July 3: Lenzerheide to Lustenau

The forecast was for rain today, but of course the weather in the morning looked fantastic. After a very full breakfast in which we had custom omelets in addition to the buffet specialties, we headed up to Lenzerheide pass which descecnded rapidly through Churwalden before hitting a bunch of construction, which we had encountered last year coming up from Chur. That time, the construction forced a detour through unusually steep alternates, but this time, at least the parts of the road that weren't under construction was super smooth and made for a very fast descent, granting us a max speed of 46mph.

Past the construction, we descended down the main road towards Chur rather than use the bike path. At downhill speeds the bike is at least as fast as a car and there's no reason to subject your brakes to the twisty bike path. In Chur proper, we followed signs to the train station and from there picked up Swiss Mobility route 2.

The route doesn't go directly along the river, but instead detours to Landquart where we had ridden through on the way to Davos in 2022.Here, the bike path actually goes up hill a bit before descending into Landquart where our luck finally ran out and a big storm blew through, forcing us to take shelter at the Migros in town where we had stopped in 2022 to have lunch. It was too early for lunch, but the storm subsided in a bit and we went on as soon as it became a drizzle.

From Landquart the route becomes easy as you get a dirt road next to the Rhine river that turns into an asphalted bike path near Sargans. From here, you're within an hour of Liechtenstein, and indeed we soon ran into a school trip. Boen and I rode ahead of them as soon as we could, since some of the kids were quite squirrely. They gaped at the tandem as we rode by.

We hadn't quite reach the head of the school trip when they took a turn right onto a bridge right across the Rhine. I surmised that this must have been the Liechtenstein border bridge, so we waited until Bowen caught up. We then crossed the border together and tailed the school group for a bit until Bowwen and Boen got hungry. leaving Liechtenstein behind near Haag, we crossed another bridge back into Switzerland to visit the huge COOP at Haag, where we could buy hot food and Boen got his supermarket ice cream. By this time the sun had come out and we could shed our rain jackets.

After lunch we tried riding on the Swiss bike path again, but the problem was that it was next to the very loud freeway, which drove us back across the border again at the next bridge, this time into Austria. I realized that we were making very good time because the storm had changed the characteristic headwind from the Bodensee up towards Chur into a tailwind at times, making this trip much easier than I had experienced in the past.

In Meningen we found the first zipline playground that we had seen today, and the kids took several runs on it while the adults looked for lodging. I looked for lodging in Hard and Bregenz, but they were surprisingly expensive and there was actually not that much availability. Lustenau, however, had plenty of availability, and was fairly cheap, including an apartment that had a washing machine ensuite, the savior of all dads on bicycle tours. Lustenau would also fulfill Boen's request do a metric century, so we booked it.

The rest of the ride was fairly unremarkable, though once again the weather started to rain as we got into Lustenau. We ended right at the apartment we had booked just as a storm came down again. I realized at this point that the SIM cards I had bought Bowen and Boen were no longer connecting to voice, despite the claim of unlimited calling inside Europe for 30 days, so I called using my phone and managed to get us the code to open the apartment and park the bikes into the bike locker. I got out our bottle of wax and rewaxed all the chains before moving up stairs to take inventory.

The house cleaners showed up and setup the kid's beds, and I discovered that the apartment was well equipped enough for coffee and even shampoo and soap, so all we needed to do was buy dinner and breakfast at the local supermarket.

We walked to the supermarket, dodging the raindrops and then came back to take showers, make dinner, do laundry, and eat. The after dinner walk was drizzly but by the time we got back tot he apartment things had cleared up a bit again. At least with the recent rains it wasn't going to be too hot to sleep.