Europe 2013: Switzerland is the Best Thing Ever

September 9, 2013

I am, at this moment, sitting in a quiet Swiss valley between Brig and Sion, watching the sun set specacularly in front of me. Cow bells, discordant yet comforting, clang a hundred meters away, worn by stalwart-looking black cows in a little field behind a beautiful if slightly dilapidated house. Crickets chirp. The clouds slowly change from bright pink and orange and red to peach, then to cream and grey as the sun sinks further beyond the horizon. Across the valley, on the opposite slope, a row of satellite dishes pointed in all directions looks out of place among the jagged, tree-strewn slopes, among the puffy clouds gently caressing and intertwining with the peaks. A gentle breeze blows the scent of the perfect outdoors past. This is the scent, this is the image, that every dryer sheet advertisement ever is trying to sell, and will never achieve. Slowly, the stars begin to emerge shyly from behind the clouds as night takes over her watch, now that the sun's duty is done.

Today started slowly, then accelerated with voluble cursing, and subsided into night with a huge grin and sigh of contentment.

I was up in time to see Suzanne pack the kids off to school. Juerg had gone to work very early, and stopped by shortly at 8:30 to say goodbye, then he was off. I got my things together and packed onto the bike, and said goodbye to Suzanne. On with the helmet, and off I went.

The sky was full of clouds. Not the normal sort of flat grey overcast that makes every Californian transplant to Seattle wonder, just a little, if maybe the crowds and high cost of living are worth it, just to see the sun. No, these were individual clouds, clearly defined, making an overcast in the same way that inspired the "Aluminum Overcast" name for the B-52. There are a lot of them, and they are angry.

Fortunately for me, the clouds did most of their angry rain-making overnight, and as I left, I received a few timid drops, but Altstaetten saw me off well. I took a tiny detour into Liechtenstein, took a couple pictures, and effectively checked it off my list. My route ran directly along the Switzerland-Liechtenstein border, and I'd made it a goal to visit the country, even if only for five minutes. Done.

Once past my Liechtensteinian adventure (cling-clong-clang go the cow bells as the sky darkens from light to dark blue to black above), I got my one and only period of rain, lasting all of ten minutes. I battened down the hatches anyway, not wanting a repeat of the device-frying events of Glenuig. No worries, fortunately.

I decided to start the day on the autobahn, so as to not lose too much time before getting to "the good stuff." Juerg had shown me a route that was basically from Altstaetten down to Chur, and from there to Brig over the Oberalppass and the Furkapass passes. He assured me (and he wasn't wrong) that once beyond Chur, that was the good stuff.

I had programmed the GPS with a route that should have forced it to send me to the right place, but I was nearly to Zurich (basically having turned one valley too early before I realized that the GPS had led me into a colossal blunder. Apparently (I realized well after the fact), when the GPS has a route programmed in, and you change its routing preferences, say from avoiding freeways to not avoiding them, it forgets that it was following a route. Instead it takes the end-goal of the route, and goes straight there -- if you'd told it to take you from Seattle to Chicago via Florida, you'd find yourself routed through Montana and Minnesota.

Of course, I don't know my Swiss geography all that well, so it wasn't until my route unexpectedly turned southward that I realized anything was amiss. It was an odd feeling to be so unreasonably angry at this little inane device for inadvertently causing me to see more of Switzerland than I'd intended to see. The flip side of that coin, which is what I was so vividly cursing the thing for, was that it had also caused me to waste two hours of travel time, meaning I would never make it to my goal for the day (Montreaux), which could conceivably make me late into Paris.

I'm not sure it was the right choice to reverse myself and go back to the route Juerg and I had planned out, but that's what I did. The first and best decision I made at that point was to shut off the GPS's routing, and just let it show me speed and where I actually was on the map. As in the past, I realized that this keeps me more heads-up, and more aware of where I actually am, instead of being led blindly through every turn. Plus, I simply didn't trust the thing to route me correctly at this point. Something about changing the routing preferences is a little buggy, and it doesn't always register the preferences I think I've set.

