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Published: July 30th 2011
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Down, Down, Down!
Two roads go from Grimentz to the Rhone Valley. One on each side of the Val d Annivers. This is a view of the road on the east side of the valley. Yeah, I know that we did not send out a blog yesterday. Frankly, we were just too lazy and we couldn’t ask Lady or the Tramp to do so because they had already had a rough day.
We awoke in Grimentz to some blue sky, which gave us hope for a sunny day. By 11:00, the clouds had lifted and the roads had dried, so we loaded up the bikes and headed DOWN to Sierre. The pain of saying good-bye to Maria and Manfred was eased by knowing that we will see them again in a couple of weeks. We had about 7 kms. of very steep descent, followed by 5 kms. of very steep ascent, then 10 kms of EXTREMELY steep descent. We stopped every half kilometer or so to allow the wheel rims to cool and to give our hands a chance to uncramp from holding so tightly on the brakes. Although it was not a frightening descent, it was not particularly enjoyable. We did delight, however, in the warm sunshine.
Arriving in Chippis around 1:30, we easily found the home of Tilly and Marc, who had offered us Warm Showers accommodations for the night. Shower, snacks,
dinner, wine, conversation and . . . we learned a new dice game. Marc and Tilly easily won the first two games, but Bill quickly caught up. Me, I lost. I did, however, get the opportunity to improve my French a bit in speaking with Marc. Unfortunately, one of the phrases I used was “c’est dommage” because someone had stolen his bike just the day before. We also learned, as we have consistently heard here in Europe, that most people did not respect President Bush at all but have much more confidence in Obama. Europeans know much more about American politics than most Americans themselves.
We left Chippis this morning after a delicious breakfast including Tilly’s homemade bread. Their nineteen year old daughter is currently doing volunteer work in Africa, so I think they enjoyed having someone with whom to share some dialogue. We may have even convinced them that biking through the US is a good idea!
Fifty kms of fairly easy cycling, meandering through the farms, vineyards, and industry along the Rhone River, brought us to Brig. We stopped in Visp at an inexpensive (well, inexpensive by Swiss standards) grocery store and loaded up on stuff
to keep us fed for the next few days. This is a big holiday weekend in Switzerland, kinda like our Fourth of July, so we are not sure what stores we will find open from now until Tuesday. We are certainly not the only cyclists out this weekend as we saw dozens of people on bikes, both training and touring.
A stop at the tourist office at the Brig train station sent us to this nearby campground which is packed with families on holiday. A walk into town found us a pizza for “take away” and some cold beer. We’ll supplement that with a fruit salad from what we bought in Visp this morning, and we will fall asleep clean, warm, dry, and well fed.
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