Phil goes uppity up up, he comes down diddly down down

Our only fan seems to have abandoned us, given the lack of comments on these posts. Perhaps that's understandable, considering we're only updating the blog a couple of times per week, not really enough to keep people coming back. But what can I say, our days are packed and by the time we get to the room at night we just want to go to sleep...and then we get up in the morning wanting to get up and do stuff.

But here's a very short post about biking in the hills along our route.

I (Phil) and a friend (Hal) intend to ride one of the stages of the Giro d'Italia next week. After a long flat section, that route has two "category 1" climbs, so I could not get in shape for it just by riding along the Danube bike path. I did have a couple of opportunities to work climbing into the daily riding, as in the photo below: where the main bike route follows the Danube (off in the background there) in a big curve around some hills, I came up the hill to a monastery, then down the other side. The load on the bike made this a bit of an extra workout.

Another opportunity came up a couple days later, outside Vienna, where a castle looms over the town of Visegrad. I got up in the morning and rode up to the castle...a good steep slope to get the heart pumping, but only about 15 minutes.  Which was fine, since I had a full day of riding ahead of me towards Budapest.

It wasn't until Zurich, after the Danube portion was done, that I had time for a multi-hour ride without a load on the bike. I stopped by a bike shop to get advice on where to ride --- I wanted a 3-hour ride with plenty of climbing --- and was a bit nonplussed to find that they couldn't suggest a ride for me. "Don't you guys ride?," I asked the guy at the counter. "A little," he said with a shrug. But he did point me towards a park just outside the city, where there was a labyrinth of interconnected fire trails, gravel roads, etc., some of which were so steep and/or gravelly that I had to push the bike up some sections. This led through some beautiful scenery, as you can see from the photo below. After I descended from the park I had about an hour of road riding.

Returning through the outskirts of Zurich, I encountered a signal of a type I wish we had at several places I ride near Berkeley. The road that I'm on continues straight ahead, and another road T's in from the left.  If you're in the bike lane at the far right side of the road, there's really no reason you should have to stop here: you aren't interfering with traffic entering from that other road. In the U.S., you either break the law(but with no risk of an accident) by continuing, or you stop just because you're supposed to even though it makes no sense.  But at this intersection outside Zurich, the bike lane still has a green light! Berkeley has very good bike infrastructure by the standards of U.S. cities but we are way behind most cities and towns that we've run into so far on this trip.

As I write this, we are now in the Alps above Interlaken (staying in a town called Wengen), and I've gotten out for a couple of good, grueling rides here too. I'm not really in shape to enjoy riding two Category 1 climbs as part of a 120-mile day, as Hal and I will try next week if weather permits, but at least it's something.