June 25th: Gelmersee Hike

 We woke up, had breakfast, and drove back over the Furka pass, and at Gletsch, turned right and drove up the Grimsel pass. It was gorgeous that early in the morning, and we would have stopped for pictures but of course we had bought 9:40am uplift tickets so we were on a time crunch. I probably shouldn’t have worried as we made it to the parking lot  by 9:00am. While the parking lot was quite full it wasn’t overflowing and we didn’t have to resort to driving around to find parking.

Walking to the Gelmerbahn station, we made it so early that the operator gave us 9:20am tickets, giving us time to look at the suspension bridge before boarding the Funicular. At 107% grade, you abstractly know that this is going to be a steep ride, but nothing prepared me for how steep it felt. As the grade steepened, I thought I was going to fall out of the Funicular, making the retention bars around our lap not just perfunctory safety devices but necessary for psychological safety as well. I kept holding on to my backpack which was placed next to my feet just because I felt like it could fall out of the funicular as well.

When we were at the top I was quite relieved that we hadn’t booked the ride down. Gelmersee was at 1850m and therefore higher than Hospental was. It was a testament to the strength of the heat dome that Europe was experiencing that it still felt very warm. Part of it was that the air was completely still! We proceeded to do the hike around the lake. The hike reminded me a lot of the Hetch Hetchy backpacking trip we did back in 2020. Like the trip back then, it was very hot, despite walking near and around a body of water. There were flowers occasionally which were beautiful, but the constant exposure would only be interrupted by places where we actually went right next to the water.

Bowen and Boen were unencumbered by the desire to want to take pictures. Mark and I let them go ahead while we took our leisurely pace. Of course, this meant that they were well ahead of us when we got to all trail intersections. We simply assumed the kids would be OK and that we would eventually catch up to them. What we did not count on was that we got lost! When we look at the Garmin track after the hike, we would see that at one point where the hiking trail was supposed to take us along the rim of the lake, we instead walked onto the now dry lake bed instead! The drought in the alps had finally affected us directly. Either that, or we could post our Garmin track and claimed that we’d learned to walk on water.

We eventually figured this out and bee-lined for the nearest trail. Once there, the trail would lead us (finally!) into shade, and we got a chance to take pictures of streams running into the lake. We only caught the kids at the intersection where we could either walk back to the Gelmerbahn (which we had no intention of taking), or hike back down to Hotel Handegg.

The hike down was interesting enough to be worth the extra walk. While it was steep, it granted us views of the Grimsel road as well as several lakes along the way. The trail then intersected with the road, whereupon we had to cross the road and then follow the signs towards Hotel Handegg. While this section didn’t have the grand views the earlier section had, the trail actually crossed a waterfall which looked really nice. Then as we approached the hotel the trail gave us views onto the open road where we could see the parked car.

Since it was already 1pm, we stopped by the hotel restaurant and checked their lunch menu. Since it was acceptable, we stopped and ordered lunch. While waiting for the food to be delivered I noticed they had an EV charging station! I asked if we could use it and they replied in the affirmative. I grabbed the keys and ran over to the car, drove it over, and plugged it into the charging station. It was slow, but so was service at the hotel, and we weren’t looking for a charge to 100%. We just wanted enough to get over Sustens pass on the way home.

After lunch, we completed the loop back to the suspension bridge before turning around and getting into the car. From there, instead of retracing our drive earlier, we kept going down to Innerkirchen, where we made a quick stop at the supermarket for more food, and then drove up the Sustenspass to give a preview of Sunday’s route. I’d never actually seen the climb from this direction before, and it looked dramatic, though full of tunnels. At the summit we got off and took a walk up to the hospice which I’ve never visited, and took a few pictures of the stream running through the area.

