Category: travel blog

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.

The 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:

and the pictures

Firstly, for those of a curious disposition I’ve now biked 894 miles with 86 hours in the saddle  spread over 15 biking days (average 59 miles per day),. My moving average has been 10.40mph. Plus I’ve had 11 rest days in my Les Gets apartment 🙂

Today  I started later than normal it was sunny with a very pleasurable ride around the lake on a cycle way, so pleasurable that I forgot to start Strava for 1.5 miles. Amazingly the Garmin etrex kicked in with lovely directional arrows and even when a bridge was closed it helped me back on the route after the diversion. However, like the dreaded crease in a paper map it suddenly ended 🙁 after a mega climb it was time to recheck with the iPhone and go back down the hill and back on the course.  The Garmin then spent the next few hours desperately trying to recalculate the route….

After one of the mistakes I found myself in some Tractor museum totally delighted to find a 60’s Massey Ferguson 35 just like I used on Spibey’s farm when I was 14 ( 2/- an hour 7 till 12 Saturday & school holidays for a year). Immediately after the museum was an ultra modern Samro potato picker in action, no more back breaking jobs on the farm. I find it very surprising just how rich the land is here lovely dark loamy soil. i bet the Swiss must be food calories totally self sufficient. Plus virtually all of Western Europe’s major rivers start here!

In the afternoon it started to pour and the first hotel was full! So I ploughed on and ended up in Biel a rather down at heel place It seems. The Best Western had a special sub 100CHF offer for a single room overlooking a building site, central station and totally humungous Co-oP, so that’s where I ended up.

Also today the principal language slowly changed from French to German, very interesting to see the language change over a few miles.

Todays Strava result less 1.5 miles.

and pictures are here Note that all the pictures are geotagged.

NB

Elmton Lodge Farm, Spring Lane, Elmton

Interesting for me and the wonders of the internet, I now know it was a 2.5 mile uphill ride in the cold winter of 1961and that the farm minus the land & broiler house has recently sold for well over a million pounds see here