June 27th: Hospental to Airolo

 We didn’t have to be in a hurry, but we’d been getting increasingly efficient over the course of the tour, so today, we left the house at 8:00am, riding up the cobblestone street onto the St. Gotthard highway. The weather was clear, and even at this early hour there was a lot of traffic, it being a Saturday, so by the time we got to the intersection with the old road, we decided to take the cobblestone path just to avoid dealing with traffic.

We went up the old road slowly—rushing a cobblestone road just gives you even more of a butt massage than going up it slowly, and we knew we hard a hard ride the next day. The cobblestone road has better scenery, taking you directly past a lower lake (Lago di Rodont) before getting to the summit lake where the St Gotthard museum was. It being early enough, we had plenty of time to visit the St Gotthard museum, which I would never visit any other time, since on a typical tour I’m in a hurry to get somewhere else before the day heated up. But today, we knew that we just had a descent to the train station and a train ride so we could take our time and watch the very well done film about the history of the St. Gotthard pass and all the various tunnels that had been drilled and built up beneath the pass.

The exhibits would then be exposed to us with all the context such that even if all the displays were in German we could still understand what they were for, and which tunnel they were for!

When we were done with the museum, we headed back down the pass. Before setting off, I gave Mark critical instructions: “Ignore all bike path signs. The only sign you want to pay attention to is the one that says “Police.” That’s where the exit is. Don’t stop just roll the entire descent.”

With that, we proceeded to take the St Gotthard at full tandem speed. This road is effectively a car highway, so at bicycle speeds if you’re wearing a jacket, you can tuck and then ride the entire thing at terminal velocity. We easily hit 40mph and were passed only by a few cars on the descent, a testament both to how well engineered the road is and how polite swiss drivers were. At no point did we feel unsafe despite the speed, and the whole thing only took 15 minutes or so. Boen proclaimed it the beset descent of the entire trip.

At the bottom, we found the exit that said “Police”, and proceeded to exit, find a place to slow down and stop, and then took off our jackets, since it was warm! When Mark caught up, we proceeded to follow the directions towards downtown Airolo and then the directions to the train station. Along the way, having learned from yesterday, we decided to stop to buy lunch at the huge coop in town before descending all the way to the train station. We bought sandwiches and rolled down to the train station.

The train ride from Airolo back to Andermatt wasn’t as scenic, since it went through one of the Gotthard tunnels that we had just went to a museum about. Once in Goschenen, we switched again to a cog railway to take us up to Andermatt. Once in Andermatt we would just ride it since switching trains was more of a hassle than actually riding back to Hospental.

In Andermatt, Mark decided that he would just ride down to Goschenen again to get to experience the tunnel bike path (since tomorrow we would be in a hurry and so would take the car road). Boen and I rode home and ate lunch. When we were done with lunch I realized that we had nothing left for dinner, so after taking a shower, drove back to Andermatt to shop. To my surprise the place was packed! It turned out that there was a car event that closed the Oberalp highway, which meant that the supermarket was jam packed! Fortunately, I did my shopping and could leave before things got too crazy.

In the meantime, Xiaoqin had been riding the Sustenspass. She successfully rode to Gadmen, and then to her surprise was nearly rejected from taking the bus with her bike by the post-bus driver! There was no one else using the bike racks, the bus was not full, but the driver insisted that you needed a reservation to ride the bus with your bike! It boggled my mind that a bus driver would rather abandon a woman with a bike rather than let her on without a reservation. Finally, some other passengers (presumably Swiss) interceded on her behalf and she was allowed to board on the condition that she get off at the top of the pass! At the top she probably could have ignored the instruction, but the bus was so stuffy (the windows could not be opened) that when the time came she was glad to get off so she could be on a bicycle instead of being on the bus!

When she got to Goschenen she pinged me on signal, and I drove the car over to pick her up. Her story shocked me (I’d always thought of Switzerland as being bike friendly), but all ended well. We finished out last round of laundry (we wouldn’t have laundry until we got to Lauterbrunnen), packed as much as we could, and planned to get up early tomorrow so we could avoid the heat on Sustens, which I remembered as usually being one of the hotter passes on previous tours.