A day short on miles (51), modest on elevation (3,600ft), but long on precipitation (6.5 cats and 4.3 dogs). Yes: rain had been forecast for the whole day, and for once the forecast was spot-on.
Still, we at least kept positive, if not at all dry. My Ortlieb panniers, like me, are old, battered and leaky now, and they didn’t give much protection to my gear from the incessant heavy rain that seeped everywhere into them like right-wing xenophobia into social media.
OK, so, the route. We followed Route 4 then Route 8, at first on pleasant, well-surfaced ribbons of tarmac that wound their way over and through farmy hills. Like Austria and southern Germany, there’s an open feel to it all: no hedgerows or fences or walls of trees, just meadows and grass slopes on either side. And often cows. A lot of cows. Wet cows.
The general look of the houses too was pretty general southern-Germanic; the music-box wooden chalets that I always thought of as typically Swiss-alp didn’t really start appearing until we got near Interlaken.
Not that I was doing much stopping and looking. Most of the time I was just plugging gamely through the rain. True, there were some interesting covered wooden bridges traversing the overexcited rivers, albeit mostly of interest for the temporary shelter they afforded.
Lunch was a supermarket stop in Wattenwil, after a 250m drop down from the hilly tops we’d been riding. Our route took the relatively shallow hairpins down, though for those in a real hurry to get to the Denner for their cheapo pastry and pop, there was a more direct alternative that plummeted down at 30%.
It carried on raining.
There was some sploshy stuff on gravel tracks through a wood, then a slippery and vertiginous crossing of a mesh-floored waterworks bridge that had not been designed with leisure cyclists in mind.
We had another stop in Spiez, dripping in the railway station’s main hall along with a load of sodden Chinese tourists, and snaffling more bargain supermarket fodder.
The final leg was mostly on a lakeside path that would have been beautiful in less savage weather, but we could see nothing of the waterside hills or mountain fringes through the thick clouds. We did, however, get a good view of the motorway.
As we got to Interlaken the rain stopped. We checked into our non-en-suite budget hotel room – ‘budget’ in Interlaken meaning ‘less than €200 a night’ – and started the drying-off process.
The evening was sunny, and we strolled the town feeling a little smug compared to the herds of tourists from all over the world dragging their wheelie cases and taking selfies. But also feeling damper than them.
Miles today: 51
Miles since Chancy: 168