Coming back down the Sustenspass we drove the car back up to Goschenen and through the car tunnel. We then went back to Hospental where Bowen had kept himself entertained all day. Xiaoqin was still far from home and told us to eat dinner without her. Boen was still on an Asian noodle kick and the car needed a charge, so we drove back to the Reuss mall and charged the car while we ate. Mark had noticed that as long as we stayed under an hour (and the charger was fast enough to give us a good charge during that time), the parking garage was actually free!

The Asian noodle place was a fast food for family place, and we had gotten there early enough to be seated right away, get served fast, and then leave all inside an hour. Xiaoqin came back about an hour after we returned (once again) to Hospental, and she ate the instant noodles I had bought in Innerkirchen along with some other food we’d bought the previous night.

We planned the next days’ rides. My idea was to ride the Oberalp pass the next day all the way down to Donat-Elms, and then take the train back to Andermatt. Then on Saturday we could ride St Gotthard and then take the train back as well. That would give us a half day of riding so we weren’t wasted on Sunday for the hard ride up the Sustens. I looked again for hotels in Meiringen, noting that nobody had AC there. Since the heat wave was still intense, I looked for a higher option. When I’d booked that hotel in Meiringen the thought was that we’d leave the car parked there and take the bus to Rosenlaui. However, the cost to park a car in Meiringen was no lower than the cost to park in Rosenlaui! I noticed that the Hotel Terrace at Nessental was available, had great reviews (especially for the Rosti at the hotel), and was considerably higher at 1000 meters. So I booked that and cancelled the Meiringen hotel instead.

Xiaoqin decided that she could take the bus with Bowen up to the St. Gotthard pass, and then hike back to Hospental the next day, which would be a pretty substantial hike, even if it was mostly downhill.

June 24th: Devil's Bridge Hike and Natschen Hikes

Arturo left so early that I didn’t have time to say goodbye to him. But his plan worked and his ride went well. We ate breakfast and then drove down to what we thought was one of only 2 chargers in Andermatt only to discover that it was occupied and in use. No matter, we’d just drive down to the public parking lot next to the train station and do our hike first.

The parking lot charged 5 Francs for all day parking, so we paid. After we parked we walked towards where I thought the hike would start, but there were no obvious signs. Fortunately, the tourist information center was right there, so we walked in and asked for both directions to the hike and the availability of charging stations for the car.

It turned out that it was more a tourist attraction than a hike, but the tourist information had no trouble telling us how to walk there. There were multiple charging stations inside the huge parking lot underground at the Reuss shopping center/mall right at the edge of town. However, the tourist information employee confusingly told us it was at the Blu Hotel parking lot when it would later turn out that it had nothing to do with the hotel. The penalty was that the parking lot charged money as well, so we’d be paying twice: once for parking, and once for the charger.

Well, we’d already paid for parking at the train station, so we just opted to walk the extra 500m to get to the start of the walk to the Teufelsbrucke. The story behind the devil’s bridge was that bridging the Reuss river was considered so hard that apparently only the devil could do it. In the legend, the devil promised to do it at the cost of the soul of the first to cross the bridge. The villagers agreed to this and then tricked the devil by sending a goat to cross the bridge.

The hiking approach to the bridge first takes you on top of the gallery that the main road would follow. I’d ridden that gallery a few times and always called it the corkscrew tunnel for the way it weaved and turned as it made its way down to Goschenen. Once the hiking trail got to the bridge, it would descend under the main road through a staircase gated by iron doors. Once there you got as good a view of the bridge as anyone who’d driven or taken the train there, and could walk both up and down the bike path as well! Despite having ridden the road many times this was the first time I’d seen the bike path. While it was still unpleasant (you would still share the gallery with cars once in a while), the bike path did a good job of making the ride up from Goschenen to Andermatt reasonable, as opposed to something only a masochist would do. Riding down, of course you’re as fast as car traffic and would never use the bike path!

When we’d gotten our fill, we walked back the way we came to the car, and then drove the car into the Reuss mall to get the car charged. Once we figured it out it wasn’t bad, and we walked back up only to see a performance of Swiss flag hurling or Fahnenschwingen. It was cool and we made a video before walking down to the supermarket/coop to buy lunch.

