And a third cent:

France

I haven’t ridden much in the motherland, only a few small routes, but here is my third cent anyway:

Tl;DR

camp sites are good, trains are ok, landscape are great, let’s go !

Camping

In France it’s somewhat allowed to camp anywhere, as long as the owner of the land or the local town does not forbid it. Basically you better find a quiet spot and leave no trace behind you and you should be fine I guess (I never did that though). However, French towns very often have a “camping municipal”, which is a camp site managed by the city itself, like a library! It’s usually extra cheap to camp there and often quality of service is good. For the stove, you will easily find Camping gas, but there is also a Decathlon every 30 meters, so it should be easy to find new gas bottles if your stove come from there.

Trains

The SNCF app for booking train tickets is shit. Pure 24 carats of shit. There are alternative like https://www.12train.com/ , but afaik you can’t book a ticket for your bike there. Depending on the region, it can be free or not to bring your bike in a regional train (TER), and even when it’s free you might need a ticket for it. You will need to look that up in there https://www.veloabord.fr/, but I think it’s only in French (feel free to DM me if you need help with translation for a specific region). For long distance trains, it’s the same as in Germany, you need to book a dedicated ticket for your bike in advance as there are not many dedicated spaces for bikes.

Places to avoid/visit

Avoid big cities (Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse…), unless you can stay on dedicated bike lanes. It’s really not like Germany, in France the small bike lanes are often of poor quality and in a shared space with cars. I would say it’s quite dangerous with a heavily loaded bike to cross such cities (again, unless riding on the large bike lanes like the “canal du midi” or so). In the country side you can often find roads with very low traffic, but not many dedicated bike lanes. I didn’t ride much in France yet, I only did Aix-les-bains to Montellimar, which is a really nice route, I can recommend.

Supply

There are many supermarkets in France, you should not have any issue resupplying. Go visit the small artisanal bakeries, it is our pride for good reasons (no my Germans friends, your bread is nowhere as good as our bread, I will die on this hill no matter on many year I live in Germany (I like Brotchen though…)). Many shops, bakery and restaurants are closed on Sunday and Monday. For the restaurant, in week days at noon, you can get a “plat du jour”, which is the main dish of the day, it will be served quickly. The service in French restaurants is often very good, tap water and bread is “free” (included in the price of food) and usually unlimited, ask for “un pichet d’eau” to get tap water, otherwise they might serve you a bottle which you will have to pay. For vegetarians, you will not have many choices, but worst case scenario, eat the cheese, it’s good. For vegans, in bigger cities there are dedicated vegetarian/vegan restaurants, but in the country side it will be a struggle to eat anything other than chips (which will certainly be cooked in animal fat too…).

Language

I think you really must learn to say “bonjour”, “merci”, “je ne parle pas francais, parlez vous anglais ?” (I don’t speak french, do you speak english ?) otherwise people will be rude to you. TBH, I try to learn this for every country I’m visiting, so maybe it’s just me. Young people will most often be able to speak basic English. Don’t expect much from the older generation though.

Happy biking!

My 2 cents:

Germany

TL;DR

Germany is a great country to visit by bike, there are lot’s of camping places, various landscapes and great bike lanes pretty much everywhere. I particularly recommend Berlin to Lubeck, via Rostock, I really enjoyed riding by the Baltic sea (Ost See).

Signs

There are many road signs for bike, most of them are green and lead you to roads that are either fully separated from cars or have low traffic.

Travel app

I’m a big fan of https://cycle.travel/map. we usually build our routes in there, download the GPX file, upload it to komoot and then to the GPS, but if you are riding with your phone, there is navigation included in the cycle.travel app.

