After 795km on my bicycle, I’m back in the saddle – or, rather, back on my reasonably-comfortable home-office chair. Time to pick up the bits and pieces and dust off the email client!

Some notes and bits from the trip:

  • It takes about a week to settle into a camping stride, for packing in the morning, getting things onto the bike, and getting going. Daily startup time dropped from 3 hours to 1.5 hours by the end of the trip. What this means: practice makes perfect.
  • Fromage Frais, in particular Bibeleskaes, is the foundation on which well-fed bike trips are built on.
  • The Moselle / Moesel river is lovely, even more so when biking along it. It would have been nice if it was 15 degrees colder, with France and Germany sagging under an unprecedented heatwave.
  • Every. Single. French. Person. says bon jour! when passing by on a bike, people move aside when you ring a bell or even whistle to overtake. It felt amazingly friendly.
  • Not every boulangerie makes a decent croissant.
  • The best local beer I had was L’ogresse rousse.
  • After two weeks of nothing but bike paths and rural France, the city of Trier is over-crowded, noisy, gross, and feels downright dangerous. Also has no concept of decent bike path markings to get you to the train station.
  • There don’t seem to be any BSD developers along the Moselle.
  • A tent does not provide protection from nuclear fallout. I learned this from the campground safety poster near the Thionville reactors.

No photos, since my low-end phone takes really bad shots.

Anyway, I’m glad to be back home, with bug bites and a slight sunburn.