After staying the Tuesday night at Champagnole, the next days's ride on the Wednesday was to take us to Lyss in Switzerland, a long ride of 147km involving 1882 metres of climbing. We crossed the border into Switzerland early in the day. The weather let up and we had great views, as we descended, of Lake Neuchatel.
We stopped for the usual picnic lunch in a small wooded area close to the bike path we had been riding on.
After lunch, as we continued on, we had to negotiate a school mountain bike competition. The road was barred to cars, but on bikes we were able to get through. Not long after we had a rude awakening in the form of a climb up what is known locally as "The Devil's Tooth"; 600metres with a supposed maximum grade of 18.7%. After that I was truly stuffed! However, I made it through to Lyss and not long before we got there passed a peculiar building in the middle of the Swiss country side, which for all the world looked like an air control tower, but without an airport. We stayed in a fairly pleasant hotel and for dinner that night had Fondue as a main course, which took me back fifty years when Fondue parties were all the rage in the UK!
We woke up to rain again the next morning. Our destination was Lucerne, but I had to stop at 42km as I was tired, cold and wet and got a lift in the Ride and Seek car to Lucerne. The river in Lucerne was running high with huge volumes of water.
Lucerne is famous for it's old wooden bridges, some of which are decorated with old paintings.
A detail of one can be seen here.
There was yet more rain the next day!
We negotiated our way out of the traffic of Lucerne and rode through steady rain to our first coffee stop which was a little past the 40km mark. An idea of how expensive Switzerland is can be gained from the fact that a hot chocolate, which consisted of a mug of hot milk with a sachet of powdered chocolate, cost 5 Swiss francs or approximately 7 Australian dollars. A little time after the coffee break, I distinguished myself by hitting a small rock on the road at a road works and immediately having a "blow out". Sam Woods was just behind me and helped me change the tyre. Some of the bike paths we rode along were separated from the main road, but some were a relatively narrow strip, like a narrow pathway running along the very busy road, which became just a little scary with the noise of all the traffic as we traversed tunnels along the side of the lake. The view of the lake would have been stunning in good weather, but it was partially obscured by the mist and the rain. About half an hour further on, I had a further blow out and changed the inner tube again, thinking that this one was because of pinching the inner tube at the previous tyre change, but it was not until the third blow out, that we realised there was a small defect in the side wall of the tyre itself.
This eventually ended up with Ritchie, guide/ and very experienced bike mechanic patching the tyre to get me going a few kms and then Bruno, our French bike guide and wine expert putting on a new outer tube. With all this, I ended up by being at the back of the bunch, but by this time the weather had started to clear and I started the climb up the road going over the Gotthard Pass. I reached lunch at about the 83km mark, and had some very welcome warm clear soup with chick peas. Road works meant that our bikes had to be transported some kilometres past the road works, and with all the problems I had had, and once again being wet and cold and in the car,and right at the back of the bunch, I chickened out of the final 15km climb. However, a lot of our group excelled themselves and did the whole climb and then the descent in to Airolo.
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