Day 9 - It's Like Riding On Butter

As a ride progresses, I'm often pondering what to tile the daily ride blog. Today it was pretty simple. Switzerland has the finest infrastructure that I have ever experienced, even better than the Netherlands. Every place you look, everything is designed well, works well and is maintained well.  Today while riding, many of the paved roads, even the paved back roads, were so smooth that it was like riding on butter. Just a pleasure to ride. You might also say that it was like being on velvet as you rolled on.

I'm told that the cost of living is expensive in Switzerland, but I guess you get what you pay for.

Oh let's talk about today's ride. Again the Epic Ride Weather made very accurate predictions of the ride conditions. Overcast and cool in the morning and as we made some climbs out of town, it started to warm up nicely. The high clouds hung around all day keeping the sun at bay. The amazing part of the predictions (check the lower left quadrant below) was the direction of the wind. It correctly predicted the direction of the wind that closely matched our route so that all day long the wind was pretty much to our backs.

As you can see in the elevation profile, the first half of the ride is where the primary climbing occurred. In particular, there were two short sections that peaked out at 13% and 15%. Needless to say, we were huffing and puffing at the end of each of the climbs.

We came across an unexpected wooden covered bride on one of the back roads. Though the route didn't go through the bridge, we just had to take a short diversion and ride back and forth through the bridge. We didn't measure the length of the bridge, but it could have easily been the length of 2 football fields long.

The last 20 miles we had a ball! looking at the above route, we were heading south, the wind to our backs and a flat well paved bike trail in front of us and we were just blasting!! We would spot slower riders in front of us and go sailing by them as if they were standing still. Under these conditions, you just don't want to ride to end.

Our stop tonight is in Feldkirch Austria, our fourth country on this tour. A great walking town that if we didn't have plans for tomorrow, it would be interesting to spend time exploring.

Tomorrow's ride will be the most challenging of the trip. Whereas, the most climbing we've done in a day so far is a bit over 3,000 ft, tomorrow will be over 5,000 ft. and some of that will be on gravel. I'm looking forward to reporting on the results. Until then, keep the shiny side up and the rubber side down.

Today's Photos

Brian

Brian@coxint.com