European Divide Trail: The Vosges

Day 3

We wake up in the forest near Cologne. What felt like a remote spot last night turns out to be quite busy in the morning. Our shelter sits at a crossroads of forest paths and while we’re calmly getting up, plenty of nordic walkers (apparently popular here), cyclists, runners, and dog walkers pass by. Most of them don’t even give us a second look for lying in the middle of the forest with our sleeping bags.

We make a cup of coffee — which will turn out to be the last time on the trip, as it’s just not very practical when packing up the bags — and start day three. The forest welcomes us with fallen trees and technical paths. Something that still feels adventurous now but will become the norm over the coming days. The route alternates dull stretches of grassland with beautiful forested areas, and tough little climbs are rewarded with spectacular gravel descents. Suddenly we’re standing at a stream with no bridge — the path ends here and the route says we need to be on the other side. A little further along there is a way to cross, but it goes through someone’s garden. On the veranda sits an old man watching us, we’re surely not the first cyclists he’s seen standing here with this dilemma. We both sense he’s waiting for us to climb over his fence so he can tell us we’re not allowed on his land. We could ride back, but we choose the adventurous option. Together we lift our bikes across the creek.

Just after the creek I come to an unfortunate realisation: my wallet is no longer in the bag on my bike. It was in the same compartment as my phone and probably fell out when I took my phone to take a photo. The last time I’m certain I still had it was at the supermarket about 35 km back. The last stretch was a long descent, which would mean riding all of that back uphill to search for it. On top of that it was mostly forest paths, and there’s a good chance my brown card holder is completely invisible among all the fallen leaves. While Dennis rides back to the creek to check whether it fell out at the crossing, I call the supermarket to ask if it’s been handed in. Unfortunately both without success. We decide there’s no point searching any further and we ride on.

Not long after we arrive at the Nürburgring. The cycle path runs alongside the circuit for a long stretch, where it’s busy today. Even though neither of us particularly follows motorsport, we stop occasionally to watch. After that comes a steep and technical descent right alongside a deep ravine. There’s a lot of adrenaline running through me — it’s incredible, but the awareness that you can’t afford a mistake here is constantly present. During this descent I realise two things. First: it’s a good thing my mother has no idea that sections like this are in the route (sorry mam). Second, I feel confident. This descent demands not just technical skill but also judgement — knowing when not to go faster than you can handle. I feel trust in myself, but also in Dennis, and that’s actually a pretty special feeling. There aren’t many cycling friends with whom I’d worry so little in a moment like this (sorry, cycling friends). At the bottom of the descent we talk about how fantastic that was and I tell Dennis about that feeling of trust.

We pass through a village where we pick up groceries just before closing time and ride on to our campsite on the Moselle in Bruttig-Fankel. Tonight is the first evening in our tents and we cook for ourselves. While I make dinner, Dennis rides a few extra kilometres to get cash to pay for the campsite. We’ve gotten quite dirty today so we’re looking forward to the showers, but these turn out to be a real disappointment — only a feeble trickle comes out of the wall.

Day 4

It’s Sunday, which means all supermarkets in Germany are closed. Luckily we find a bakery that’s open for lunch; otherwise we have to make do with the snacks we picked up yesterday and stops at petrol stations. The route offers little diversity: mostly grass hills. The combination of long grass and tractor tyre tracks makes the paths slow and bumpy, which is exhausting. I feel my motivation sinking with every grassy stretch, but I don’t say anything because the mood is still good and I don’t want to ruin it by complaining. After the hundredth stretch of grass I can’t help but wonder out loud why Andy Cox thought this would be fun — a question we’ll ask ourselves many more times over the coming weeks. Rather than bringing the mood down it actually comes as a relief. Dennis says with relief “Oh man, thank god… I thought you were enjoying this the whole time!” For the rest of the day we bond over shared suffering, something that will also keep coming back throughout this trip.

At the end of the day we reach the Vosges. On the map we spot a nice little shelter and decide that’ll be our sleeping spot for tonight. The climb up there bodes well for tomorrow’s route, because it’s beautiful up here. It’s already quite cold in the shelter by evening and we’re not sure whether it might be better to sleep in our tents alongside it. We still decide to layer up and sleep in the shelter.

Day 5

That night is a real ordeal. Despite wearing multiple layers of clothing, we both wake up absolutely freezing. The wind chill is -3˚C, well below the 10°C our sleeping bags are rated for. Dennis says he felt it was on the edge of irresponsible, and at first I think “it wasn’t that bad, was it?” But the cold only really hits me when I get up. While packing, the motor control in my hands is nowhere to be found, and breakfast makes me nauseous. Okay, maybe this really was irresponsible.

We decide to ride back to the nearest village, where we find a bakery to warm up. We barely talk, apart from a few half-conversations about how we’re going to handle the coming nights. I’m still nauseous and can’t think clearly, let alone about sleeping plans. Before I know it Dennis has booked a hotel for that night. I actually feel this happened too quickly and that we should have discussed it properly. Now it’s set in stone that we need to cycle 130 km that day to get there, something I’m dreading enormously at that moment. Luckily in the first few days we had created the space to talk openly about irritations and feelings. We discuss that I don’t like how this went and that good communication matters, especially in the hard moments. The conversation clears the air, and quietly the idea of a warm hotel bed that evening is actually starting to appeal to me too. I feel better again — those two double espressos may have had something to do with that — and we start the day’s ride.

