Constance Cravings
Week 3 - Strasbourg through the Black Forest to Lake Constance, with mechanical failures and an ode to Tayto crisps
“How will we know when we’re in Switzerland?” Ellie asked as we crested a small hill in the unseasonably warm sunshine.
A few days before when we’d crossed the Rhine from Strasbourg on the French side into the German town of Kehl, there had been no signs or indication that we’d passed from one country to another. Knowing when we’d crossed a European border wasn’t always going to be obvious.
In the region of Alsace, with their tumultuous history of conquest and governance, it’s probably understandable that there aren’t lines of demarcation. You’ll see more proclamations of borders and regional rights when you cross from Waterford into Kilkenny on a country road than you’ll see around the “Passerelle des Deux Rives" (the bridge of two banks) that we cycled across from France into Germany.
We’d stayed in Strasbourg for three nights, one night more than we’d planned. After two nights and a full day off from cycling, our first in two weeks, we were fully prepared for the road, but we only managed to clock up one kilometre when the freewheel mechanism on my bike gave enough trouble to force us off piste to seek mechanical assistance. It was an ill wind that meant we got to visit the park where the storks of Strasbourg hang out.
The storks like it there so much that they’ve given up migrating completely, staying in the park all year round. It was wonderful to see them dotted throughout the landscape in their huge and conspicuous nests, circling in the sky above us, all the while making their clackety clack calls. If we didn’t get the bike sorted we may have ended up joining them.
We’d had a visit to this park on our list of things to do in Strasbourg when Warmshowers hosts Colas and Eva in Taissy near Reims recommended it to us, but between all the eating and sleeping we had to do, we hadn’t managed to fit it into the day and half we had originally planned to spend in the city. The extra forced day, once we’d seen to the bike and fitted in some more eating and sleeping, afforded us some quality stork time.
As we’ve been making our way along the road over the last three weeks, eating has been a high priority. We need to keep fuel in the tank.
We’ve tried local delicacies where possible, but truth be told, I’m more than a little reserved when it comes to cheeses. This is a problem in France. One of our hosts told us he likes to leave his blue cheese at room temperature for a couple of weeks before eating it, to make sure it’s nice and lively, but just not so lively it can run away. I believe him.
My theory on why wine accompanies blue cheese so well is that it acts as a form of anaesthetic, completely necessary to dull the senses before attempting to ingest something that smells awful and is already well on its way to being more biology project than foodstuff. When I hear the word Camembert, my immediate response is, why would you?
Ellie does not feel the same way about some of the more challenging cheeses, thus ensuring our safe passage through France. Sometimes a Cavanbert (Ireland’s answer to the French stinker) will be found lurking in the fridge at home, or even a Cambozola, the Frankensteinish combination of two already pretty gross monsters.
It turns out that similarly to Frankenstein, Cambozola was developed in a laboratory. This lab is located in a cheese factory in Germany. Ellie had expressed a desire to visit that very factory when we were planning this trip. I’m hoping that the natural beauty of the Black Forest has distracted her from her desire to witness a horror factory of disfigured, half living/half dead cheese monstrosities.
I haven’t been a complete food philistine. A few ciders were happily consumed in Normandy. We had a chocolate eclair on the road to Eclaires. As soon as we hit Germany there was schnitzel for dinner.
We’d been told that we could not miss out on tarte flambeé and traditional choucroute garnie while in Strasbourg. Shur, it would have been rude not to try them.
Both those specialties were wonderful. Tarte flambeé is similar to pizza but with a white sauce instead of tomato sauce. Choucroute garnie is pretty much bacon and cabbage, in a slightly different format, with less spuds. After a day spent shifting round bales it’d be an ideal feed for a farmer, if it had just a couple more potatoes or a few scoops of mash.
When we began this trip myself and Ellie chatted about what food we’d miss most over our two year adventure. Ellie didn’t have to think about it for too long. Barry’s Tea. She packed 40 teabags into her panniers before we left and we have already had some much needed and restorative brews along the road.
