July 2nd: Mals to Kappl

 The morning was clear. Despite our plans to catch the 9:45am train, we were up way early, and had gotten ready by 8:00am. Rather than sit around at the apartment, we got the tandem down, left cash on the dining room table (after taking a picture), and then rode to the train station. Or rather, Boen and I rode to the train station, and there received a text message from Arturo that he had gotten a flat but rather than fix it, he would just walk/run to the train station. By the time he had arrived, we had bought train tickets to Mals from Merano for the 8:45am train, which happily took bikes. I never figured out why the train station had postings stating that the 9:45am train was the only one that took bikes. 

The train was already sitting on the track so we got in and took pictures, and then Arturo went about fixing his flat tire. I observed that his proposed replacement tube had been improperly patched, and sure enough, as soon as he started pumping up the tire, he could tell that the air wasn't staying in the tire. The second time, I helped him with my VAR tire lever tool and he replaced it with the TPU tube he'd gotten from me back in California and this time the tire held. "Darn. Your tire lever outperforms mine by a lot!" Alas, the VAR tyre lever is hard to find and even harder to keep in stock. I hang on to my precious few purchased years ago in bulk precisely because of the difficulties involved in acquiring one. 

The train took us past villages we'd ridden past just 4 days ago, yet it seemed a long time ago, since so much had happened. One of the best things about cycle touring is that days are so eventful, scenery changes so meaningful that your brain has no way to compress all those events and so even asking what you had 2 days ago for breakfast makes you look back and think "that was so long ago!" 

At Mals, we got off the train and immediately started riding up the pass towards Reschen pass. At the train station a couple on heavily loaded bicycles looked at us and told us they were going to hop on the train to Nauders. I saw no reason to do so, since the bus was slow and taking the tandem apart was an ordeal, so we rode on. 

I remembered the descent as full of steep grades, but with the rest day behind us, the grades weren't nearly as bad as I remembered and soon we were pedaling alongside the Reschensee, reading the placard at the side that informed us that the dam had been completed but no one in the drowned village had been informed. "A clear case of malicious intent" Arturo declared. 

The ride around the various lakes around Reschen is great. It's a lot of fun and there were many locations that looked stunning. You can't speed through it, but even in the uphill direction it wasn't very challenging after the climb up from Mals. Once at the end of the lake we stopped at the lakeside playground where Boen did several runs on the zipline. When he was finished we ate chocolate chip cookies and proceeded to the pass itself, which was drawn at the Italian border, but actually reached its apex just past the lake. 

At the border we stopped for a picture, and then rode down to Nauders for lunch at the Migros. Post lunch I set a course on the GPS for Landeck and then proceeded to take the car road instead of the bike route, confident that we could keep up with cars on the descent to Prutz. I wasn't wrong. While the climb up to Nauders used Nobbert's pass to get minimal traffic, on the descent we were as fast as car traffic and could zip down the various tunnels and gallery at speed. Obviously at this speed we couldn't get any photos but saved a ton of time and let us use the momentum to traverse multiple miles that otherwise could be a slog. 

How much of a slog became obvious at Prutz, where we pulled off the highway to join the bike path at a sign that looked like it meant "no bicycles" but we would later on figure out to mean "no mopeds."  From here on, we're on the Inn river bike path/Claudia Augusta. The bike path mostly goes downhill, but there were several climbs until as we neared Landeck the bike path rejoins the main road into town. Once on the main road, the descent is again fast and there's no need to return to the bike path. 

In Landeck it was only 2:30pm, so we made the decision to keep riding to Silvretta. The highway to get to the Silvretta turnoff is annoying with lots of traffic to share the road with. The climb is slow and the late afternoon heat made it quite annoying. Nevertheless, it's a short 8km so by the time we turned off it was 3:30pm and the initial descent was nice and cool, followed by some galleries that shielded us from the worst of the heat. 

The initial part of Silvretta is almost flat and the traffic while constant wasn't aggressive.  At the town of See we pulled off to check on the lodging nearby, and were about to book an apartment right there when we noticed the cleaning fee being as much as the cost to stay for the night! We looked further and settled on Kappl. If we'd known how much climbing Kappl was (it's off the main road) we would have kept on going to Ischgl. I remembered one of those 2 towns was uphill off the road from taking the bus 2 years ago but misremembered which one. 

When we got to Kappl I looked in dismay as we had to climb 150m in 2km. It was a tough grind but Boen was up to it after a rest day. The apartment was hard to find but we eventually found it. Unfortunately, no one was home. A call to the owner turned up the fact that she hadn't even check the booking we had made. She let us in by giving us her door code anyway, and promised to show up in half an hour. When she showed up she told us that it was her late mom's house and no one else was living in it, and we could park our bikes (tandem and all) in the kitchen at the lower level. 

We quickly got our backpack out and went to the supermarket before it closed for the night and bought about 60 EUR worth of food. We then made dinner and ate it all before taking a shower. Arturo went for a walk but quickly got rained on. The forecast looked good for the next day but given that it wasn't supposed to rain today I kept my expectations in check.