After lunch, we started our second hike, which was to go from Andermatt to Natschen, the first train station on the Oberalp. It was warm, a bit too much for Boen in combination with the steepness, so he threw a temper tantrum and started hiking down. Xiaoqin and Bowen would join him and have ice cream at the main train station, but Mark and I would do the rest of the hike, which ironically started being shaded as soon as Boen left!

Once at the top, it was just a few minutes wait before the train picked us up and reunited us with everyone else in Andermatt. Ironically, the reason it was such a short wait was because the train was late!

Reunited with everyone, we went back to the car and drove it over to the supermarket to shop for supplies for dinner as well as breakfasts. We then drove back to our AirBnB, had showers, made dinner and ate it.

After dinner, Xiaoqin thought it was a good idea to see the sunset from Oberalp pass, and since the car was charged we drove up and saw the only lighthouse on top of an alpine pass in Europe, as well as the beautiful reservoir and did small sections of what would be multi-day hikes. By the time we got back to our AirBnB it was 9:00pm. We debated what to do. Mark said he could stand another hiking day to get more rest in. Xiaoqin wanted to ride Furka and possibly Grimsel pass as well.

I did a bunch of research and it turned out that Triftbrucke was not possible because the cable car was down. ChatGPT suggested Gelmerbahn and the attendant Gelmersee hike. The downward Funicular was booked up in the afternoon, but I checked and the descent was quite doable by hiking, so we just booked just the upwards ticket on the steepest open Funicular in Europe and went to bed.

June 23rd: Brig to Hospental

 We woke up early enough to visit the breakfast area when it opened at 7:30am. The food was unremarkable but we knew we had a long day to get to Hospental, so we ate up, packed, loaded up the car, and started riding at 8:16am. It was already warm, but we luckily got to Fiesch after about 90 minutes of steep climbing at 1000m up, which had a gas station with an attached convenience store where we could get ice cream. It was already clear that we were in a cycling area, as even then we started seeing groups of cyclists going up or coming down the road.

From Fiesch the rest of the climb up to Oberwald was no longer scary, and the temperatures moderated a bit as long as we were in the shade. Unfortunately, once we got to Coms that shade almost completely went away. In Oberwald, we stopped at a bike shop to buy more cycling food, and then took a turn to buy groceries before having lunch at the fountain right across the street from the bike shop.

From there, the serious climb starts, going between 6-8% grades until the 15-18% grades at the (now permanently closed) Hotel Belvedere. Fortunately, however, the first section was at least partially shaded, even in the afternoon, so while the rider was hard (mostly because we were riding on tired legs), it wasn’t insane. While this was my first time climbing Furka from this direction (as opposed to coming from Grimsel pass), I was very familiar with the area. Mark, on the other hand, later said that as he climbed and saw the twin climbs ahead of him (Grimsel on the left, and Furka on the right), he somehow got it into his head that he would have to climb both. To be honest, however, he was so much stronger than myself and Boen that he had no issue distancing us. We would end up riding with Arturo for most of the climb.

As we approached the intersection with Gletsch, our shade went away, but the views also dramatically improved. I was impressed by how hot it remained, despite Gletsch being at already 1700m. We would not cool down until after we got past the Hotel Belvedere. I looked for a water fountain past Gletsch but never saw it because construction hid it from my view. Regardless, we ended up having plenty of water so it never became an issue.

At the summit, we found Mark waiting for us, and waiting for Arturo didn’t take long. We took our time with pass photos before we went onto the next view point and then starting the descent. Furka at this point is largely a single lane road and in the middle of the day there was still plenty of traffic, so we minimized stopping for photos and just descended for speed whenever we were not blocked by motor traffic. I’d forgotten how much fun the descent was, since I hadn’t done it since 2016 or so. The road while not perfectly smooth had plenty of sweet corners.