This morning I asked Ellie if she would like me to bring her a cup of Barry’s tea before she got out of bed. “No thanks,” she answered sleepily. “I’ll make one myself. We don’t have enough teabags left to waste them on poorly made cups of tea”. Well, at least I asked.
The afternoon of the first day we spent cycling through Germany, the sun came out, and it felt like spring had arrived in this part of the world. We’ve been steeped with the weather so far. Only three days of rain and one day of headwind so far. Keep lighting those candles for us; they’re still working.
For the first time we sat out in the sunshine to fire up the stove during a break. We were sitting on a log, enjoying a nice cup of Barry’s, so I took out the concertina and we had a little practice session. A lady passed us on her bicycle and gave us a big smile and a thumbs up. Barrys couldn’t have made an ad like it.
There are less than half the teabags left. Things could get nasty pretty soon. We haven’t resorted to drying out the used teabags yet, but we’re not far away from it. Anyone got a line on some Barry’s tea in Vienna?
Tayto crisps will be the foodstuff I’ll miss most. As we make our way through different countries and regions I’ve been sampling their crisps, in an effort to scratch the itch. Nothing’s come close, but it’s an interesting and informative search.
France has a brand of crips called Brets, who offer a dizzying and worrying array of flavours. They have the dreaded and aforementioned Camembert flavour, mushroom flavour, chips and mayonnaise flavour, another couple of dodgy cheese flavours, and a whole host of others. I tried a few varieties, and they were very decent. A very solid salt and vinegar and a surprisingly good pizza flavour.
It got me thinking about crisps, as I often do, and how they can actually signify something much more important than convenience food trends. Take Tayto as an example. We should be very proud of Tayto founder Joe “Spud” Murphy in Ireland: he is credited with creating the very first flavoured crisp in 1954. Before Spud, it was all just added salt.
Ireland made a ground-breaking step in the world of crisps, yet on the northern part of our island Tayto crisps are different to those in the south. There is different packaging and different flavours available north of the border. Whenever I’m up north I’ll usually stop off in Jonesborough on the way back home to stock up on Tayto Wuster Sauce crisps and fireworks.
Free-state Tayto are now owned by the German company Intersnack, who have shares in Largo Foods, while Tayto in the occupied counties remain a separate independent family run entity. How can we ever expect Ireland to be a country united while our crisps remain divided?
What does the array of crisp flavours in France tell us about life there? Is it a country embracing its food culture in every way possible, or is it a reflection of a society that is edging ever closer to dependency on convenience foods to satiate appetites in increasingly busy lives, where ordinary decent folk have less time to devote to cooking intricate meals and eating healthily?
In Germany there is less choice in terms of crisp flavours, and in Switzerland even fewer still. The German flavour options are mostly influenced by foods from other countries, and the Swiss offerings lean heavily on the simple and standard ready salted pre-Spud Murphy approach.
What France, Germany and Switzerland have in common are that many of the crisps made there proclaim that the potatoes they use are sourced in the country where the crisp companies are based. Some of the fancier brands even offering the names of the indigenous farms where the spuds were sourced.
Some of the brands that borrow flavours from other cultures and countries still have this element of potato nationalism on the packaging. Does this reflect some wider held attitudes in relation to value placed on the influences of multiculturalism and migration on national identity, economics, culture and the attitudes of the crisps munching masses? Or are they just crisps?
For more in-depth analysis of the impact of multiculturalism and migration on nationalism and socio-political gastronomy in the countries we’re visiting, I’d steer you towards Le Monde and Der Spiegel. What I can offer you here is something special that you will not read anywhere else, my friends: International Crisp News.
In the spirit of discovery and edification that drives our great bicycle adventure, I offer you the first of our international crisp reviews.
All of my international crisp reviews will follow the same structure as Top Trumps card games. Ellie is somewhat surprised at the time I’ve been devoting to this research. I’ve assured her that there is definitely no other travel blog that is covering crisp related issues. She tells me that this is because no one besides me wants to read about it. She may be right, but the roads are long and it keeps me occupied, entertained and from dwelling too long on mountains and headwinds.
