Day 5: Neuenberg am Rhein to Strasbourg

This was going to be a long cycle day and it wasn’t clear that we have a long cycle day in the tank and we have a very long day planned for tomorrow. So we decided to take the train and have a “rest” day. We had eaten cheap ‘n’ tasty Italian food in the restaurant next to the hotel last night and we had also had our sodden cycling kit professionally dried in a tumble drier by the lovely woman who runs the hotel. So we were set up for a relaxing day.

We intended to get the train from Neuenberg to Strasbourg. I’d done some internet searching and there was definitely a train which connected in Mulhouse. However, Neuenberg is not exactly the hub of the universe and when we got to the Bahnhof, it turned out that the next train to trundle down the single track to Mulhouse was two hours away.

It was only 25km to Mulhouse so we (once again) screwed our courage to the sticking place and set off.

There ain’t no train coming down these tracks.

We had sensibly prepared for this possibility. I had a route from Neuenberg to Mulhouse in the Garmin and with only a tiny sub voce grumble from Dr T we were off.

Through gritted teeth: “do I have to get on this bloody thing again today?”

Another 5km and another border. Back into France.

You can tell we are in France. A tiny itty bitty Eiffel Tower in a roundabout.

We joined the EV6 route which heads west from here to ultimately reach the Atlantic coast. There were 10 or 15 km in a forest which were absolutely beautiful.

There was a lot of this. Really lovely.

As we were rolling along, I thought about the strange towers that we had seen yesterday next to the Rhine. My good friend JJ told me they were “salt drilling towers”. A little bit of internet searching brought me to this delightfully badly translated description of the towers.

Impressive witnesses to the industrial era in Bad Zurzach are the salt drilling towers between Zurzacher Flecken and the banks of the Rhine. The 17-meter-high salt derricks were decommissioned in the 1970s. One of them now serves as a salt museum. Peepholes give you an insight into its inner workings, and the brine pump can be set in motion at the touch of a button.

Cornelius Vögeli had a good nose. Shortly after the definitive end of the Zurzach fairs in the middle of the 19th century, the building contractor and former mayor of Leuggern took up the trail. He could smell it, the stuff that the next upswing would be made of. The treasure lay right at his feet. Now he would lift it.

To recover the treasure, “Salzvögeli” needed money. He borrowed it from another entrepreneur, Jakob Zuberbühler. Vögeli used it to build a tower. Inside it hung the key to the underground treasure chamber – the drill bit. This ate its way through the layers of rock and encountered rock salt deep below. Cornelius Vögeli discovered this raw material for the production of table salt during test drilling in Koblenz in 1892. After further drilling attempts in the Zurzach-Rietheim area, he discovered significant salt deposits. He obtained the state concession to mine salt, but sold it again and died without having started mining.

After the Swiss Rhine Salt Works had secured the concession, the upswing began thanks to the founding of the Swiss Soda Factory in 1914: “Sodi” and later Solvay (Schweiz) AG provided many jobs for decades and shaped the social and economic structures in the area. The fact that the Zurzach thermal water was also discovered in passing thanks to Cornelius Vögeli’s sniffer is a story in itself.

I am exceptionally pleased that Cornelius Vögeli’s sniffer is a story unto itself. Switzerland is a strange place sometimes…

Since we’re on interesting history, we are in the middle of “goitre country”. Goitre is a swelling in the neck caused by a lack of iodine. It turns out that being close to the sea causes a lot of iodine to be dropped on the land where it’s absorbed into the food. In the centre of Europe near the Alps, not so much iodine. Also in the middle of the Great Plains in America.

There’s a great story about an American doctor/chemist called David Marine who added iodine to the salt in Akron Ohio and solved the goitre problem. He is the reason why we all have iodised salt now. There are some interesting questions about the ethics of doing this sort of thing without consent but there’s no doubt that he solved that problem. Probably RFK Jr is about to suggest that Bill Gates is trying to control us through microchips in our iodised salt….Make Goitre Great Again.

Anyway, enough about salt. You came here for the cycling stories, not salt-based political commentary.

This area has been intensively fought over during the past couple of centuries. There was a tiny memorial to a battle that I’d never heard of but, in which 1,500 French, Moroccan and German soldiers died in 1944.

This is the original M1 155mm canon. The great great grandfather

of the M777 which Ukraine is using so effectively right now.

When you seamlessly pass over borders which were brutally fought over in the past, it all seems so fabulously civilised now. Probably doesn’t seem like that in Ukraine right now though.

The EV6 rolled smoothly and effortlessly into Mulhouse. We avoided slipping perilously into the canal.

Shout “huiii” if you fall in!

All in all, it really was quite lovely even close to Mulhouse with a beautiful canal side pathway leading directly to the railway station.