Of course, at the bottom in Realp we once again faced a headwind. But on a descent, we were entirely capable of keeping pace with Mark, so we got down to the bottom, hunkered down, and just drafted Mark all the way to Hospental. Once there, however, we discovered that Google maps had no idea where our rental house was! We eventually just parked the bike while I walked back and forth reading house numbers until I discovered that the house was far from where Google thought it was, and much further down the hill near the center of town than Google had shown.

By the time I found the house, Arturo had caught up to Mark and we all rolled down the cobblestone to the house, opened it up, and parked the bikes in the garage. Xiaoqin and Bowen texted us to say that they had bought lift tickets in Fiesch and would therefore get to the hotel much closer to 6pm.

We got settled in, and then went out to dinner at the one place down the street after an attempt to take Uber to Andermatt completely failed. The place was actually quite good, and while we were there we round another group of British cyclists who’d come over for dinner as well. Turned out that they were on a series of fixed bases where they would do day rides with a van. One of them was a former school teacher and looked suspiciously at Boen, saying, “Why aren’t you in school?” The rest of his group teased him mercilessly when we told him that California schools had already let out for almost a month.

When Bowen and Xiaoqin arrived, we showed them where to park the car and sent them to the same restaurant down the street while the rest of us unloaded and took showers. Arturo tried to figure what to do tomorrow. I told him that the last pass in the area that was new to him was Nufenen, the highest pass with both sides within the Swiss border. “Louis told me I should see the devil’s bridge as well!” His plan was to ride down to Andermatt and Goschenen, stopping by the devil’s bridge and then take the train from Goschenen to Airolo to start Nufenen. Once over Nufenen into Oberwald he could easily catch a train back to Geneva with plenty of time to spare. Because Brig was a major hub, there were frequent trains and none of them required bike reservations. The devil’s bridge sounded like a good idea for a rest day hike as well, and we needed to know how to charge the car anyway, since the car’s charge map showed very few chargers available in Andermatt.

June 22nd: Grand St Bernard Hospice to Brig

 Overnight, I checked the hotels with AC available in Brig, and discovered that they were far and few in between, even after expanding my search to the entire Sion valley. When people talk about climate denialists, they’re usually talking about the American right. But I would contend that Europeans who refuse to install AC in hotels and AirBnBs should also be categorized as climate denialists. The only reasonable hotel was the Good Night Inn in Brig, which had dubious reviews but a liberal (as in same day) cancellation policy, so I booked it and then told everyone else about it.

Breakfast looked dire when we showed up, as the buffet tables looked decimated, but we shouldn’t have worried. This being Switzerland, the staff almost immediately refilled the tables. We ate to our content and then proceeded to load everything into the car and check out.

Leaving the hotel, we took a few pictures in the gorgeous section before the road to the hospice intersected with the tunnel exit. Once on the main highway, however, it turned into a gallery with no views and very high speed, where the tandem essentially stayed at terminal velocity for minutes at a time. At one point we encountered construction and had to stop, but the traffic that was behind us were giant trucks and other slow moving vehicles and I wasn’t going to cede pole position. We were more than capable of staying ahead of the traffic until Sembrancher, where the road levelled off and we pulled off to give ourselves a breather.

From there it was an easy pedaling descent to Martigny where the bike path signs took us through downtown. It was already warm enough that we’d started to look for ice cream shops but at this early hour nothing was open. Past Martigny, the bike path followed along the Rhone river, with sufficient shade once in a while that the warm up wasn’t immediately overwhelming. Jobst often rode the Sion Valley in the late afternoon with a strong tailwind, but this early there wasn’t any wind whatsoever to help us. Mark caught us, and Arturo caught up to us as we approached the Sion airport.

Arturo had been to Sion before, and knew a good burger place, but when we rode there it was closed! We thought for a minute about eating at another restaurant, but realized that there was a COOP supermarket right there, so opted to buy a picnic and eat outside where there was a shaded area. There was a light breeze which fooled me into thinking that the Jobst tailwind was going to show up, so I pushed for us to ride on instead of just taking the train to Brig. “We should get at least a metric century out of this!” I declared.