Trains

Almost every regional train (Regionalbahn, RB) and S-Bahn (suburb train) have at least one bicycle friendly car. You may need to buy a ticket depending on the company managing the local transports. For example in the trains of RMV around Frankfurt, Mainz, Darmstadt, no need for a ticket, but around Köln, you will need one (if I remember correctly). In small train station, there is often no elevator, be prepared to carry your bike on stairs. I would highly recommend not planning to take a regional train on a Sunday or a public holiday (which vary depending on the state/Bundesland), because Germans love their Sunday’s hiking trip but the trains are smaller and less frequent on these days, so you might not even be able to enter the train with you bike and luggage (happened to us). It’s also possible to take long distance train, IC (slow) and ICE, but you better book in advance as the places are very limited. Also, don’t hesitate to ask people to move away from the foldable sits, if you don’t say anything and just awkwardly stay in the middle of the way, they will look at you suffer for the whole trip holding your bike and moving it around to people go in and out, without ever suggesting to give you the space (again, happened to us). Instead, promptly ask for it, these are places made for bikes and stollers, unless the train is full, there is no reason to lock these places for other reasons.

Camping

As far as I know camping outside of regulated camping places is forbidden, I would not do it unless I have no other choice. Also it’s fairly cheap (often under 15€) to have a place for a tent and two bikes in a camp site, plus it’s nice to have commodities accessible IMO. For the stove, you will easily find gas from Primus or Camping gas in Germany.

Our favourites routes are:

• Romantischer Rhein: approximately between Mainz and Bonn, great landscape, to do especially if you like wine.
• The Mosel river, from Koblenz (DE) to Metz (FR).
• Baltic coast, the best camping in all Germany are there IMO. I also enjoyed the lakes around Leipzig, the forests in Brandenburg, the Elbe around the beautiful Dresden and everything in between. BTW, if you are around Dresden, I also recommend letting the bike aside for a day or two to hike in the Sächsische Schweiz, in particular to tour the Malerweg (the way of the painters): truly beautiful.

Supply

You should not have any issues finding supermarket, you will have a lot a choice in REWE, EDEKA or Tegut, organic stuff in Alnatura or Denn’s and cheap stuff in Lidl or Aldi. On Sundays, Germany is either hiking or having a Frühstuck, you wont find many shops and restaurant opened., I recommend resupplying on Saturday. However, when it’s sunny make a pit stop in a typical Biergarten, fresh beer and snacks to keep you going. Also, it’s very easy to get vegetarian/vegan food in Germany, which is nice.

Language

As a foreigner leaving in Germany, it’s really hard finding Germans that do not speak English. Nowadays, I’m really trying to speak only German, but I know I could switch to English in most cases. They will appreciate if you can say Hallo, Tschuss and Danke and they will surely tell you your German is very good even if you can’t say anything else. Bonus point if you can say “Ich spreche nicht Deutsch, spechen Sie English?”.

Yeah, we are a bit afraid of that. I hope it cools down a bit in the night, especially in camping sites outside of cities.

Thanks, I was not aware of that.

You may want to read the text before commenting nonsense, the French are not pleased either.

| Sales are crashing in France, Germany, and the UK […] In France, sales of new Teslas fell by 63 percent

I don’t see what justify your attack, it seems unnecessary to attack people based on their nationality. Yes, we do have a far-right issue in France, but it’s pretty much the same as everywhere else in Europe and there is still a resisting left here, not all hope is lost. Also, regarding your comment below, the white flag stereotype for France comes from 2003, when the US and allies invaded and destroyed Irak, but for once France stood against the US imperialism.___

Not 100% sure but it looks like a Kona sutra SE

That’s why we also need to reduce our use of pretty much everything. We can never reach zero fossil fuel used, unless we start by reducing the amount of stuff we buy/use, starting with things that currently use fossil fuels: cars, shipping, flights, plastics and so on.

Then we could use renewable energies only or nuclear only or a mix of both to power what is truly necessary for our lives.

Nice, I will be attending if the DB is okay with that. I don’t have any practical knowledge in neither Nix nor Rust but I’m interested in both so that’s a great meetup. Do you know if the speakers will talk in German or in English ?

Where I was working Excel was used for the specification of scientific data. You get stuff like thousands of rows in several sheets themselves in multiple files that inherit from one another and everything is edited by hand… And I maintained a tool that combined them to create binary files from this mess. Lot of fun.

It depend on your morphology I guess: for me below 15km rides, I can wear jeans and it’s fine, but above that it starts to be painful. When I’m touring I really enjoy having my cycling pant, even a cheap one does the job perfectly for me. But again, I have a quite large distance between my ischium bones, so the same may not apply to everyone.