Unexpectedly nice.

Literally one hundred metres from here, we were at the main Mulhouse railway station.

I had expected some painful omnishambles booking tickets or — horror or horrors — being told there were no trains until tomorrow which took bicycles. However, it turned out perfectly. A lovely lady at the ticket counter handled my mangled schoolboy French with good humour and we had two tickets on the next train to Strasbourg with our bikes included.

Mulhouse station is pretty pleasant in the ticketing hall. Not so much on the platforms.

There’s a very strong “former Warsaw Pact country” vibe going on here.

The train arrived on time and we wrestled with other cyclists to get our bikes on board. There is a certain type of entitled cycling folks who are definitely very keen to get their bikes on the train in front of you even if they have to push you out of the way. There was a rather tense stand-off and I had to deploy my Angry Eyes™.

The train set off and over an hour into Strasbourg, Dr T slept and I looked at almost endless fields of corn. This region really produces an absolute shit-tonne of maize. There’s even a website if you want to know why.

Strasbourg arrived, we again fought with the entitled wrinkly cyclists with their e-bikes to get our bikes off the train and then negotiated the medieval streets of Strasbourg to the hotel.

This is a long architectural journey from Andermatt and Vaduz.

Our hotel is definitely a considerable step up from the one in Neuenberg. It’s built out of nine renovated ancient buildings around a courtyard. It’s funky and quirky but it is really nice.

Big brownie points for me in choosing this place!

We were allowed to check in early — many thanks to the small gods of hospitality on that one — and then headed straight out for some shopping.

Despite my effortless sartorial elegance over the past five days, it was made clear to me I was going to have to buy some new pants and socks. One pair of pants and two pairs of socks is really not enough for a long trip when you have somebody with you — on your own…it’s a different, and much smellier, story.

We bought pants, we bought more athletic tape for broken knees and we bought more…lotion for irritated soft tissues…

The smile of a man with brand new pants!

A little bit of touristy wandering took us to Strasbourg cathedral which is arrestingly huge and beautiful. I would like us to be able to report that the inside was also arrestingly beautiful but unfortunately the queue to get into the cathedral was about 200m long. Life as a long-distance cyclist is too short for queuing.

Woah, look at the size of that!

And then it was time for a traditional Alsace lunch of cheese, meat and white wine. There’s something to be said for short days cycling and then afternoons being tourists in a stunning European city. Maybe next time I should rethink the plan but unfortunately, most of the plan for this trip is now set in stone.

High performance nutrition.

Our hotel has a thermonuclear towel rail so we washed everything and then snoozed until dinner.

There was time for a little bit of sight seeing. First up was the Astronomical Clock which was unfortunately shut for the day. There was another incredible attraction which is the oldest barrel of wine in the world. They’ve got a barrel of wine down there which dates from 1472 and has only been tapped three times since then.

It was shut too.

As a travelogue of Strasbourg, this isn’t really working out well for our readers.  However, on our way to dinner, we passed the Büchmesser or the “Belly Measuring Column”. Built in the sixteenth century, it was used by the Strasbourg big-wigs to test whether or not they had eaten too much at a feast night.  I can report that we both passed the belly test.

No giant bellies for us!

After our giant Alsatian lunch, we couldn’t really fit much of the Alsatian specialities into our (measurably slim) stomachs but it was nice sitting in a trad restaurant and enjoying the vibes.

Strasbourg is very pretty indeed. Although there are some scars from the various battles and wars which have been fought here over the past couple of millennia, it’s managed to preserve — or maybe recreate — a strongly medieval charm. The post war history is a little dark. Upon liberation in 1945, the French undertook a very aggressive “Frenchifying” campaign against the local people of whom 90% were of German-Alsace heritage. People who had only spoken Alsatian their entire lives were forced to speak French in public and at home. Maybe understandable given the history but not something we might be comfortable with today. In a little side note for our US readers, Alsatian is the dialect of German spoken by the Swiss Amish in Allen County, Indiana.

Tomorrow we have to get back on the bike. We did have a 145km day ahead of us but that’s not going to work. By rerouting around Karlsruhe, I’ve managed to get it down to 130km. That’s still a lot to get done in a day but there’s really nowhere else before Speyer which is our next stop.

An early start and a slow pace should get us there. Knees permitting.

The Stats:

• Distance: 26km. The rest was by train but that was one of the most tranquil and pretty sections we’ve done so far.
• Climbing: 72m — ho ho ho.
• Average Speed: 18kmh. Taking it easy.
• Others: Well…there’s a bit of an ongoing undercarriage problem at the moment. We did get some new knee strapping which might help the knees and some baby nappy rash cream which might help…down there.

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