Hike-a-Bike V
Bike: Le Chenit / Le Brassus, 45 miles, 2300 feet of climb
Accommodation: Chic Studio in Old Town (Airbnb); host Philippe. wifi, washer quiet courtyard
This is the last day of hike-a-bike. Really. Well, except I think there is one day, maybe two, later in August that will have steep hills. Oh, well. Hiking or biking, it’s all good exercise.
We started right out with a two-mile hike straight up to the Jura Natural Park. The weather was incredible—low 70s, not a cloud in the sky, fresh breeze. Once in the park, the riding was the best, up and down rolling hills through fields and forests.
About six miles in, we found a boulangerie for breakfast in Bassin. While we ate at a little table in front of the cafe, people kept going in the next door with empty containers and coming out with full containers. We popped inside and found an automatic milk dispenser: you put coins in, and fill your own container or a paper cup from the stack on top of the machine with fresh local milk. Wouldn’t it be fun to have that in Northfield?
Heading out of town, my Wahoo and RWGPS apps started blinking red and telling me I was off-route. Ken’s told him he was smack on route. So weird. We have been mapping our routes at the RWGPS website on my laptop, then I share the finished route with Ken and we load the same route into the RWGPS app on our phones (we each have the same app on an iphone) and sync the phone app to our Wahoo (we each have the same model of Wahoo). Until today, we have really had good luck with navigation. The apps and our skill in using them have improved greatly since the first couple weeks in Spain last year (when we got ourselves into all kinds of messy biking situations). On this trip, we have never been more than a couple meters off-route and have had mostly very ridable days.
Anyway, we decided to just turn off my devices and go with Ken’s, and we made it to our apartment in Geneva with no problem.
Dropping down out of the Jura Mountains onto Lake Geneva was one of the most breathtaking moments ever. I didn’t even try to photograph it; it is so hard to capture broad, sweeping vistas. The alps were faint blue outlines on the far horizon, the lake was an incredible blue expanse below, and the green fields and trees of the Jura surrounded us, dotted by red tile roofs and gray-blue church steeples.
After a quick stop at an Aldi’s for cold drinks, yogurt, and fruit, Ken navigated us through the crowded and quirky streets of Geneva to our apartment in Old Town. We got into the building with no problem, using the code provided by our host. When we got to the door of the apartment, we found an old-fashioned lock. The host hadn’t said anything about a key. As I sent the host a message asking about how to get in, I remembered that in Strasbourg, we had a similar situation, and the host had left the key under the rug outside the apartment door. Sure enough, there was the key in Geneva.
Sometimes Ken and I wonder whether we are losing faculties as we age, especially when we can’t find our glasses or can’t remember a wifi password or something like that. This kind of traveling, being challenged 24 hours a day with navigational, physical, and mental puzzles, is SO good for us. Sometimes we reassure each other that as long as we can get through each day on the road successfully, we must not be in too bad a shape.
We have found that food in Switzerland is extremely expensive—about double what we were paying in France. We’ve been eating more grocery store food and at more casual restaurants to keep costs down. Tonight we found a little roasted chicken restaurant—great food, simple, just a few things on the menu, very friendly staff.
We ended the day with gelato (yes, that sort of blew our budget, but...) and a walk down to the lake to see the famous fountain in the harbor. The fountain was not running. But we did see it from a distance earlier in the day when we biked down into the city, and it was lovely.
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| Our last day of biking in the Jura Mountains. That's the alps in the distance! |
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| Konur and I traded photos of our favorite breakfast: quiche, pain au chocolat, orange juice. What could be better? |