The route through the Vosges is beautiful. Progress is slow because of the fallen trees we have to scramble over or under, but we’re rewarded with stunning views. One of the descents takes us along more than a quarter of an hour of singletrack above a steep ravine, riding through sections of forest with a lot of trees and sections with very few, and whole stretches where you just flow. It feels incredible — I wish we could stay on this path forever. After this descent we quickly cross the border into France. The route gets easier here, which helps with the kilometres we still need to cover today. At this point the pain of this morning already seems to fade quickly.

The hotel room can fairly be described as cosy — the two bikes just barely fit next to our bed. We find a pizzeria in the village on Google so we decide to go for that. It turns out to be a pizza vending machine, and with no other options we pull two warm pizzas out of the ‘Gang of Pizza’. To our surprise they taste pretty decent — or maybe it’s just the exhaustion?

Day 6

The day starts with a stretch along the canal, dew still hanging above the water. Here I discover a fascination with waterlocks that I didn’t know I had. At every lock with a boat in it I stop for a moment to watch the calming process. As soon as we leave the canal the climbs get tough quickly. Many sections aren’t rideable, so we’re puffing our way up pushing our bikes. Still, the first half of the day feels smooth. We’re not going fast but we’re in a good rhythm. For lunch we stop in a field on top of the mountain. We have high hopes for the crêpes we picked up at the supermarket yesterday, but they turn out to be genuinely bone dry. At least we have a beautiful view and a lovely bit of sunshine.

Most of the climbing for the day is behind us, so from here it’s a nice descent to tonight’s sleeping spot. Right? No. The descents turn out to be difficult terrain and we go roughly as slowly as we did going up. On top of that I get the first puncture of the trip. We have tubeless tyres, which should mean that holes seal themselves with the latex inside the tyre. But the hole is too big, so I have to put in an inner tube. Not long after, Dennis realises the GoPro is no longer on his handlebars. This time we think it must have happened about 5 km back. We borrowed the camera from a friend and it already has some great memories on it, so we decide to ride back a stretch. Luckily we find the camera after about 1.5 km, right in the middle of the path. It does make you wonder how far away that wallet might have been lying..

We continue our route, but with today’s setbacks the planned campsite at 130 km feels unachievable. It starts to gnaw at me mentally. For a few days now I’ve had it in my head that we need to cycle around 130 km per day to complete the route in the planned two weeks. The terrain turns out to be much harder than I imagined though, and I start to doubt our plan — have we overestimated ourselves? After 90 km we pass through a village with two options: push on another 40 km to the campsite, or get another hotel here for the night. There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground, and after last night’s cold we don’t want to wild camp tonight. For Dennis the decision is clear pretty quickly, but I struggle to accept that things can’t always go according to plan.

We go for the hotel option. That evening we have a good conversation about adjusting expectations and processing disappointments. Together we put today’s setbacks in perspective. Okay, today was a tough day, but we also had a puncture, the lost camera, technical terrain and an enormous amount of climbing. We’re not even that far behind schedule when we consider that the route flattens out after the Jura mountains, where we’ll be able to cover a lot more ground. But we’re only in the Vosges right now, so it’ll be a long time before we’re through the Jura, and until then we’ll have to keep adjusting our expectations. Besides, it would also be completely fine if we take longer than planned. It feels good to be able to talk about this together and it also feels like a personal victory to be able to turn the disappointments around. Maybe we’ll even learn something about ourselves on this trip?

We sleep again in the same mediocre-but-fine hotel and get pizza in the village again. This time it does come from an actual pizzeria, but unfortunately it disappoints. That can really only mean two things: either we didn’t cycle hard enough today, or that ‘Gang of Pizza’ yesterday was actually not that bad after all…

Day 7

Today brings the final stretch of the Vosges. It’s going to be a tough day as the route has a lot of climbing on this section — you can bet expectations will be adjusted today. The route planner also marks a section as ‘Alpine terrain’ and we wonder what that actually means. It turns out to mean riding across ski slopes. There are still large patches of snow in many places, but what an incredible environment and views we find here! And indeed, we adjust expectations today — we start the day anxious about the route, but by lunch the mood is great and we talk about how much we’re enjoying ourselves. At the end of the day we get one more surprise climb and a final taste of the Vosges on the descent. We have to walk sections which means we ride the last stretch through the forest in the dark. On the map we spotted a shelter for tonight, but before we reach it we’re already out of the forest and into a residential area. It seems strange that there’d be a shelter here, but we just follow the route. The shelter turns out to be a lean-to next to some kind of fishing pond. It feels like a strange place to sleep, but that also makes it kind of exciting.

We’ve got the Vosges behind us and we’ve ‘only’ been on the bike for a week, but we’ve already experienced so much. We’ve learned a lot about ourselves, each other, friendship, and emotions. We also now know that ‘Gang of Pizza’ pizzas are actually decent and that you can eat five Liège waffles a day without ever getting sick of them.