Rain was falling gently, tip-tapping on tree leaves. It seemed like the sound wanted to wake up the forest, but even that sound couldn’t break the silence of that place. When the lighting storm arrived everything suddenly became white for a second and then deep dark again.
Thankfully I wasn’t alone. She was with me. We both stood up, in complete darkness, letting the rain speak for us.
Laura wasn’t supposed to stay with me. It wasn’t her intention to leave Freiburg that day. She left home on her old city bike carrying only a small bag, headphones and sunglasses. She walked out the door just to go shopping at the grocery store but as she started cycling she changed her mind. Looking at the map she suggested a route to ride next to me till downtown.
We rode without saying much, it’s always hard saying goodbye to someone you had a special connection with, but it’s painful when it seems your goodbye could last forever. Our eyes were focused on the road or on the handlebar most of the time, as we were afraid of looking at each other to see the reality of leaving.
As our time was going to an end, something magical happened. City blocks had suddenly ended letting trees and plants take over the landscape. Soft hills with vineyards, farms and animals were opening our way. Laura couldn’t stop there. She wasn’t ready to come back to the concrete jungle, not after seeing all that.
So she said: “I’ll do just a few kilometres more with you before heading back”
But she didn’t.
She pushed for 10 more kilometres, then her tyre was almost ready to explode.
Laura was determined to find a bike shop to fix the wheel. Based on the size of the small towns we were passing I thought there wasn’t a chance but, we actually found it: it was next to a kebab’s restaurant, and they shared the same roof too, as they probably were the only two shops in town.
We cycled a bit more, the sun was getting really hot and we didn’t have any food yet. That’s why the very moment we found a strawberry field, we rushed to take some: those strawberries were the most amazing I ever had.
There were many kilometres between Freiburg and us by then, but Laura didn’t seem to care so much about it. That was definitely the right spirit!
It was hot, like boiling hot, so while cycling along the river we decided to do a quick stop and swim into the freshwater.
That was the Rhine River, which also acts as a border between Germany and France. The wild swim made our trip more like an adventure, inspiring me to live those last moments fully.
“Let’s cross the bridge!” I suggested as she looked at me with big surprise. As I said previously by crossing the Rhine we weren’t just changing shore, we were changing country too.
And Voilà! We were in France: different language, different economy, different politics but same sun, same air and same travellers too.
We stopped at a big supermarket to get ready for the night. At this point, it was simply obvious Laura wouldn’t come back to Freiburg that day, so she decided to reach Switzerland with me and then, once in Basel, she would have taken a train back home.
We decided to wild camp together, to me, sleeping outdoors on random spots is freedom at its most. I love all my solo camping in the middle of nowhere, just me and wild nature. But I can’t deny I had difficult times and being alone under extreme conditions isn’t fun. Whether it was the heavy rain that almost broke my tent in two, or the challenge to make a fire when everything was wet, or a scary one when I heard a bear roar (it actually happened in Slovenia).
For all these reasons plus the fact that Laura among any other travellers was with me, I was truly excited about our unexpected wild camping in the France forest.
Finding the right spot to pitch a tent requires patience. I usually spend from one to two hours looking around, so the most important things to check are:
- be isolated, enough to make a fire without being noticed
- be protected by strong wind or rain
- have a source of freshwater nearby (when not possible fill bottles and tank just before)
- look for dry terrain, during the night temperature drops and humidity will attack your tent
That night we didn’t have many options to choose for the best spot: the little forest we found was just a few kilometres from the river, as we had to follow the Rhine on its way to Switzerland we couldn’t go any further. The terrain was completely flat with relatively small trees and lots of grass on the ground, this is never a good thing because grass attracts water and everything gets wet by the morning. In our case though there was more to worry about: a storm was coming and that water would have been a problem.
Laura was so happy to be alone in a forest that she wandered around leaving stuff here and there: hand towel on a branch tree, music speaker on the ground, food roped together coming down from a tree. I pitched the tent under the thickest trees around to have some sort of protection from the rain. If the amount of rain would have been any close to what the weather forecast sayid, those branches wouldn’t have helped much. I was just hoping the forecast guys were wrong.
A solo traveller is never really alone because he shares with all the people he meets on the road: it’s easier to connect to others when you’re alone, people are more open to help and spend time with you. I personally enjoy the feeling of not knowing what is going to happen next: being alone in an unknown territory makes you vulnerable but also ready to experience amazing things. It’s like leaving objects, ideas, beliefs behind you; after a few days of adventure you are empty, or free if you like, and that’s when you truly become ready to accept the unknown.
I’m usually in this state of mind when I’m travelling a long distance on my bike. I seek loneliness to let silence find me. This time was different though. For the first time in a while I was sharing my adventure with someone. It wasn’t me and the world anymore but me and Laura on one side and the world on the other.
Dinner was full of laughs and joyful moments, which is usually just a rush to refill my energy. In that moment I saw beauty in sharing life with someone: while I was living the way I liked and I found someone who enjoyed that too. The best part was that she didn’t know she would like it till that day, the same she left the house to go shopping but turned out to be with me, in a forest, somewhere in France.
We went to bed straight after dinner for two reasons mostly. The first one was we didn’t know how bad the storm would have been so we wanted to get as much sleep as possible, the second one was that we were knocked!
It started raining just after midnight, it started gently, as little tip-tapping on the tent, but rain drops soon became bigger hitting heavier the tent. When the thunderstorm arrived we left the tent and sat on a fallen tree nearby. You couldn’t see a thing, only the sound of raindrops touching the forest was creating movements. We sat there for an indefinable time, looking with our eyes closed.
