July 2: Bergun to Lenzerheide

Once again, we had another beautiful morning to start our ride down the rest of the Albula pass. The descent was cool enough that we had jackets on, but once in Alvaneu, the road started turning up and down as it went through the small villagers of Surava before a decisive climb up to Tiefencastel. We shed our jackets in Surava, and by the time we started the climb up towards Lantsch it was warm in the full sun. 

Fortunately, while the traffic was briefly bad along highway 3 from the Julier pass, most of the traffic was headed towards Davos, so we were spared most of the traffic once we made the turnoff towards Lenzerheide.

On the way up the road, we saw a landslide come down the mountain. That was remarkable. We made Lenzerheide proper by 11:00am. While waiting for Bowen I sported the Hotel Seehof Valbella which had a good offering on booking. Given that they had a lot of room we were in no hurry, but ate at a SPAR off the main road before riding down past the lake to the Hotel Seehof. We could have kept going to ride down to Chur, but that would have guaranteed a very hot rest of the day. This was our last chance to stay high (Lenzerheide was at 1473m) and enjoy the cool weather before heading towards Lindau.

There, we showed the booking.com offering to the receptionist, who called her manager who immediately said: "Of course. We give them a discount for not using booking.com and showing up in person instead so we don't pay commission!" Our room was actually ready for us by the time we unloaded the bike and parked the bikes. We asked about the half pension but it seemed really expensive so we decided we would order a la carte instead.

Xiaoqin was pretty tired, so she opted to enjoy the beautiful hotel room while the kids and I walked to the Lenzerheide cable car. Lenzerheide is pretty famous for its bike kingdom, where it has a downhill lift assisted mountain bike course. The bike rental was no worse than comparable places in Canada, but Bowen opted not to do it because he didn't want to put on body armor. Instead, we took the cable car up and hiked back down, with a disappointment because the waterfall trail was actually closed. What I saw of the mountain bike park, however, looked impressive. The berms were well groomed and people in general looked like they were having fun.

When we got back to the lake we visited the watersport rental and rented two paddleboards, one for me, and one for the kids, and we made full use of the half hour rentals before returning it and hiking back to the hotel.

One at the hotel, we took showers and did laundry, before heading out to see if there were alternative places to eat. The supermarket didn't seem to have anything that was appealing, so we walked back to the hotel and ate off the (expensive) a la carte menu. The food was good, though perhaps not so good that it justified the high prices.

After dinner, rain came in and together with the shining sun, gave us an amazing lightshow, with rainbows and double rainbows in combination with an evening alpenglow. We congratulated ourselves for having the good luck to stay here. Looking at the forecast, the next few days were supposed to rain but we were also going to be low where the cool temperatures might be welcome.

Boen looked at the elevation profile and decided that tomorrow would be a good day to do a full metric century. He actually spent 15 minutes talking Bowen into it!