Rowkin Rovings Blog

Happy Canada Day!!! She is turning 150 years and not aging too badly. We have been very patriotic and have been travelling showing off our nationality – we are obviously proud to be called Canucks!!

Last night as we were just putting our weary heads down for the night after a rather superb dinner, we were treated to this sunset from our balcony.

Surreal to say the least. It did not last very long but was totally mesmerizing. Would have to say that is probably one of the most spectacular sunsets we have ever seen. The colours were perfect.

Today we were planning on a fairly difficult day of hill climbs but distance not too great. After spending some time reviewing the topography, Di decided she wasn’t going to attempt it. In other words, pick your battles wisely. So we rode from Morgarten about two kilometres to a town called Sattel where Fras put Di on the train to avoid the 200m in two kilometre distance – that’s tough.

Di didn’t realize until the last minute that she had to push a button to get the train to stop which is a definite first for her. Luckily there was one person on the platform waiting for the train, otherwise it would have shot through the platform.
She waited for ¾ of an hour for Fras who did the slog without having to get off his bike to push. He is turning into a mountain 🐐 and loving every minute of it. Di is still the slow 🐢 who likes to go around things.
On his trip up the hill he got a couple of good photos of the countryside. We are most definitely in rural Switzerland.

The route takes us through a lot of back roads and sometimes we feel like we are trespassing but the signs tell us something different so we have learnt to relax over that issue.

Our total kilometres today was meant to be 38 but on review of the map again, it seemed 18 of it was unnecessary and included a lot of hill climbing. The purpose of it was to keep you off the roads but Di felt 18k was an excessive diversion, so we bit the bullet and made sure we were highly visible and shot down a secondary road for four kilometres to our destination for the evening.

It was hard for us to know what hotels we should book into when we were planning this trip and it was the distance and elevation gain that was setting the agenda. The hotel today was called First Business Class so we thought it was like a dinky Ibis hotel and the price reflected it. Oops, we screwed up on that!!!

This was in our foyer outside our room door.

We had informed them via email that we were arriving on “velo’s” of which they decided we must have been joking. Not to many people check into a business hotel on bikes. Anyhow the place is not manned on the weekend (being a business hotel) so when we arrived we only found the cleaner. She wanted us to put the bikes outside in the parking lot of which we declined. So we think we have lowered the standard of the hotel for tonight with two bikes parked at the front reception desk. It was where she wanted us to put them in the end.

Nice room with a very comfortable bed but on a main road. We also trashed the room a bit with our usual washing.