Fahrradtour Konstanz → Cannes

Motivation

After finishing my Technician degree in February 2025 and before my Computer Science studies at DHBW Mosbach were set to begin in September, I had a rare window of freedom — time without obligation, without a schedule, without a plan. Most people would have used it to rest.

I decided to cycle from Konstanz to Cannes.

There was no grand backstory. No years of preparation. I had done the Hawaii language trip just before this, come back to Germany, and found myself with energy to burn and no reason to sit still. A friend was in Cannes. The weather was getting warm. I looked at a map, saw the route, and thought: why not?

I bought a second-hand touring bike, packed a lightweight tent, grabbed some basic camping gear, and booked a one-way train ticket to Konstanz — the southernmost point of Germany on Lake Constance. The plan: ride south. Cross the Alps. Get to France. Figure out the rest on the road.

No cycling experience. No GPS device. No support vehicle. Just the bike, the road, and whatever came next.

Starting Point Konstanz

June 21, 2025 · Day 0

Getting to Konstanz by train with a fully loaded touring bike is an adventure in itself. Navigating through the carriages, squeezing past doors, making sure nothing toppled — by the time I arrived at the station I was already sweating, and I hadn’t turned a single pedal yet.

Konstanz sits right on the shore of Lake Constance (Bodensee), at the southernmost tip of Germany. Standing there, looking south toward Switzerland, everything became suddenly very real. The hydration vest was loaded, the panniers were packed, the helmet was on. No plan beyond “go south, cross the mountains, reach France.”

I took a moment to breathe it in — the smell of the lake, the warm June air, the buzz of summer. Then I clipped in, pointed the wheels south, and started pedalling. That first kilometre felt like a thousand promises.

Day 1 — First Night on the Road

June 22, 2025 · Rhine Cycling Path

Day one began with a healthy mix of excitement and mild chaos. The route along the Rhine was flat and straightforward — the kind of riding that lets your mind wander while your legs fall into rhythm. Fields, trees, the river beside me. It felt easy. Too easy, part of me thought.

The kilometres passed. The Rhine valley opened up, wide and green under a grey sky that couldn’t quite decide whether it wanted to rain. By mid-afternoon I’d already covered more ground than expected, and the legs were talking but not complaining.

What I didn’t expect was how quickly strangers would become part of the story. Sitting down to rest at a terrace, a cold drink in hand, watching the mountains start to define the horizon — that moment of stopping and just being somewhere new with everything you own on a bicycle beside you. That’s a specific kind of freedom. A cold Wanda beer and the sound of the outdoors. Day one, done.

Day 2 — Along the Rhine to Chur

June 23, 2025 · Rhine Valley → Chur, Switzerland

Day two was about finding a rhythm. The Rhine Gorge — sometimes called the “Swiss Grand Canyon” — opened up somewhere south of Chur, and nothing could have prepared me for the scale of it. Rocky walls dropping hundreds of metres, dense forest clinging to the slopes, and a turquoise river threading through the valley far below. I stopped at a viewpoint and just stared for a while.

The riding itself was a long, steady push — not brutal, but consistent. Switzerland’s road infrastructure is almost unfairly good for cycling: smooth tarmac, clear signage, and mountain air cool enough to make the effort feel manageable even under a blazing June sky.

The highlight of the day came not from the landscape but from a retiree near Chur. We got talking, and he invited me to pitch my tent in his garden for the night. Before I left the next morning, he pressed some cash into my hand — for camping fees ahead, he said. I hadn’t asked. He just did it. Some moments on a long journey stay with you permanently. This was one of them.

Day 3 — Into the Alps

June 24, 2025 · Swiss Alps · Splügen Pass area

Day three was the day things got real. A wrong turn — or rather, a routing decision that seemed logical on the map but wasn’t — added roughly 120 extra kilometres to the day. By the time I figured it out, there was nothing to do but keep pedalling.

But the detour delivered something unexpected: a completely different slice of Switzerland. Quieter roads, smaller villages, longer climbs. And then the Alps appeared — not gradually, but suddenly, like a wall of rock and snow rising at the end of every valley. You can look at images of the Alps a thousand times and still not be prepared for the feeling of standing at their foot on a bicycle with everything you own, knowing you have to go over them.

That moment, looking up at the snow-capped ridgeline against a perfect blue sky, loaded bike beside me, exhausted but completely alive — that’s the image I carry from this day. The mountains don’t care about your plans. You adjust. You climb.

