June 6th: Geneva to Bonneville

 Waking up at 5:30am in the morning due to jet lag, I went down to the front desk and started assembling the bikes. Xiaoqin’s road logic came together easily and well, and I was as finished as I could be within an hour. The tandem came together less easily, but by 7:30am I had it all together. Despite my best efforts, however, I could not get the bike to shift into the lowest gear. This would be a big problem during the tour, so I searched for bike shops nearby. None of them opened before 8:30am, which was not a problem since I had arranged for only a 20 mile transit day.

We ate breakfast, and then I rode over to the bike shop to try to get help. While the shop manager was initially resistant because he had a fully booked service department, he eventually relented and a mechanic rolled my bike onto a fully electrified workstand. While working on the bike he identified the problem, which was that the anchor bolt for the derailleur cable had been stripped and could no longer be tightened to spec. He replaced the bolt and got everything adjusted to spec. It would strike me later that this was another argument for going to a fully wireless shifting setup—this type of failure mode would be impossible.

In the meantime, Stephan had gotten onto his train from Munich but had discovered a missing SPD shoe bolt. After paying the shop for the work, I biked back to the hotel, and together with Xiaoqin took the shuttle over to the airport to pick up our rental car, which turned out to be a Volvo EX30 electric car. We had reasoned that the way to avoid expensive European gas prices would be to rent an electric car. The reason for all this was that unlike in the previous year, Bowen refused to ride his bike at all this year, so the plan was for Xiaoqin’s road logic to live in the car, and on days when Xiaoqin wanted to ride, she would park Bowen somewhere. If you’re supporting a bicycle tour with an EV, there’s no range anxiety—our days would not be longer than a 100km at a time, and a tour of the alps had the characteristic that some of the energy spent driving up mountains would be returned to you on the descent. Hertz at the Geneva Airport supplied us with a CCS charging cable but not one that would take a household outlet. They explained that we could return the car with 75% charge and that would be OK.

Having everything squared away, it was time to load up the car with everything not necessary for riding and head to Bonneville. There was an event that Saturday that involved thousands of cyclists taking up most of the lodging in Cluses. I disliked making reservations, but in this case opted for Hotel des Alpes in Bonneville because they took a low deposit to secure our lodging. In any case, with the antics Aer Lingus had played on us the previous night, we were in no shape to keep riding past Bonneville anyway!

We rode downhill from the Geneva airport into downtown Geneva where we got a beautiful view of the lake and the huge fountain that defined the town in so many pictures. Along the lakeshore, we turned onto the bike path. I’d remembered from 2005 that the ride from Geneva to Cluses went past lots of shops, so we did not stop for lunch in downtown Geneva for food, which was a mistake—in 2005 I did not have RidewithGPS or Komoot, and so had just ridden by following signs away from the train station!

This time, the route followed the official bike path out of Geneva into France, where we stopped for photographs for our transition into a new country. From there, the route took pains to bypass village/suburban commercial centers in favor of granting us beautiful views of the Alps before us.

By the time we arrived at Bonneville at 2:00pm we were quite hungry. However, we had caught the hotel owner as she was going out for a bike ride with her son. She paused to check us in, show us where the car parking was, and then told us where the closest supermarket was, which turned out to be quite a significant ride away. We bought what proved to be a disappointing lunch, after which we got settled into the hotel and took showers.

Xiaoqin and Bowen would show up much later, after a visit to CERN first. Stephan had gotten off the train, gotten a free SPD bolt from a bike shop, and had started riding towards us.

Arturo and I took the EV out to see how charging it would work. The car came with some form of Google maps integration that allowed searching for charging stations, though we would discover much later that the charging map frequently were missing charging stations or was incomplete in other ways. Nevertheless, this being my first time with an EV, I appreciate Arturo’s experience (he owned a Swasticar, uh, Tesla Model Y) and was familiar with how EV charging behaved—much like a smartphone, it would charge fastest when fully depleted, and then slow down, so it rarely made sense to charge it to 100%. Different places would also have different rules about whether you would have to pay for occupying a charging space after you were fully charged, and frequently there would be an outrageous deposit to be paid prior to plugging the car in, and then the charging company would take its time refunding you the difference. Every so often even paying for charging was an obscenely complicated experience requiring a working web-browser (not always easy for someone on a T-mobile slow international roaming plan). Having said that, for the entire trip, I would only once be completely unable to charge and have to switch charging stations to find one that would allow a foreign credit card. It annoyed the heck out of me that these stations required registration, a dedicated app, or sign up. Why not just let me swipe or tap an NFC credit card and then just charge? If fueling stations for gas cars were so demanding of their customers gas cars probably wouldn’t stay popular for that long.

Dinner was at a La TablEnvie, as the hotel restaurant was closed. We would repeatedly find out during the trip that we were at the leading edge of the summer season, with many lodging or other tourist facilities only opening after we had come and gone.

Going to bed early that night in an attempt to claw back hours of sleep lost to us by Aer Lingus, I had high hopes that the ride in the Alps properly would be as invigorating as they were for me years ago.