Lost

The good thing about not knowing where one is at any given time, is that it's impossible to get lost.

When we awoke, our Swiss neighbour was wearing gloves and a beanie, which we took to be some sort of sign that we'd been asleep for a month, and it was now coming on winter, but alas we hadn't and it was bleak and overcast and not much short of sleet in our minds at least, and we had to put up with all the moaning (in German) about how terrible this summer has been. To be fair, of the eight boats that are allowed in this harbour, we were the only ones not to speak German, and it does seem to our ears at least, to be a perfect language for complaining in.

So we decided to wait until they'd moved on before emerging in our shorts and sandals to the promise of an improving day, and cycled off in the direction marked "Piste la Fort 1km", we knew that Piste was a track and a Fort is a Fort after all, and the little green bicycle symbols were self explanatory along the way. The track was sensational but we did start to wonder after half an hour why it had taken us so long to travel a kilometre. After an hour and a half we were beyond caring about how far away this fort thing was, and found a shop, a baguette some pate and an iced tea to assist in restoring our previous disposition.

While mid baguette, it seemed like a good time to make use of a few iPhone Apps. Firstly the Collins French English Dictionary suggested that "fort" may actually mean "strong" and perhaps there wasn't much chance of finding an odd rampart anytime soon. Secondly Mobile Maps GPS was convinced we were more or less ten kilometres from home as the crow flies, although clearly the direction we had travelled in, meandering beside rivers and around lakes, across cornfields, through hop plantations, past meadows of flowers, was not at all as the crow flies and actually the maps seemed to indicate that perhaps it had flown a further five kilometres or so.

Having an understanding of our whereabouts did go some of the way towards breaking the spell we were under, being somewhat immersed in the countryside we were traversing, as indeed did the realisation that we were a bit over forty kilometres short of completing the circuit we'd commenced. 

Simple physics mentions something about it never taking as long to travel back along a given path as it does to go outbound along it, and so it was to be that before either of us could say "Soufffelweyersheim", we had turned around and were back and no longer wondering whether the fort was worth a visit.

Indeed it was.