration and says “Ja, OK”. Success! Thanks kid! Then on my way out I realized all these stands in this area are being run by kids! Now I’d wished I’d had 2 Franc as I’d happily given it to him but I did give him the extra 0.05
Pretty neat. Thanks for helping me stick to my budget kid (and not brutally over charging me for something you had a pile of).
The last time I was in Basel was for the TriCMC in 2009. This is a great event in which they find the best courier from Switzerland, France and Germany. I’d come along with some friends from Karlsruhe to play in the polo tourney and joined the race for fun. I do not recall doing well and dropped out after loosing a delivery.
I came a day early so I could catch up with the infamous Ström, who is to be away for the weekend. Thankfully he’s letting me stay at his apartment while on a…. Ahem, strategic planning retreat? Ah the things you do when in charge. He’s now the owner and CEO of KurierZentrale, for which he’s work for nearly 20 years. A huge accomplishment. Congrats buddy.
Plan for today is to mostly relax. I’ve a couple last minute supplies to get. If it gets hot today I will go for a swim in the Rhein, otherwise tomorrow should due. I will take many pictures of fountains I expect.
If you pop over to Mastho you’ll see Bernstein mentioned in like… ever other post. And now I understand why. It’s very close to Karlsruhe, about 30km on the short route with the possibility to add on as much as you like. Not only can you add more, it’s nice forrest paths. Mastho put a route together for me using Komoot, I’d never used this service before but it looks quite nice. I downloaded the app and he was able to share the route with me easily, and the GPX it generated worked very well without mods on my old Edge 705. Few (reads no) other services can do this.
As I prepped for BTG I’d read a funny description that stuck with me. They said that sometimes the route appears to ‘bully’ its way through. This is a good example of that. Yes, there is a trail through there.
A bully of a trail
This ride was to be my final shakedown so I ‘decided’ to leave quite late. I was out the door around maybe 2100? I rode for a short while in the last light of the day before finding myself looking down the tunnel of my lamp. Such a comforting view. Onward.
I love riding in the dark. Especially when weather is nice. It was cool but not too cold. My route worked well, even with navigation turned on but towards the end I got bit by the Garmin. I must have missed a turn, then I missed the fact my computer recalculated my route. On it’s face, that’s fine, I just kept riding along, seeing the end approaching. 1.5km. 1km. 800m…. should be right here…..
Recalculating….. 1.8km.
WTF!? I’ve seen some dodgy bugs in Garmin but not only did this add a 1.5km spur, it decided to move the end point! In the end 3/4ths the detour was down hill until I reached the hike-a-bike. A 150ish meter steep, rocky, switchbacky climb that finished right at the hiking hut.
I arrive a little after 0100 and pretty hungry so I started a fire right away with the small amount of wood already in the pit. Once a small fire was going I grabbed some better wood from right nearby and drank some Grappa.
One of my favorite parts of travel is the interesting food along the way (Baja was beans in a bag!). Even just different takes on somewhat familiar foods. Why don’t we grill cheese in the US?!? I’m not talking about grilled cheese sandwiches, I’m talking about putting cheese (halumi or similar) right on the grill. It’s delicious and leads to other innovations like this marinated grilling cheese!
grillkäse
Happily fed and finishing off my beer I fell asleep texting with my love back home (smooch!).
My home for the night! Let me show you around.
Breakfast nookInto the bedroomView from the bedroom
Let’s go out to the back porch!
The entire area is pretty stunning and continues to make me envious of the outdoor culture in Germany. California, as stunning as it also is, has been bastardised by private land and closed off access. Where I grew up on the central coast, oil exploration privatised all the surrounding lands. This wasn’t such a big deal in the 90s when I was running around but on recent visits everything has been closed off. I guess this is due to some combo of newer fraking techniques opening fields back up and development pushing up against their property boundaries. This is a crying shame because it’s these areas that helped develop my love of the outdoors and exploring.
The area is named for Bernsteinfelsen, the giant rock on the hill. The whole area has some really neat geology in general. The rock formations were then used to create the outlook.
I spent a very casual morning at the hut having a slow brekky and exploring the immediate area.
Those Germans loooove their grillin’
There were several other grills tucked away in various places.
