Despite the hotel being along the main road into the Black Forest, I slept very well, a theme that seems to continue throughout this trip, luckily. Apparently it did not rain, ah well. Breakfast from the grumpy landlady was not quite so convincing, but ok.
I spent all morning cycling downhill or on the flat, what a pleasant change to the last few days. As in the last few days I saw quite a bit of wildlife, today it was my first storks of this journey. This is also very much fruit country between the Black Forest and the Rhine, the cherries for the Black Forest gateaux have to come from somewhere. The raspberries from one of the farm shops were delicious!
Kehl is not really very nice. I almost only heard French being spoken there, and there are lots of Shisha-bars, tabacco stores and casinos. The saving grace was, that Elke met me at the station to wait for Phil and Alex. We ended up waiting for a total of three hours, as their train trip on the last stretch ended up being a bit of an adventure (but this is their story). Elke and I of course used the time starting to catch up.
The evening at Elke and Ralf‘s was very pleasant, we reminisced a lot, drank oodles of wine and even discussed politics. Alex is quite surprised at the multi-lingual environment here (Dutch, Polish, English, German, as far as I could tell) – this is very good for him. But I never took any pictures…
It was a really nice evening with Elke and Ralf. I ended up eating far too much good food!