Heaven is Overrated (Bikepacking the Alps)
maybe something is wrong with us we're in the elps on one of the best bike paths in the world and somehow we're kind of bored when Chris and I knew we'd be coming to Italy for a family wedding we decided to make the most of it and bring our bikes we asked the internet for Route recommendations and heard go to the the cycling's amazing we like mountains we thought sounds as good a place as any but now we're realizing that much of what we love about traveling by bike involves type two fun like I said maybe there's something wrong with us but we're looking for a little bit more Adventure M we're pulling out of our sweet little campsite that we found last night and we both had a pretty good night of sleep but unfortunately there was a cold that was being passed around the wedding we were at last week and it finally caught up to me Chris had it before me and he's getting better but I just got it so we've got about 70 km to do today and then we have a hotel reservation it also feels like it's going to be kind of hot today so my goal for the day is to just try and enjoy it as much as I can even through being sick and the heat knowing that I'm going to have a day to get some rest after this okay let's go so we're getting just a little bit of an earlier start today because the forecast is calling for rain later today um and then thunderstorms the next couple of days and we would really like to get to the the hotel that we have booked before we get soaked [Applause] [Music] just blindly following Kimo through the corn fields again it's a good thing we have these bikes that was a joke they're a little aggressive for this whole trip but whatever well this is nice I think we follow this psychopath for a while the whole day yeah by the way if you heard me say psychopath instead of cycle path you're not alone if it really is just like this most of the day 70 km might not feel too bad yeah hard flat [Music] well we have been on this cycle path for a while now and it seems like it starts at like KO and goes all the way to the top of the valley so we might be on it for the rest of the day and there's the river on one side and a bunch of agricultural land on the other and it's really pretty I'm really enjoying the chance to just pedal and not have to worry about um dodging cars or where the next turn is the only problem is that it's hard to find a place to get espresso so that's what we're on the lookout [Music] [Applause] for in Italy a hot July is pretty much a given but we're here now because my sister got married earlier this month than Tuscany otherwise we might have picked a less hot and humid route as it is Europe is in the middle of a heat wave with temperatures pushing 30 to 40° C or around 100 F and we're struggling we take a break at the church yeah in the shade hopefully get a breeze this where we get all of our uph good wow I haven't told christas but I don't know if I'm going to make it we' only we've gone like 25 kmet and I just feel kind of weak and it's hot I think it's going to get hotter and it's going to get more a pill so we'll see if she wasn't sick tastes like bubble gum [Applause] well this is Pleasant it just started feeling really easy and we're going uphill and then I realized that we have a Tailwind I always feel like it's very easy to notice a headwind but Tailwinds sometimes you don't realize you have them happy Tailwind yeah I was just thinking Tailwind on the Valentina bike Highway doesn't get much here isier we [Music] [Music] good now well it's almost 3 and we would really like to get out of the Sun for a little bit during the hottest part of the day but the river is turned from that calm River of the morning to this like kind of intimidating torrent and it's been hard to find a place to get into it that feels safe so we'll keep looking you look like a hot chicken feel like a hot chicken yeah Bridge Troll time I've been waiting for this clear River all day swimm time it's so hot 2 3 yeah I'm almost [Music] cold all right I took some pills I'm trying no long sleeves right now we're in the wrong place I thought we were on the right place but we're in the wrong one if we're going to be in the wrong place it may as well be beautiful yeah anyway the sun is behind some clouds and life is better [Music] [Music] so we're just a couple of kilometers away from Toronto and I'm really glad that the rain is held off so far but the clouds are building on the horizon we've got a hotel booked for two nights I'm really excited about that because number one I feel kind of cruddy and it' be nice to rest a little bit and number two we might have a side quest tomorrow also the hotel has five star reviews across the board and they're all they all mention the the owner the host so let's make it to Toronto okay it should be like here right a lot so oh here it is it says call for check in though we're cheap and we don't usually pay for an international phone plan instead we we use the money we would have spent on phone data for the day on an apparao and bum the bar's Wi-Fi to text the hotel owner not too [Music] [Applause] bad well this place is great Alberto uh the owner is the best he just spent like 20 minutes telling us about all the spots that we should visit in the town the restaurants that we should go to the things that we should order from the different restaurants is very good for typical food like P is a special kind of black pasta about the third best cathedral in in Italy after there is the biggest organ in Europe W with 2,200 of pipes wow W and this place is wonderful it's so clean and comfortable looking and so spacious so spacious so activ so much room for activities I'm very sticky I feel like I've been damp for days so it's time for shower to shower and then go get dinner look presentable for dinner yes bye we did end up getting Pizer which is buckwheat pasta with potatoes cabbage butter and tons of gooey cheese 10 out of 10 W eat again [Music] soon as we're done doing a little sink laundry we will head to the train station and catch a train up to the Bernina pass which is supposed to be like a highlight of anyone's trip to Europe we're taking the train because we're not going to bike in this weather it's thunderstorming and it's raining really hard but that also means that we might not see anything on the train but we have time to kill so we might as well take it it's almost always worth going often the days that you think will be terrible end up being the most spectacular yeah sometimes there's breaks in the clouds and then it's actually more dramatic so we'll see sometimes Chris sometimes it's just terrible but whatever it's better than staying all day in the hotel to the train station [Music] so we've been on this train for 2 minutes and already the views are spectacular um better than I was expecting yeah I now have black hopes for the rest of the day this route will take us across 196 Bridges and through 55 tunnels covering 122 beautiful km between Tano and T this is the regional train that takes the same route as the bernin express one