Swiss Mountain Biking and a New Car

It was time to swap our lease car over for a new one. To do this without a one-way charge we had to go to a French city. We choose Geneva so we could combine it with some mountain biking. Leaving at lunch time on Friday we were in Chamonix by late afternoon. The drive up was good, it was a clear blue sky and the late autumn colours in the Alps are fantastic now with hillsides of orange, gold and yellow. Also the Mont Blanc tunnel had no queue and 10km in a tunnel doesn’t seem so bad now.

We looked at some ski gear shops in Chamonix and had an amazingly cheesy meal at a restaurant there. We avoided the fondue and raclette but still ate a huge amount. Next morning we headed into Geneva and swapped the cars over. All went smoothly except that Renault have remodeled the Clio completely and our roofracks don’t fit the new model. So we had to jam both bikes inside – never the best thing for a brand new car’s interior.

We headed around the lake past Lausanne and had lunch among the vines lining the shore of Lac Leman. It was so nice we decided to stay the night in the area. However, it was hard to find a place with space and it took us a lot of driving around. In the end we found quite a nice old place nestled in the vines with a balcony that looked out onto the lake and the mountains on the opposite shore. We ate at the hotel and enjoyed the sunset from the terrace. Next morning dawned fine and clear again and we took a walk down to the lake shore as the sun rose. After a lame first breakfast in the dining room (it was included with the room) we had second breakfast on our balcony.

We then headed around the end of the lake and climbed up out of the valley and down to Gstaad. We parked the car and headed out on a Swiss National mountain bike route. We climbed up out of town over a spur and then worked our way up a long valley beside a river. At the head of the valley was a lake that was a obviously a popular day walk. We then started a long climb above the lake. It was cold in the shadow of the ridge and we were glad to reach the warm sun higher on the climb. A long section too steep to ride took us over the ridge and then we had some brief good trail then a long set of steps. This wasn’t looking so good and when we came to a junction we decided to change the route. The suggested path headed up steeply in front of us but to our right an inviting piece of singletrack headed back down to the valley we had come from. We were helped by seeing two other riders head that way.

So we took the trail and were treated to a technical downhill all on singletrack that twisted and turned its way down. Part way down we caught up the other riders, they were a couple from Gstaad and showed us how to piece together bits of singletrack all the down the river. They took the road at that point but we followed the walking path on the river bank all the way back into town. All up the descent from our highpoint was about 12km and it was all singletrack. The great trails, snow capped peaks and autumnal trees all combined to make it a great ride. We squeezed the muddy bikes back into the rapidly aging car and started the long drive home over the Simplon Pass.