Day 33/34/35 - Attenschwiller To Epoisses

Though France has a strong cycling culture, its infrastructure is far less developed than its neighbours. Narrow roads and fast cars left us searching for an alternative to the 'direct' route. The camino de Campostella offered one such alternative, though it is admittedly very indirect.

From time to time over the past few weeks, we have noticed little symbols on various fences/posts/walls. Today, we realized that these mark the camino and that we could have saved ourselves the need for a map and just followed these signs for at least as far back as Austria (though it might have taken us another week to get here, as the camino winds in a rather indirect manner).

Another notable change is the serving sizes for beer in France. In order to maintain the mealtime consumption that I enjoyed in Austria/Germany, I would need to now order 4 beers with each meal. As this feels a bit excessive, I've elected to cut back on my beer consumption here.

Finally, while we have lost the awesome bike paths and the nicely sized beers with our entry into France, we have gained beautiful, inexpensive municipal campgrounds; the cheapest campgrounds so far on this trip (other than bush camping). We've also found more hills here than we did traversing the Austrian Alps - but that's just allowing these last days to linger and I like it.

We finished our first few days in France with a night in Epoisses, where Pierre's parents were staying for a few days. We are now officially on the homestretch, but we are ahead of schedule, so we may split the last two days of riding into three and savour the last kilometers. I love Paris, but it is going to be hard to let this go.