June 26 - What a Day!

This was such a great day I don't know where to start and I am sure I will forget some things.

First, when I looked at Facebook this morning, I see my niece (Michelle Rettig) posted a picture of herself beside a statue of a Swiss cow in New Glarus, Wisconsin, where she and her husband Rod are on a very long pedal bike ride!  Coincidentally, I was in Glarus yesterday on my "bike" ride and that is the area where we saw the ranch with many Swiss cows on the road.  How cool is that for both of us!

The weather today was bright sunshine with only very few clouds all day.  It made the views today very beautiful.  I will post a few pictures but I can tell you, they don't do the mountain justice but at least you can see just a fraction of what I did today.

We went across several mountain passes today includes Silveretta which is 2,032 meters and has 34 hairpin corners, Timmelsjoch (2,509 meters = 8,231 ft.), Jaufenpass (2,094 meters) and Penserjoch (2,211 meters) along with a couple of shorter passes.  Timmelsjoch proved to be a real challenge because there was a large pedal bike event with riders going up and over the mountain. There were bikes and chase vehicles everywhere.   As the bikers approached the top of the mountain, they cared less about where they were on the road as they were most concerned about making it to the top, this meant they often used their lane plus some of the other lane which made passing them difficult at times. 

Unfortunately, one of the riders got separated from our group today.  Somewhere there was a miscommunication between the rider and our leader Charlie.  Charlie sent us up to the top of our next pass while he went in search of the rider.  Charlie returned unable to find the rider.  We continued on our way and later Charlie contacted the rider and agreed to meet back at the hotel.  We arrived at our hotel about 7:15PM, the lost rider made his appearance shortly after 9:00PM.  All is well once again.

This is the second day in a row that we have arrived at our hotel around 7:00PM (we leave at 9:00AM) so we are putting in some good days of riding.  Today at about 4:00PM we had a choice to take the short way back to the hotel and arrive about 5:30PM or take the long way and get back around 7:00PM; everyone agreed to take the long way!!  Yeah - that was my vote!  In the 3 days of riding, we have now logged about 575 miles.

We are now in Italy!  We are staying in the town of Corvara.  We will be at this hotel for 3 nights.  As we were coming to the hotel, some of the roads were familiar; that is because this area is very close to where I did my previous 5-day ride in Italy several years back.  Actually, we drove only a block or 2 away from the hotel we stayed at on that trip while driving to the hotel for this trip.  For some reason, I have the ability to remember places I have been and roads I have traveled before.  I am sure some other roads will look familiar during the next several days.  I am OK with that, there is good reason that many of the tours use this area for riding.  The Dolomite Mountains of Italy look very different than those in other parts of the Alps.  Hopefully tomorrow I can post some good pictures for you to enjoy.  Unfortunately, currently the forecast for the next couple of days looks pretty wet.  We will wait and see!