Day 4 — Switzerland Done, Italy Begins

June 25, 2025 · Alps → Northern Italy

Crossing into Italy felt monumental. Switzerland had been stunningly beautiful but also relentlessly demanding — the climbs, the altitude, the sheer scale of everything. Coming down the other side of the Alps, the air got warmer, the road signs switched language, and something shifted in the atmosphere. Europe feels different country by country, and Italy announces itself immediately.

The descent brought me to a lake campsite unlike anything I’d expected to find in northern Italy — turquoise water, palm trees, a cycling path running right past the entrance. The kind of place you’d normally book months in advance. I just rolled in, pitched the tent, and sat by the water for a long time.

Later that evening, circumstances and budget meant improvising a sleeping spot under a railway bridge. It sounds worse than it was. Dry, sheltered, and with a certain rough poetry to it — the kind of accommodation you only get when you’re moving through the world without a fixed plan. That’s where day four ended: under Italian stars, listening to the odd train pass overhead.

Italy — Heat, Pasta & Turin

June 26–29, 2025 · Northern Italy · Turin · Cuneo

After crossing into Italy, the landscape flattened out into the Po Valley — long straight roads, searing heat, and a sky almost too blue to be real. The days in Italy were less about grinding kilometres and more about absorbing everything around me: the food, the people, the architecture.

A pilgrim house near Mornago became an unexpected highlight. The kind of place run by volunteers, open to anyone on a long journey — walkers, cyclists, pilgrims of all kinds. The communal kitchen became the scene of one of the trip’s best memories: making gnocchi from scratch with other guests, flour everywhere, someone’s Italian grandmother’s recipe, laughing over a chopping board. Travel does this — it creates moments you couldn’t have planned.

Turin was a full day off the bike and worth every minute. The city’s covered arcades — portici and galleries — are unlike anything in Germany or Switzerland. Grand 19th-century architecture, marble floors, iron and glass ceilings. Just walking through the Galleria felt like stepping into a different century. Real coffee. Proper food. Rest.

Then Cuneo — a quieter city at the foot of the Maritime Alps. One more workout at an outdoor gym (the legs needed movement, not rest), then the mountains appeared again on the horizon. The second crossing was next.

Second Alpine Crossing — 2,700 m

June 30, 2025 · Maritime Alps · Italy → France

The second Alpine crossing was in a completely different category from the first. Splügen had been a proper mountain pass with a real road. The Maritime Alps — between Cuneo and the French Riviera — were something else entirely. The route I had planned looked clean on a map. On the ground it turned into loose scree, steep rocky faces, and sections where no path existed at all.

I ended up carrying the bike. Lifting it section by section, over rocks, up slopes too steep and unstable to ride. The weight of a loaded touring bike in that terrain is difficult to describe — it demands everything from your legs, arms, shoulders, and whatever reserves of stubbornness you have left after a week of cycling.

And then — completely unexpectedly — a mountain lake appeared. High in the cirque, hemmed in by jagged grey peaks, an emerald-green alpine lake sat perfectly still, reflecting the overcast sky. I stopped, dropped the bike, and just laughed. Not because anything was funny. Because sometimes you reach a point of effort where the only response is pure, unfiltered joy. That photo — eyes closed, helmet on, rain jacket, laughing into the cold mountain air — is probably the truest picture of the whole trip.

France was on the other side. One more descent to go.

Arrival — Southern France

July 1, 2025 · Côte d’Azur · Cannes

The descent from the Maritime Alps into southern France was the best 30 kilometres of the entire trip. Everything that had been hard and heavy on the way up — the weight, the altitude, the loose rock — turned into pure momentum going down. The air got warmer with every metre lost. The vegetation shifted: pine trees, then Mediterranean scrub, then the first palm trees appearing alongside the road. The sea was somewhere ahead.

The Côte d’Azur hit differently after ten days on a bicycle. Nice felt enormous. The Promenade des Anglais was everything you’ve seen in photographs, and somehow still surprising in person. I sat on the beach for a while with the bike lying beside me in the sand and tried to process the fact that I had cycled here from Lake Constance.

The final stretch from Nice to Cannes runs along the coast — sun, traffic, blue water, the kind of scenery that cyclists post on social media. I barely noticed it. The legs had stopped sending updates somewhere around kilometre 850 and I was running entirely on momentum and the knowledge that a friend was waiting at the end.

And then — a Lidl parking lot, somewhere in the south of France. A Vermont touring bike leaning against a tree. A helmet hanging off the handlebars. A bag of chips on the rear rack because priorities. Green mountains still visible in the background, unimpressed. That’s the photo. That’s the finish line. No fanfare, no ceremony — just a bike that made it, and a person who made it too.