This sign was conveniently posted on the backside of the hut, opposite the well established fire ring.
Feurmachen verboten? \_(ツ)_/¯
Around noon I’d been mostly packed up and getting ready to head off when I noticed something off.
So first, a little preface. As I said previously I grew up bush-whacking on the central coast. We’d spend all summer out in ‘The Fields’, a typical Califonia coastal sage/chaparral region. How many thousand hours did I spend tramping around? I don’t know, but based on the number of times I got poison oak it’s a lot. One thing I never got, was a tick. Until 3 years ago when camping on the Lost Coast I’d never had one. Since I’ve had 1 or 2 each year. At Bernstein I got 3. At the same time. Or worse, 2 jump on while I was busy extracting the first.
Gimme my blood back!Thankfully I had a multitool with pliers.
The other two were much smaller and came out easily. I believe this is Ixodes Scapularis. It reaaally didn’t want to come out. Eventually it did, head and all. Grumble, grumble.
I took the longer route back into Karlsruhe, taking time to make some adjustments to the bike. My phone died so I didn’t take many pictures on the way back but that did motivate me to fix my charger.
Don’t you know axes are out? Saws are the new hotness.
Welp, that’s my Bernstein trip. What a lovely place.
After a night of anxiety driven shit-show-y-ness I managed to meet up with Thomas, Oli and some other friends outside the small town Irhingen. Not only did I get to catch up with some old friend this vantage point offered my first glimpse of the Backpacking Trans Germany course. These profiles cover about the first 130km.
On the right, 73.6 km 4.76% elevation gain vs. distance. Nice!
And on the left, 53.0 km with 22.47% elevation gain vs. distance. Oof. 3rd steepest segment… on day one. I couldn’t bring myself to taking anymore pictures as my head turned left. Just more mountains.
Basel in the distance
After some chit-chat, snacks and brekky beers we departed at the crack of noon. The cycling infrastructure in this area is impressive. Even the smallest of towns seemed to be marked with on path signage, making it really easy to keep rolling along without paying so much attention to the route.
A lot of the days riding looked fairly similar to this with nice forest paths dotted through out as we headed towards Offenburg. We had some elevation gains through the day but nothing major until headed east after getting supplies in Offenburg. Right away we found ourself in vineyard country again but this time heading up some fairly steep climbs. Our destination was one of several lookout towers in the mountains east of Offenburg. Originally we’d planned to stay near an old brick tower but a mistake in the route planning led us to a more modern steel structure. While less visually appealing this did mean we could climb it for sure, offering some spectacular views.
The old brick tower can barely be made out to the south.View from the tower of where we slept.
And being that it’s World Cup season, we happily cracked some German themed cans as we watched the match. There was a MASSIVE party down the hill who’s cheering prompted us to pay attention to the match and thanks the substantial delay on the phone we didn’t miss any excitement.
Thomas and Oli getting into the match.Oli admiring his handy work. (see the signs?!)Artisanal campfire pizza.
And that pretty much wraps up day one. We hung out around the fire until late drinking wine, eating bread and cheese and telling tales of our recent adventures. Really good catching up with old friends.
I’d somehow got it in my head I that my flight landed on Friday and I had to jump on the train straight away. Thankfully I was wrong and I could visit with some friends. That also meant I had to get in touch, which is increasing more difficult and I move away from centralized “social media”. But things worked out, I got a place to stay Thursday night and had plenty of time to visit folks on Friday before my bus.
One of my favorite parts of coming to Germany is that you cannot drink too much coffee. So I, as usual, celebrated this fact. This time with a very beautiful espresso machine made by my friend David with help from the house-mates. They’d cobbled together parts from various machine into this stunning brass enclosure. Has all the features of a fancy machine like auto water filling and a nice powerful pump.
I’d forgotten a couple small parts so Fridays top agenda item was finding, most importantly the proper bolts and plates for my cleats. We visited Parrots and Crows a new shop since the last time I visited. I cannot thank them enough for helping me out.
Cine Guide to Parrots and Crows?Very nice hub displayhüps
The shop splits a space with a nice cafe. We’d rolled in just in time for lunch. If I got it right, normally it’s just veggie (yay!). We had a kind of pasta salad lasagna that was very nice.
