Cycling trip - day 5
Today I did a thing I had not done before.
But first, the morning. It had rained all through the night, keeping me up at times. In the morning though there was a window of a few hours of sunshine, just as I needed to start wrapping up camp. Got most of the things dry in the sun and hastily exited towards a restaurant for lunch, as the drizzle started coming in.
My route would take me towards Basel and originally I was going to go through some valleys with "only" a few hundred meters of climbs. But Garmin wanted to suggest a marked cycling route further north, so I took that. Of course what it didn't tell me was that soon after moving from Liechtenstein to Switzerland, I would need to ascend over 700 meters, during a climb lasting a total of 10km. When the climb popped up on the Garmin it was too late to choose another route, but also I'm quite easy to sway into an adventure, so up it is!
Slowly, one rotation at a time, sometimes up to 11%, I fought up the windy road, cars zooming past. As this was a cycling route, clearly signposted as such, I was hoping the drivers were used to slow moving cyclists pushing up towards the top, so didn't feel too threatened. What did start feeling threatening was when I was a third up the heavy rain started, and soon also thunder. Does thunder sound different when you're close to a kilometer up from sea level? It sounded more ominous, possibly due to all the low clouds covering half of the distant mountains.
Wet, tired, a bottle of water and quite a few snack bars down, I did finally make it to the top. And it was possibly the most rewarding thing. The sky was also clearing and a restaurant serving pizza came up, so I decided to reward myself with a pizza and beer. This was by far the largest single climb I've ever done and I'm super happy that even though the weather was poor, I managed to do it.
The rest of the planned ride, ending up somewhere near Zürich, was going to mostly be downhill. But alas the sun didn't last. Before I had finished my pizza, the rain was back, at least as angry. Having spent so much time riding in the rain and everything being muddy and wet again, I decided to call it a day and reserved a room at a hotel 8km away at a place called Nesslau. I was looking forward to the downhill section but now it was just annoying. Completely drenched, rain pouring down and fast moving cars spraying water everywhere, some of them passing by rather too close for comfort on the larger two-lane road. For some reason using the other lane for taking over is sometimes impossible if a cyclist is being taken over by a car. Maybe car steering wheels are sometimes really stiff and getting onto the other lane is just difficult, what do I know.
Hotel is very nice at least. Got my laundry done and all the camping gear spread out to properly dry. Tomorrow hopefully Zürich and potentially beyond, if the weather doesn't ruin things. Scenery is so beautiful here and have passed many nice villages, but all the train is taking a bit of the enjoyment out of it.
Distance cycled: 44.76km (today), 244.59km (total)