Past Sion, the bike path stayed along the Rhone until Saint-Leonard, beyond which construction and main road riding started becoming intrusive. Along with the construction, the trees along the main road disappeared and we ended up riding on a big highway with giant trucks for a bit, along with the attendant dust. By the time we got to Varen, I saw that we had exceeded 100km and I asked Arturo where the nearest train station was. He looked as relieved as I was.

We rode towards the Varen train station, and saw a supermarket that was open just 100m away from the train station. I went in and bought a box of cola popsicles and we proceeded to demolish them with only one left. That one I just dropped into my water bottle to flavor and chill water and then we proceeded to the train station to buy train tickets.

The train was uncharacteristically late, and on top of that, once we got onto the train the story wasn’t over. The train actually suffered a breakdown just before getting to Visp, and actually had to go backwards to a place where a service train with a working locomotive could pass it and then take over. By the time all was said and done we were about half an hour late.

In the mean time, Xiaoqin and Bowen had finished their hike and started driving towards the hotel. When we got off the train station at Brig it was broiling hot, but since the ride to the hotel was barely 1km, it was not a big deal and while we had to wait to check in, we got to wait in an air conditioning lobby. It turned out that Arturo knew about the Good Night Inn—it was a series of motels much like Super8 or Motel6, but more upscale than the American equivalents. Indeed, when we checked in we could see that the lobby had lots of model railroads, something you’d never see in Super8 or Motel6. Mark immediately got off his bike and started replacing the brake pads on his disc brake bike. I looked at his pads and to my eyes, he had much more than 2mm of material. “If you were to ask me, you’re just throwing away money,” I said. “Well, it’s more than halfway through the tour, and around the same time last year was when I needed to replace it. I’m not worried about the few cents I’m throwing away."

We got our rooms and figured out where their bike locker was. We moved in and in a little bit Xiaoqin arrived and we figured out how to park the car as well. After showering, I started looking for places to stay in Andermatt. My original preference had been the Hotel Tiefenbach just after the Furka pass so we wouldn’t have to put up with the headwind, but they were mysteriously all booked up the next day despite it being the middle of the week! Arturo only had 2 days of touring left. I found a number of AirBnBs in Andermatt, even though they weren’t as cheap as I would like, but Mark didn’t like any of them. He searched and came up with some options in Hospental, One of the options looked good so I went ahead and booked 5 nights in Hospental, using up all our days prior to the pre-booked Meiringen and Rosenlaui visits.

Arturo and I then went and got the EV charged up. We were actually surprised the Switzerland had much worse EV charging infrastructure than either France or Italy. We would discover later that despite our having rented the EV in Geneva, Switzerland, the car didn’t know about many charging stations that were available—we ended up having to ask locals about them!

Dinner was at a Thai restaurant Xiaoqin found that ended up being very good. We ate well. By the time we got back to the hotel in the evening after some expensive gelato,  the hotel was full—it was a bus tourist kinda place, and a tour bus full of hikers had arrived. Fortunately, they didn’t disrupt our sleep much.

Review: Fist of the North Star Vols 1-10

 I had fond memories of Fist of the North Star from teenage years. It's got a stoic hero who mostly lets his fists do the talking (in the 1980s anime version, he could talk without moving his chin too!), it's got this post-apocalyptic look reminiscent of Mad Max (lots of leather and chains, lots of spikes on the leather), and over the top campy dialogue. (The guy says: "You are already dead," so many times that we parodied that) The first 10 volumes of the series covers the original story arc, and if you read that and stop, the story resolves itself. It's clear that most of the series' writing was improvised, with the author saying that he expected to be able to take a break after the first series and was instead told to deliver more within a month!

