September 6, 2023
Heating Up: Saillon to Ulrichen
This was the very opposite of my restful, relaxing day yesterday: a long one and a hot one -- though also nice riding, for the most part.
The route was, in essence, very simple: straight up the Rhone Valley until the road got steep (at the foot of the Furka/Nufenen Passes), at which point I'd stop. In practice, there was a little bit more wiggling around, though I was always heading upstream (and therefore always uphill: more gently at the start, more noticeably at the end).
Mindful of the distance and the weather, I aimed to get a relatively early start, but it took me a while to drag myself away from the Drawer Of Cheese (what a concept!), and things were already warming up by the time I got underway.
The first few km took me back up to Sion: I didn't go into the city this time, but passed by on the river below.
Then it was more of the same on the next hop to Sierre, with the small variation of being on the other side of the river.
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Things were a bit fiddly after Sierre: the route went through the outskirts of the city, and then along a rather busy road as far as Susten. (There was a cycle path, so it wasn't unsafe; but not particularly restful either, especially because there was quite a lot of truck traffic -- there's a gap in the motorway here, so I guess there's nowhere else for it all to go.) But it wasn't too long before the motorway reappeared and took most of the traffic away again; and then the cycle route found its way back to deserted valley roads too, weaving round a sequence of tiny villages.
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7 months ago
7 months ago
The cycle route was doing an excellent job of avoiding most town and village centres, which was good in a way, but also meant that I was starting to worry a bit about food. So at Raron I deviated from the path a bit to find a supermarket sandwich (and -- why did this seem like a good idea? -- a big bottle of grapefruit-flavoured milkshake. Reader: it was not a good idea...), which I stopped to enjoy (well: sort-of enjoy...) under the trees in a lay-by/nature-reserve on the outskirts of Brigerbad, a little further upstream.
Before that, things got a bit more industrial: first, past the DSM Factory (I'd always wondered what these cycle-team-sponsors actually make, and I'm not sure I'm any the wiser now, except that I know it generates a lot of fumes...), and then alongside a not-quite-finished stretch of motorway.
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Then, all of a sudden, it was back to rural riverside calm, until -- equally suddenly -- that all came to an end just after Brig. To be fair: this was mostly down to my own choices: the official swiss cycle route from here on up the valley behaves in a Very Swiss Cycle Route way, which is to say that, to avoid the main road, it seeks out every tiny twisty gravel track it can, and in doing so adds about 1000m of climbing as well as quite a lot more distance. I just didn't have it in me to face that today, so I'd decided to stick to the main road -- on the grounds that there was a railway line running alongside the whole way, so if the traffic got too much I could just bale out.
As it turned out, the traffic was entirely bearable; the challenge was the heat, which was now well into the 30s. (That's a lot, when you live in northern England...). I was running low on water, and generally melting, and none of the villages I passed through seemed to have a cafe, or even a spring.
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Finally (and at the top of a fairly stiff hill) I came to a slightly bigger village, Lax, and toppled into its station cafe, where the kindly owner supplied two helpings of their Biggest Drinks. That gave me the impetus to keep going -- quite solidly uphill now, and also into an increasing headwind (which I couldn't really complain about, since I'd been benefitting from a lovely tailwind for most of the day. This didn't, of course, even slightly stop me from complaining.)
At Niederwald, I briefly rejoined the official cycle route, but after about 500m it turned to gravel and dived off down a crazy descent so I thought better of it and retreated back to the main road. My reward was a snippet of roadside alphorn concert and -- even better -- the miraculous appearance, really in the middle of nowhere, of a frozen yoghurt stand.
My punishment was one last climb to get through the village of Munster: quite unreasonable of them to put their settlement on a defensible hilltop, in my view. But after that it was a flat, or even downhill, run to Ulrichen, where I was met by an exceptionally kind hotelier: she sympathised about the heat and the wind, escorted my bicycle to its storage space in the hotel's barn, carried my bags (!) up to my room, and explained that they could feed me a four-course evening meal for (by Swiss standards) hardly any money. All I would have to do was sit myself down in their dining room at a pre-arranged time: no other decisions needed or indeed possible. At the end of a day like this, I couldn't think of anything better.
Today's ride: 110 km (68 miles)
Total: 448 km (278 miles)
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7 months ago