So it was full-speed autobahn to Chur (all 120 km/h of it, or about 75 MPH), where I made my turn, and got back on track. You know, two hours later than expected.

However, Juerg's directions did not disappoint. The road up to the Oberalppass was awesome, and as in Austria, I must have stopped at just about every safe opportunity I could find to take pictures. It certainly slowed me down, but I didn't regret a bit of it. It started out as a normal Alpine valley road, but slowly rose off the valley floor and got narrower and windier and steeper. The views got correspondingly more impressive. I remain astounded at the places you can find hotels and restaurants in Switzerland, such as at mountain passes on roads that a semi truck literally could not drive (the switchback turns are too sharp).

If you imagine this whole account written in flowery poetic language, you might come close to how I was feeling during this drive. Every slope and valley was another explosion of beauty. I literally caught my breath numerous times when I came around a corner, and suddenly BAM another gorgeous, movie-set-perfect scene seared into my conciousness. Sunburned wood houses nestled improbably into steep hillsides. Nearly vertical waterfalls descending for hundreds and hundreds of meters. Staggering gothic church spires lit perfectly against unreal puffy white clouds and verdant peaks. Rivers forming sinuous paths along valley floors. The bizarre feeling of looking *down* on a hawk as it spotted prey, far below. Sensuous puffs of clouds floating down the rifts of barely restrained rocky peaks.

Fortunately, I reached the top of the Oberalppass, and took my requisite goofy picture. Then, it was a short distance until I was passing the sign warning bicyclists that the road I was embarking upon, up to Furkapass, climbed this many meters in that many kilometers. Translation: steep; not for the faint of heart.

The road to Furkapass was like someone had taken the road to Oberalppass, and said, "Oh yeah? I bet I can do better than that." Repeat brain-explosions times two or three. Narrower road. Steeper slopes. Tighter hairpin turns. More gorgeous beauty above and below. At the top of Furkapass, there was a little Imbiss trailer (a snack trailer) that was sitting closed up and idle, and a run-down looking hotel. I took another goofy picture: almost 8000 feet in the air (2436 meters above sea level).

The road alone was fairly mind-bending. For most of its length, there was no railing, frequently no barrier of any kind. Just the edge of the road, and about a thousand feet of "down" if you mess up. On the other side, of course, rock wall. I was not trying to break any speed records, needless to say.

Once over the pass, it was down, down, down. The same steep roads and hairpin turns, which I mostly took in first gear, at about 25 km/h or less (my normal cruising speed on a bicycle: about 15-18 MPH). At the bottom of the road from Furkapass, I consulted the map, and continued toward Brig.

I should say, at some point before I reached Oberalppass, about half of the signs were in Italian. It was odd to see the German official signs, and the Italian business names. Street signs were frequently "via somethingorother" instead of "somethingorother strasse." As quickly as the Italian had appeared, it disappeared again as I went over the Oberalppass. I had briefly considered dropping down to Lago di Como to visit the Moto Guzzi museum, but we discovered this morning that it's open from 3 to 4 pm, Monday through Friday (and we all said in unison, "probably"). I'm absolutely sure Como and the lake are gorgeous, but it was too far out of the way, and the chance of actually getting in seemed far too remote.

As I mentioned before, my initial goal for today was Montreaux, on this side of the lake from Lucerne. I figured it would be a doable distance from looking at the map, but we planned a few alternate stops earlier in the journey, in case it looked like my progress was too slow. I had explained to Juerg my typical rate of speed when the going gets pretty.

I fell far short of the goal, though, mostly due to that screw up with the GPS routing me most of the way to Zurich. As I listen to the crickets and occasional cow or church bells, and look up at the vast, starry sky, though, I don't find that I care very much.

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Created by Ian Johnston. Questions? Please mail me at reaper at obairlann dot net.