To my surprise, the library has the entire collection, which I never read, so I checked it out one book at a time. This is really campy stuff, so you can't really binge the whole series at once because it gets really silly. What surprised me was that unlike modern comics where the origin story and the resolution of the initial impetus of the plot takes multiple volumes to deal with (I'm looking at Frieren, where the author and artist couldn't even be bothered to finish the story, despite having multiple years off), Fist of the North Star finishes its entire arc within the first volume. It's not even a bad finish, with surprising twists.

The art is incredibly dynamic, though sometimes quite silly. The premise is that Kenshiro is the inheritor of a secret assassination technique called "Hokuto Shinken". This technique allows him to hit various channeling points in the human body that causes insane effects. Heads explode, bodies come apart, and sometimes he can even achieve programmatic effect like causing you to die 3 minutes from when he hit you. Of course, his opponents also always have their own secret martial arts techniques, and just like in Pokemon (I'm pretty sure this series predated Pokemon), everyone has a penchant for yelling out their secret technique's name and even explaining it in combat. It's all very hokey. One example was when Kenshiro faces a sumo wrestler of some sort who has so much fat on his body that he couldn't get to the channeling points. Well, Kenshiro is no dummy, so he uses a rapid series of kicks to shift the fat away from a channeling point and when the channeling point is revealed he strikes it and wins the day.

The problem with having a hero/protagonist with such power is that the escalation gets crazy. Each opponent he faces has to have even more super powers or secret techniques, and by the 8th book you're pretty far along (turns out that there are multiple inheritors of the secret techniques, and then he gets to fight all of them). 

That's probably not the worst thing. The worst thing is that it's a 1980s adolescent boys' comic. The women in the books are there for decoration or for rescuing. Even when they supposedly have martial arts abilities they are easily captured and then used as bait for Kenshiro to show up and look heroic. Much more recent comics probably do not have this problem.

Nevertheless, this is the kind of stuff where if you're exhausted after a long day it does not require much intellectual brainpower to process the comic, and the art is still dynamic and exciting after all these years.

June 21st: Aosta to Grand St Bernard Hospice

 In the morning, there was more clarity. The pass was set to open on June 22^nd at 12:00pm. However, today was a Sunday! I was more than certain that the road was ready, and that the barrier if any, was solely because somebody had to sign off on the work and that person didn’t work on weekends. I have a lot of confidence in the Italian/European work ethic. At breakfast, Arturo said that a mutual friend of ours, Louis Perrochon, was very negative about the idea. “What’s the difference between tomorrow and today? No cars today!” I declared. We were going to ride, but Xiaoqin and Bowen would probably go hiking and then we’d text them when we got lodging at the Grand StBernard hospice, which was confirmed to be open and taking reservations. While I’d ridden the pass a couple of times before, I’d never stayed at the hospice, nor had I even visited the St Bernard museum, and given the heat expected in the Sion valley I was not in a hurry to experience it.

After an excellent breakfast, we rolled the bikes out of the garage and started riding out towards the mountain. The Garmin route I’d laid out took us on the Eastern edge of the ridgeline, which was ideal for staying shaded on the climb. Not for the last time on this trip was I grateful for the new improved popularity heatmaps routing.

The nice thing about the steep first sections was that we gained altitude rapidly, so the effort was paying off in cooling temperatures. As we climbed we ran into a local cyclist. I checked with if the pass was open and he said it was. Arturo followed up and got a bunch of directions that later turned out to make no sense. It could very well be that our route did extra climbing in order to stay in the shade longer, so he was trying to route us to somewhere with less climbing, but we were already pretty happy with the route!

After about 2 hours of climbing, the road finally descended and dumped us out into the intersection with the state highway. There was a water fountain at the intersection, so we stopped to refill our water bottles. Boen spotted a couple with what looked like a very chill and mellow dog, which turned out to be a St Bernard! He spent a few minutes happily petting the dog.

At this point, we started seeing other cyclists coming up the main road. One of them stopped at the water fountain and we asked her if the Grand St Bernard road was open to cyclists, and she replied in the affirmative, no hedging. “That was a lot more helpful than the last guy we talked to.” Replied Arturo.

