Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Category: Personal

Boy, what a whopper!

Toughest hill of the trip today, especially after biking already 45 miles 🙁 Straight up 1300 feet the Strava elevation says it all:

Strava_Ride___Zurich_to_Donaueschingen

Lovely bbq area

The ride from Zurich to Donaueschingen started with riding through vast construction sites before the airport, very reminiscent of when I visited Dubai! After the airport it turns into a gorgeous cycleway along the river with many covered bridges and you get to visit the Rhein Falls if you want to part with 5 chf.

It all changes when you cross the river and reach Schaffhausen (which is interestingly still in Switzerland, so The Rhein is not the border.  I made some mistakes and nearly ended in a tunnel heading to the motorway 🙁 However a did a U turn and eventually navigated around the station and into the country again. Eventually reaching Germany atop the foresail long grind.

How can you tell you have left Switzerland:

  • The gorgeous HUGE visible cycleway signs disappear and are replaced by occasional ‘tasteful’ small signs in white with pale green text.
  • Suddenly a huge number of very fast artics. and motor bikes appear.
  • What you think is a cycleway ends after a mile in a crash barrier 🙁 where you have to oik the bike over. Or cycle back and take your chance with the artics.
  • Open Street Map suddenly loses a lot of detail and main roads are not correctly identified
  • Oh. A bonus the hotels are cheaper 🙂

So it is totally possible if you are flying into Zurich with your bike to cycle to the start of The Danube Way, bit hairy in places but still an excellent ride. I will put my corrected GPS gpx track up on bike map.net eventually.

The first hotel, thankfully, was full and I’m now at the really quite nice Hotel Linde, the manager offered me a double room at the single rate and the restaurant has been very good.

Tomorrow is the big one! First day on The Danube Biketrail, will I use all those bike line books I’ve been carrying for the last 1000 miles or so 🙂

Todays Strava:

Strava_Ride___Zurich_to_Donaueschingen

 

And the picas are here

 

Pumpkin art & swimming at Jucker’s

Yet another grand day organised by @planetjones & his partner. Maybe they should get into the tourism business 🙂

Pumpkin Elvis
Pumpkin Elvis

Today was just a train journey from the local station to Seegrãben followed by a short but steep walk to Jucker Farmart and it’s fantastic models all created with straw & pumpkins it reminded me a bit of the Milton Maze at home. Their maze is however made with dwarf apple trees 🙂 After pumpkin soup (of cause) we wandered down to Pfãffikersee. Were to my astonishment local industry has sponsored a delightful bathing shed, toilets, diving board and a swim deck.  So a quick dip was called for, well I did have a handkerchief to dry on 🙂

Totally amazing no dire  health & safety warnings here & no vandalism, if only we  had all this on the Cam, like we did when I first moved to Cambridge. Now of course all destroyed by the local vandals otherwise known as Cambridge City Council.

Then a return to Zurich and an excellent bbq at the flat. A fitting end to an excellent weekend, probably the first  weekend with my brother since I left home in 1966 🙂 When he had just met his wife to be…

All the pictures of the day are here.

Robin Hood & his Sherwood Forest compatriots.
Robin Hood & his Sherwood Forest compatriots.

 

The workers return to work, the retirees go on their cruise and now I leave Zurich to find The Danube….

A Grand Day Out

I had an excellent surprise yesterday, my nephew @planetjones had purchased a Switzerland day pass valid on ALL public transport anywhere in Switzerland. It was a promotion been run at the CooP.

So it was decided to visit the Queen of Mountains – Mount Riga. This meant bus travel to Zurich main station then rail to Lucerne. We crossed the lake on a boat built in 1901 still using it’s paddle wheels (schrecklich – it was a whole 8mins late) . Alighting at Vitznau it was straight onto the mountain railway that is even older than the boat, opened in 1871 and still in perfect working order!

At the top of Mount Riga we did the touristy thing taking photos and having lunch at Hotel Rigi Kul . After lunch it was a walk down the mountain, admiring the paragliders, with me shuddering at the thought of my last solo lesson where I nearly perched myself on the top of a conifer growing on a precipice 🙁

We caught the cable car down to Weggis and then the boat back to Lucerne for a wander along the historic (totally rebuilt after the disastrous fire 20 years ago) chapel bridge.

Then back to Zurich where one of our party immediately collapsed into bed with a migraine 🙁 🙁

So an amazing day clearly demonstrating the virtues of a fully integrated public transport system. Many thanks to Jonathan for organising it all so skilfully.

My photos are here

Aarau to Zurich

First apologies for the whinge about lack of readers in my previous post. I totally forgot what a sophisticated bunch of followers that I have! with Feedly reporting 71 folks have signed up to my RSS feed plus on Friday my readership leapt to 191 readers according to Jetpack.

IMG_3582The ride started of as a very pleasant route along the river Aar, I loved the swimming pool embedded in a pond thus allowing natural oxygenation and purification without chlorine etc. Very green in more ways than one. It’s very interesting to see the low tech way of hydroelectric generation on the Aar, every 6 miles or so there are hydraulic barriers that raise the water level by 10 feet or so, the water then goes into low head turbines. In the towns these are disguised as pretty buildings. Neat & no huge dams & lakes needed.

I loved the town of Baden so picturesque with its medieval covered bridge, cobbled streets and old buildings.

In the afternoon it was a very zig zag course into Zurich where I kept taking wrong turnings. It’s a fine balance either looking at the iPhone or searching overgrown hedges for signs. But I made Zurich.

I set off to search for my brother, unfortunately the address I had for my nephew was wrong and even worse it was 3 miles walking in the opposite direction wrong 🙁 However, I did get to see the brand new Tesla showroom, the Apple store & managed to procure a new 8GB uSD card for the Garmin. I eventually made contact with even more confusion over timings but we eventually made it to the  Zeughauskeller restaurant 🙂

Total mileage done is now 994 miles with 95 hours in the saddle.

Here is the Strava for the day:

Strava_Ride___Aarau_to_Zurich

and the pictures