For more international crisp updates as they happen, follow us on Instagram @spokeyokes.
The issue with the freewheel mechanism on my bike, that kept us in Strasbourg for a extra day, raised its head again this morning as we were about to leave Lake Constance and make our way back to The Danube. This time it couldn’t be coaxed back into working. To coin a local phrase, it was kaput.
As I tapped the wheel hub and cassette gingerly with a spanner, trying to get the freewheel mechanism to dislodge itself, two local cyclists in casual clothes stopped and asked if we needed any help. I was a bit dismissive, knowing that the problem was kinda serious and needed some specialist tools and parts. “My father is a bicycle mechanic and has a workshop five kilometres from here,” Anja told us.
Anja’s boyfriend Joe was on an electric bike and he towed me to the house with some rope that I have. It took a bit of getting used to, and truth be told, I ended up in the ditch on our first attempt at take-off.
We are currently sitting in a wood and glass conservatory, directly on the shore of Lake Constance, with a stove lighting. Anja made us tea, coffee and some wonderful lunch while we waited for her Dad to come home. This evening we had dinner with the whole family. If you’re going to have a mechanical failure, this is the way to do it. If we fell out a window, we’d fall up the way!
Anja’s dad Michi replaced and fixed the freewheel mechanism. We tried five different bicycle shops in Strasbourg for the very same part when it first showed signs of misbehaving. None of them had it, so we had to take the cassette off to clean and oil it, hoping it wouldn’t stick again before we got to Vienna.
Michi isn’t even a bicycle mechanic by profession; he’s just really interested and handy with bikes. He had the needed part in his workshop on a spare wheel. He had the whole job done in about 30 minutes. Legend!
We’ve already been writing about the kindness of strangers we’ve experienced so far on this trip, and how it’s been blowing us away. Today and yesterday it reached the highest levels yet. We’re indebted to Anja, Joe, Michi and their whole family. Tonight we camp in their garden, right beside the lake, and because of their kindness, I can pedal my bike again tomorrow and we won’t miss a day this time.
Last night our Warmshowers host was not in town, but he left the key to his apartment with his neighbour, who let us in when we arrived. A stranger allowed us into his empty apartment to stay the night without ever meeting us or being there himself. That level of trust and kindness is breathtaking. We have some serious karma to repay.
We find ourselves on the banks of Lake Constance, known in German as the Bodensee, as part of an unplanned detour.
When we hit Donaueschingen, where the Danube rises, Ellie noticed on our map how close we were to Lake Constance. It would have been remiss not to have a little look, especially as we’d have the added bonus of whistle-stop visits to Switzerland and Austria as we made our way around the lake. Also an opportunity to pick up more crisps!
As we cycled from Donaueschingen towards Konstanz, the German town on the shores of the lake, the 80km journey was mostly downhill, and we descended along immaculately surfaced quiet country roads, through the woodland of the Black Forest region, with blue skies and circling golden eagles overhead.
When Ellie asked that question about how we would know if we had entered Switzerland, I pointed at the sky in front of us and Ellie looked up. “What?” she asked. “Look above the clouds,” I replied. Rising above the clouds and horizon were the snow-covered peaks of the Swiss Alps. They were glorious, made even more beautiful in the knowledge that we weren’t going to attempt to cycle over them. We were happy to admire them from a safe distance around the shore of the lake.
Even after two punctures, this was my most enjoyable and awe inspiring day on the bicycle so far. A tough and somewhat hair-raising trek over the frozen mountain from Freiburg to Donaueschingen had been well worth it.
We’ve been on the road for three weeks, we’ve been in four countries, we’ve had three punctures, two mechanical failures, thirty teabags and more crisps than a reasonable person should. At this point we can report that we’re still having one hell of a time.
Hold her steady, and keep it between the ditches! (especially if you’re being towed)
I got in touch with Barry's Tea and you can buy some in Flanagan's Irish Pub in Vienna. They have information on their website about where to buy, so you might get some more info there. I don't have any info about Tayto.
Top Trump crisps, Genius boy 👏👏