Solothurn

Day 26 – this is the midway point of our trip – by golly we have done a lot!

So today we set alarms which was a bit of a shock. We were on the tram pretty early, and then on the train to Basel by 9.15. Basel is in Switzerland, and one of our aims was to spend all of our swiss francs by the time we left. It was great to have our tour guide who bought the train tickets, and worked out where we had to be – aka Jeremy. When we got there it was a quite a walk to the old town. J&J needed a coffee so we went to a Coop (aka supermarket) and had some breakfast. Then we walked around the old town, found the cathedral which was rather cool. We visited a few shops, and had lunch at the market. I had fun spending my remaining francs pretty much just on chocolate and had exactly the right change to spend on lunch for no remaining francs – goal met!

Then J&J walked to the other side of the river to sit in the sun while I explored a few more shops. I was a bit restricted though cos I had spent all my francs, so would have had to really want something to use my card. Then I joined them sitting in the sun which was really nice. I did take my sox off, and tried my feet in the water (the Rhine) and by golly it was cold. It would have been great if I had a sprained ankle, would have sorted that out pdq. Then we decided to take an earlier train back to Freiburg. I am a slow walker, so left straight away while the J’s were going to stop at Lidl for limoncello and something for dinner. Was so funny, we were at the train station waiting for our train at 4.30. I was wondering why people were coming up the stairs and walking quickly to the left. Then I realised that our train was already there out of sight, and there was about 3 minutes before it left! Needless to say that we got up in a hurry and rushed to the other end of the platform to get on the train. We had bought a return ticket initially for a 7.30 return, and then bought 4.30 tickets. It would have been funny if we had had to buy 5.30 tickets as well – not!

So the train trip was uneventful, and the tram trip after. Then it was about a 1 km walk back to Nico. We then had a wee snack, and I was sent off on a mission on my bike to get olive oil and dish washing liquid. We had run out of both of those. On our initial shopping trip a couple of weeks ago we bought some flowing soap for our toilet. By golly it was such crap soap – a real mission to get any soap out of it. I was so relieved when Jody relented and allowed me to buy another bottle, we both love the new bottle! But while at this supermarket I found more berries at a similarly cheap price – ie 2.50 euros for 500g of blueberries, and 2.0 euros for 250g of raspberries. These had been more than double that price in Switzerland. I knew things were more expensive in Switzerland, but the last time we were there, we weren’t as familiar with the prices of other countries, now that we are we didn’t want to spend any money there.

When I returned from the shopping, Jeremy whipped up another feast for us. Yummy roasted potatoes, and fillet steak. It is quite nice having our own personal chef – Jeremy works as a chef in Stuttgart and certainly knows his way around a kitchen. During and after dinner we played the card game again – bugger your neighbour. I really like this game, and winning makes it even better, tho I didn’t win every game tonight. Jody had ended up buying 2 bottle of limoncello which I thought was a bit carried away since we still had the Baileys and Cointreau – cost of that was 8 euros, and 11 euros so extremely cheap. And the limoncello was 13 euros. Anyway tonight we polished off the Baileys and Cointreua, and nearly all of 1 bottle of Limoncello. Not a bad effort seeing as I don’t normally drink – that Jody is a really bad influence. I don’t normally eat gummy bears either, but Nico’s glovebox is full of them, and they are rather handy when the navigation efforts are less than ideal.

So Jeremy leaves us in the morning, and unfortunately the forecast is for rain nearly everywhere we would like to go. So possibly we might take a train in the morning to Titisee lakes which is about 25kms away, and then bike back (mainly downhill of course!). But if it is pouring first thing, we might not do that. We still have 9 days before we have to drop Nico off, and really could end up anywhere in those days. My weather forecast app has Bruges (Belgium), Versailles (France), Rotterdam (Netherlands) Strasbourg (France), Munich (Germany, but we are not going there, so not sure why that has come up…), Luixembourgh and Versailles (France). The forecast is rain for everywhere tomorrow, but not so bad after that.

We can’t quite believe that we have done so much, and we are only half way through our holiday. I am not sure that the videos of me singing really needed to make it onto a public domain – apologies for that! I need to get some more incriminating videos of Jody…

Ciao ciao ciao (yes, I am still not totally sober! But have done a pretty good effort remembering what we have done for the last 2 days. Midnight was a while ago, so bed is calling).Read more