I think that’s unfair, in a city for example every equipment made for bikes, like a bridge above a road with lots of traffic or smooth road crossings, make the life of disabled easier too. I’m thinking about wheelchairs, but I guess it’s true even for people who struggle with walking too. And to me, the “fuck cars” Utopia is certainly way more inclusive for the disabled than the current situation.

It’s the same for us in France. We barely get any news from Germany, apart from who is the current chancellor and the big headlines. I now live in Germany and it feels very strange to have so few knowledge of the politics of where I live (my german is way too weak for now to properly understand it)

I found out there is actually a builtin function in telescope to fuzzy search in registers. In case someone is interested, I made this binding to access it (lua):

vim.keymap.set('n', '<leader>se', require('telescope.builtin').registers, { desc = '[S]earch r[E]gister' })

I’m not yet sure how to keep the history of deletion though.

Just someone learning DE here and I’m not sure to understand fully the article. Would that mean a specific ticket would be necessary to travel with his bike in place of the usual Deutschland ticket ? Maybe I’m confused because on RMV network, we can travel freely with our bikes. In other regions do you need to pay each time for a fahrrad ticket in addition to your Deutshland ticket ? (feel free to reply in german, it’s easier to read than write!)

I don’t play that much any more sadly, only one evening per week with the buddies but BG3 looks very appealing. Do you think it can be enjoyed casually ?

Pour te donner une idée le dernier que j’ai fait c’était en janvier 2023 Paris->Toulouse en couchette de 2nd classe, c’était 37€ mais j’ai déjà payé 48€ pour le même service. Après ca varie fortement, c’est clairement moins cher si tu peux reservé en avance. Ca m’est arrivé de payer 150€ parceque je reservais le jour même et qu’il ne restait que des billets de 1er classe.

Pour avoir fait pas mal de fois Toulouse-Paris en train de nuit l’année dernière, c’est vraiment top. J’y dors généralement bien et ça me donne l’impression de ne pas perdre de temps dans les transports (même si j’aime bien le train). En plus, je seul moment où je peux apprécier Paris c’est à 7h du mat’ quand il n’y a pas grand monde et que tu peux aller te prendre un café et une tartine dans les cafés qui ouvrent tout doucement. Donc je plussoie fort vers le haut !

Je suis étonné que les Pays Bas soient aussie haut, ils ont la réputation de manger un sandwich triangle devant le pc le midi et des tartines le soir. Ca vaut aussi dans une moindre mesure pour les Allemands.

Here it is https://unisa.alma.exlibrisgroup.com/view/delivery/61USOUTHAUS_INST/12177058790001831 I haven’t read it, just doing my part for open science. By the way, unpaywall is a great browser extension to quickly go around publishers paywalls: https://unpaywall.org/welcome

It seems the temperature has been slightly hotter about 6500 years ago for a period of around 2 centuries with temperature estimated between +0.8 and +1.8 °C compared to 19th century, but this is subject to debate, (see for example https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-0530-7).

Before that, we have to go back to a period where most Homo Sapiens were living in Africa about 125,000 years ago, where warming was likely +0.5 to +1.5°C compared to the same 19th century baseline.

Regardless if there was periods much hotter in the long past, the big difference with today’s situation is the rate at which this warming is taking place. For example, for the “6500 years ago” period, it took about 3000 years of warming to go from +0 to it’s maximum (which is between +0.8 and +1.8 °C). Today we are at about +1.1°C and it took us only 100 years, through fossil fuels burning and farming to reach that and most of which happened in the past 50 years.

Sources:

• IPCC WG1, figure2_1
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-0530-7

Also, about oxygen 16 and oxygen 18:

The water remaining in the ocean develops increasingly higher concentration of heavy oxygen compared to the universal standard, and the ice develops a higher concentration of light oxygen. Thus, high concentrations of heavy oxygen in the ocean tell scientists that light oxygen was trapped in the ice sheets. The exact oxygen ratios can show how much ice covered the Earth. Sources:

• https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Paleoclimatology_OxygenBalance which is based on https://hal.science/hal-03334828/file/jgrD1994Jouzel25791.pdf
• You may also find this wikipedia article useful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Δ18O#Extrapolation_of_temperature