That afternoon Mo and I rode out to his new place outside Frankfurt. On the way we stopped for a nice view and the obligitory apfelwein.
The apartments I visited are an interesting communal hosting project called Edwards-Kaserne. Old American GI barracks where converted into various sized apartments with several large communal gardens, work spaces, play areas and social spaces.
After this I headed back to the main station to catch my bus. I was left with a timley message on a poster in the basement. Next up, Freiburg to…. I have no clue where I’m going.
Hurry up and wait, as the saying goes. I rushed and rushed to make my departure but my train was oh so predictably late. This is not a picture of my train.
I am headed south for Baja Divide, but not before a little bit of derping around the now slightly less podunk town in which I was reared. I rarely make it this far south on the central coast so I decided to further shake-down the bike in the bushwacking grounds of my youth.
I see you have a fire gapThey are bigger than when I rode here…I’d do a backflip if I had my other bike
Eh, this bike is more my speed. I never did get very good at dirt jumping.
Modern progress! I’m moving south again and for the first time I am riding on a new Amtrak with rollon bike service!
So glamorous
It was far less of a pain in the ass than I expected. I thought I was going to be throwing out my back lifting it up to someone on the cargo deck but turns out it was true roll on and with no charge. Win, win excluding the fact I’m on Amtrak.
Next stop is Irvine to meet up with Patrick who I’ll ride the next two days with down to San Diego.
I’ve just signed up for The Oregon Outback. A 360 mile mountain bike odyssey! On top of that I have been mulling on the idea of racing the Trans Am. A 4233 mile self-supported road race from Astoria, Oregon to Yorktown, VA. If I go for both, they’ll be back to back. I’ll finish The Outback, hang out in Portland for a couple of days then head to Astoria for the start of the Trans Am. Exciting and nerve racking, time to get some training in.
This is the first installment of Guinea Pig Kitchen. The most frequent questions I get asked about touring are generally related to food. Usually it comes down to, what do you eat? Since my first tour in 2008, I have put down about 15,000km touring and since that first tour everything has changed. Then I was on a track bike with an overloaded backpack eating at cafes and staying in hostels (or under the occasional bridge). Now I have 2, going on three tourable bikes (including that old track bike coming full circle), I own multiple stoves, switch regularly between tent and hammock camping. I would say I have my grub down pretty good.
I like food. I like good food a lot. I fancy myself a pretty damn good cook. When I became a vegetarian, half my life ago, my mom told me it was time to learn to cook. The memory mangled press worthy quote was a long the lines of “I’ve have too many children to cook for one that wants to be different”. So I have some practice.
OK, STFU now and talk about the food.
Shakshuka! This is a recent addition to my arsenal. A friend and fellow Team Moustacher taught me this one about a year and a half ago before we threw the Team Moustache Albany Bulb race.
This is as delicious as it sounds. Having realized last year carrying eggs isn’t as hazardous as it sounds I quickly adopted this as a touring food. This is my recent Hawk Overnight rendition along with some prep tips for short trips.
Ingredients:
Mushrooms
Green Onions
Baby Heirloom Tomatoes
1 can tomato sauce
2 eggs
seasoned with salt and pepper
container
Ingredients.
Since I was just doing an overnight I was only going to cook breakfast, this meant I could prep everything ahead of time.
Dice up all the veg, chuck it into your container, add seasoning and your preferred cooking oil for a light saute*.
* optional, see next step
The veg is contained.
Next you can optionally saute your veggies. It will be just as good if you wanted to chuck them straight into the sauce and soften them up there. Ideal if you want to minimize your cookware kit. Just leave out some or all of the oil from the previous step and give the veggies 2-5 minutes before adding the eggs.
Veg in Sauce
Put your veggies in the sauce and bring to a simmer. Once its simmering carefully crack and drop your eggs in the sauce.
Eggs in sauce?! You talkin’ crazy!
The eggs cook differently than normal poaching. I usually give it about 10 minutes with the lid on and the lowest simmer I can get my stove (MSR Whisper Lite) to do. This will vary between stoves and cookware but the egg should be much firmer than you’d do for something like Eggs Benedict.
Done!
My egg looks like a dumpling. But it is not, so serve with bread or toast.
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