A sticky situation

We’ve spent countless hours looking at cycle routes, planning rides and thinking about where we want to visit. It’s great to spend time building excitement for the next part of the route but, and I know it’s a cliché to say, the best memories we’ve made so far have been short snippets that have nothing to do with the route we chose or city we are in. 

Our daily supermarket trip, for example, is a great source of entertainment as we struggle to translate foods. I have come to realise that there is almost nothing that you can’t put inside a croissant, from nutella to whole sausages, generally European croissants are a lot more exciting than ours. 

We had one particularly big supermarket-based issue when it came to buying some more toothpaste. We headed to the aisle and grabbed a tube which had a picture of a smile, was branded ‘EuroDont’ and said ‘mit Minzgeschmack’ which my GCSE German vocabulary brain guessed to be mint flavoured. So far so good. I was ecstatic that we were finally able to get a second toothpaste to avoid sharing (we didn’t consider how awkward sharing would be given that most campsites split the bathrooms by gender). The evening arrives and I innocently load up my toothbrush with my new paste and start my brushing. Something isn’t right. I can feel the paste coating my teeth and rolling into little clumps all over my mouth. I immediately spit it out, rinse my mouth out but im unable to get rid of the feeling of a dry coating on my teeth. I run to the tent to try and figure out what I had just put on my teeth and thanks to google translate found out I had just brushed my teeth with… (any guesses…?) denture adhesive! My immediate reaction is stress that this might cause some damage but after some quick Googling and brushing my teeth with our trusty Boots toothpaste for a good 5 minutes I can see how hilarious it is. I manage to get to sleep despite the fear of my teeth bonding together overnight. I have since learnt my lesson, the hard way, to ALWAYS translate the whole label and I’ve bought myself some actual toothpaste so worry not, I am minty fresh again. 

Some of our anecdotes are not so traumatic for my teeth and do, shockingly, involve bikes. We have been cruising along the Rhine steadily and are about half way through the first stage of our trip now. For me, the gorgeous rolling hills and vineyards we were surrounded by in the Rhine valley are the most spectacular views so far. We had the pleasure of staring at an hour-long sunset over the hills while staying with hosts living in a community based building in Ingelheim am Rhein. We had flowing conversation accompanied by a delicious (vegan) pizza while sitting in their garden, in which the landlords grew an abundance of fruit and veg. 

These landscapes, however, weren’t the most impressive thing we encountered as we passed a group of people who were walking from Antwerp to Athens, towing a wagon they had built which had handmade wheels that must have at least 10ft tall. Just for context this is over 3,000km! We caught up with them on a narrow path and they were kind enough to help us get our tandem past their beast of a cart which seemed to contain all sorts of random goods, including an oven. It was being pushed by a group of artists called ‘Time Circus’ for a cultural show in Greece in 2023 (https://www.timecircus.be if you’re interested). To be honest, I couldn’t really see the artistic meaning behind the giant vehicle but dragging it all that way is crazy, and crazy impressive, to me. 

The vineyards have been replaced with industrial cities and long dykes and the heat has started to ramp up. Today, on our 2 week anniversary of the trip, we got to fix our first puncture. Luckily, it was not ours. We helped a nice man fix his flat in the 34 degree heat. Jack spotted him walking along and he said that without us he would have had to walk 20km in the sun. His tyre was in very bad condition and he was missing half of his back brake, so we don’t actually know if he managed to cycle home. Fingers crossed for him! (I realise now that we never asked his name…)

So just to really hammer it home, always always read the label before putting something in your mouth. 

Speak soon,

Jack and Baz