Day Five

 

After an uneventful night wild camping I am decamped by 07:30 but the weather is still looking unpredictable. I push on but feel tired today and my right knee is playing up. The route EV6 follows the Canal du Rhone au Rhin and unlike the last canal this one is being used and is popular with holiday makers. At times, as picturesque as the route is, it can be quite monotonous and villages are infrequent. Finding water can also be a problem despite the canal. The canal is inaccessible and probably not water I would want to drink anyway. In a way you are prisoner on this route as there is no escape until the next town, which can often be kilometers away. Maps.me has also not been functioning correctly and I have been forced to use Google maps several times. Around midday I was pushing the bike up a hill only to find after an hour that I was going in the wrong direction and had to backtrack. Well that's my excuse for only managing 46km today. There was also a cold headwind, which did not help. By mid afternoon I was finished and happy when I rode into my intended campsite.

The herons along the canal banks are amazing. You can almost go up and touch them, they don't even bat an eyelid as you approach them. This photo was taken, like all photos on this blog, on a smartphone, which are always poor quality when taking wildlife. I had to leave my camera behind due to weight and this was just one of many occasions I wished I'd had it with me.

There are many more pictures I'd like to add and more text but there is never enough time to edit everything. Also for some reason Blogger does not always work when I am away and does strange things like I am using a foreign keyboard. Very annoying but that's today's tech world. Amazing when it works and a nightmare when it doesn't. So bear in mind any odd text or formatting, I do my best but sometimes I have no control over it.