The main road was busy and had lots of cars. We were thus very happy when we turned off it just 20 minutes later onto the pass highway as the rest of the motor traffic went through the toll tunnel (which was open, but as always, denied for cyclists).  The traffic didn’t drop to zero, however, since the road was opened to the barrier and was still an attractive destination for hiking. Nevertheless, it was no longer a hellish continuous stream of fast moving traffic, and being at above 1800m, it was as lot cooler!

Xiaoqin and Bowen had parked at one of the parking spots and got some nice pictures of us as we climbed. As we got further up, the views improved and the traffic diminished until we came along row after row of parked cars just before the barrier, which was basically a pole across the road surrounded by plastic lane protectors. There were signs saying “Road Interrupted”, and that pedestrians and cyclists were not to use the road, but this being Italy, nobody actually respected the sign when it was easy to roll your bike under the pole! Hikers and cyclists clearly were on the road.

After taking a few pictures, Arturo, Boen, and I crossed under the barriers and began riding. This final segment was above the treeline so we were in full sun, but it was also so high that it got the pass breeze and the cooling.  We rode in perfect silence, interrupted only occasionally by the sound of an e-bike motor working furiously.

The galleries, which were normally noisy, echoing with the sound of noisy cars and motorcycles, were a place of solace from the sun. I even felt relaxed enough to take a video from inside one of the galleries.

We stopped a couple of times, once to refill our water bottles and once to eat. This was by far the biggest single climb on the trip—even though Cime de la Bonnette was taller, Aosta was much lower in elevation than Jausiers, so the climb ended up being longer. When we crested the last rise and saw the barrier, we celebrated and saw the summit lake. Mark had ridden all the way to the hospice but we called him back so we could have lunch at the lake. The lake restaurant was very busy, but the lake itself had several picnic benches, and the waitress told us that we could take our trays out to the picnic benches if we didn’t want to wait for a table, so that’s what we did.

The food was satisfying, and the view magnificent. We ate our lunch relatively quickly and then noticed there was a hotel on the Italianside. “The Italian side is usually cheaper than the Swiss side,” remarked Arturo,” Maybe we should get a quote from them!” Mark pointed out that there was another barrier between this Italian hotel and where the car parking lot was, but it wasn’t too far a walk for the roller baggage.

When we got a quote from the hotel, however, it wasn’t cheaper than the hospice internet pricing, so we demurred, pushed our bikes around the Swiss border barrier, and went to the Swiss hospice. It turned out they had 2 different types of rooms, and once we saw both, we picked the modern rooms which had internet, and similar pricing. Xiaoqin and Bowen drove over, but since the rooms weren’t ready yet, we had time to visit the St Bernard museum. Xiaoqin would grab a quick snack, get out her bike, and ride both sides of the pass, exploring both the closed side and the side she had driven up from the tunnel.

The St Bernard museum had actual live St Bernard dogs we could meet with, take photos of, as well as displays of the history of the dogs. Sad to say, they are no longer used as rescue dogs for which they were originally bred and trained for, because the new style of alpine rescue depends heavily on helicopters and St Bernards are simply too big to fit in helicopters!

After the museum visit, the rooms were ready. When we were all showered and rested, Arturo and I walked back to the Italian side past the barriers and shot more pictures. It’s hard to overstate how accomplished we felt—we had accomplished everything I had planned to do as part of the tour, despite unexpected road closures, train line outages, and had just gotten to ride one of the tallest passes of the trip unencumbered by motorized traffic.

Dinner was decent, if unimaginative because we simply took the half pension option and all ordered pretty much the same thing. The after dinner walk consisted of walking back to the pass along the hiking trail rather than the road, and enjoying the peace we found there, as well as discovering all the hiking trails that were available. Xiaoqin and Bowen would get to hike those trails tomorrow while the cyclists braved the heat to make it to Brig.