Out on the town but our German is not at the same level as our French, so all of a sudden we are foreigners and tourists without the smug feeling we have in France. So we walked over the Rhine, found a traditional Baseler bier kellar and dined on something that we thought bore resemblance to what we ordered. Despite being less than 2 km from the French border and an international City, home to many of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies our server was pleased to tell us he spoke 'nur Deutsch'. With a smile.
The thing about travelling like this, especially in Europe where things change so quickly is that you set off from somewhere and lunch is in a totally different place and same again in the evening. And being on a motorbike it's all a bit 5D. So Champagne and cathedrales to lakes to the Rhine and bier cellars, all in a day's ride.
So we window shopped the cake shops in Basle, 180 Swiss Francs for a Rose Cake, we watched the swimmers being taken full pelt down the Rhine with their clothes in a plastic bag acting as a float, cleverly sold by the Tourist Office. And then the storm hit - it had been far too hot all day and we sheltered in the Bier Kellar and all was fine. We even managed the tram back to the hotel, but they could have told us that there were two Bahnhofs in Basle.
We had struggled with the automatic check-in at the hotel. Paul's fingers or the touch screen; one wasn't working properly. Basle didn't endear itself with Paul, as the car park attendant insisted Paul should pay or he would call the police, despite insisting that we weren't allowed to park there. But we had.
A bit grey in the morning but we decided to shelter in the Vitra Museum. Only 4km away but then we were in Germany. This hadn't been planned.
Felt both the Gehry and the Zaha a bit disapointing though the Zaha is clearly historic. Thought the clock that was also a helter skelter a bit naff and the HdM central Building bore many similarities to Ban's Metz. But then again we are not Architects. Paul keen on changing houses to Vitra-fy a house.
And then the road - let's not take the big roads and even though it was 11.30 when we left the Museum it was soon time to stop for lunch, even though we had just cafe'd in the museum. But we had gone back into Switzerland and then back to Germany. Were we back in Switzerland now? Euros or Francs? We take both...
Sometimes it can be difficult to do 200 km in a day. Too many distractions. Riding through Zurich was grim, so we took the Autoroute and it was very scenic indeed. But we wouldn't have had such a nice lunch if we had done that straight away.
And that was how we swished through Switzerland this time round.
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