of the most famous tourist trains in the world we decided to take the regional train at Alberto's suggestion and we're glad we did it was cheaper and there are no sign seats so you can move around the car depending on where the view is best which not that helpful in this moment but we'll be glad for it later it's also less well known so it wasn't as crowded I'm the express we see this fault right now we're basically eight seats for the two of us I'm okay with our choices yeah we also just realized that we forgot our passports in our hotel and we are now in another country which is a country that neither of us have ever been to before but we're in the EU so it shouldn't matter right welc yeah turns out we are ignorant Americans and Switzerland is not actually a part of the EU even though it is smack dab in the middle of it it is part of the shenen area however which is a group of countries that typically don't have passport control between their borders so luckily we didn't have any isue still it felt weird as heck to be in a different country than our passports we will be reaching the Fantastic Viewpoint up cre at 291 m above sea level how's that Glacier View yeah it's white GL are white at 2,253 m above sea level Opia Bina on loo biano is the highest duration railway station this is the land language border Italian is spoken in bavo while Roman and German are spoken inad we got off the train we thought maybe we'd do a little exploring here but the weather's so bad that we're just going to probably get some food and then take a train back to Toronto but it's a good way to spend a raing day I think we're eating German food now the menu's in German and Italian it's hot dogs well while we were eating lunch it turned into a beautiful day we gambled with the weather and as so often happens it turned out great so we're going to take a later train back and go for a little bit of a hike we'll be heading back to Toronto after this but the train continues down the hill and deeper into Switzerland in a few days we'll be back in this exact spot so we'll see the rest of the trains route by bike [Music] I'm happy here yeah that's pretty cool but I think we need to go home okay got to catch the train go go go while we waited for the next train we learned that the railway was built between 1908 and 1912 and was actually created as an electric sightseeing train during the winter in the early days of the train passengers and workers often used horsedrawn slays to reach the highest point of the line and the tracks were dug out by hand eventually the regional trains were added after local communities expressed a desire to use the tracks for regional transportation and commerce oh also another perk of the regional trains over the tourist train the windows open [Music] on the Bernina express your ticket is only valid for one departure time so you can't get off and explore but the regional trains allowed us the flexibility for side quests like this so we are right here mhm and we're going to go cool see what those are all about okay so this area was all covered by a glacier but underneath the glacier is a layer of water and sediment uh as that all contines used to flow downhill sometimes it creates a little pocket and as the water and sediment turns in it it creates a bigger and bigger and bigger pocket like this one it's a hole can't even go in this hole I know so many that was very deep who missed the train [Applause] [Music] side quest accomplished side quest accomplished Welcome to our Hollywood set just exploring back streets in Italy and they all look perfectly the same and like they're made up [Music] so we're getting ready to leave our hotel here in toron we've had a good couple days here resting up and relaxing and avoiding the bad weather but now it's time to head out in the first couple days that we were biking it was really nice to have the bike pack that goes all the way up and down the valley because we were able to make big miles but the tragedy of bike paths is that you don't get to see the buildings and people and culture that we really like to explore and check out while we're in other countries just feels like we could be anywhere in the world on this bike path so we've revised our route to take us off of the bike paths and get us back into the towns where we can see some of the cool things of Northern Italy [Music] somehow we found ourselves at a remote control car racetrack it's fascinating it's like watching fire I'm so M to I know well that was a worthwhile inter Mission yeah we decide to take a turn off the B path and immediately things get [Music] weird we spent the rest of the day getting off the bike path any chance we could exploring small towns and churches woo this church it's got mermaids on the door that's my kind of church this church was built in the 1500s and still has its original carved wooden door [Music] [Music] it's definitely looking more Swiss yeah or German that's my baby gear so as we go up in elevation the the valley gets narrower and narrower that also means that the bike path gets closer and closer to towns we didn't know this at the time but this series of dams was constructed after a massive landslide in 1987 obliterated multiple Villages and blocked the adder River creating a massive Lake that threatened the valley below the dams helped to drain the lake in a controlled manner 43 people died during the disaster some of them from a 35 M High mud wve that traveled nearly 3 km Upstream since then a monitoring system has been installed up and down the valley to check the progress of the landslide debris it's [Music] [Applause] crazy some say that that fun lies at the intersection of Challenge and ability serer people might look at our time on the valalo path as a pleasant relaxing bike ride but it lacked the kind of challenge that makes us tick getting off the bike path that day did help break up the monotony a bit but it wasn't until we reached the end of the path that things started to feel more our speed well we just passed through Boro which marks the end of the long climb off the valley we stopped there for some sweet treats well as soon as we got out of voro it completely changed character now we're on a really steep Forest Road with no traffic our first order of business is to find a place to Wild Camp cuz we've been staying in campgrounds and in a hotel and we'd really like to just camp in the woods so that's what we're doing I mean is it really an adventure if we're not anxiously searching for a place to sleep as the day is fading the bust no flat spots no water let's keep going we can see the switchbacks that we'll find [Music] tomorrow we found a [Music] campsite it's like really close to the road but hard to see from it I'm tired guess I don't really ever feel like it's a proper Adventure until we wild camp for the first time so last night was really nice and now we've got a big climb up into the mountains up a kind of intimidating set of switchbacks but then we'll be up in the high mountains and I'm really excited about that oh damn [Applause]
2024-10-12 12:29
