June 4, 2014

Fortunately, it is a warm sunny morning giving us the opportunity to get everything dry before packing it on the bikes.  We call in for a coffee in Buchs town centre on our way back to the riverbank.  No cake with the coffee now – two cups of coffee on their own are €9, we were getting coffee and cake for that in Germany and would get lunch for that back home.

They say home is where the heart is and we’re feeling at home now because we’re back in the mountains.  The journey so far has been a great experience and we’ve loved doing something different, but our hearts really are in the mountains.  Again, there are very few cyclists passing by.

The signposting continues to be accurate and part way along the route takes us up into one or two of the small villages on the slopes overlooking the Rhine.  One is Maienfeld where the novel Heidi by Johanna Spyri, is set.  You can image how picturesque it is.

We decide to have a shorter day today so as to ensure we can camp both today and tomorrow.  If we do our normal distance today, according to the information that we have, we will be in a place with no camp-site.  It will work better if we camp today in Chur leaving us with a run of about 65 kilometres to Disentis tomorrow.  Tomorrow will be a day of more serious climbing up to 1142 metres and so a distance of 65 kilometres should be about right.  That will leave us about 22 kilometres to go to the summit of the Oberalppass at 2046 metres and the end of our quest to reach the source of the Rhine.

The rain does put in an appearance again, but we’ve already pitched the tent and cooked the dinner when it does – we eat huddled in the doorway to our tent.  I’ve also been able to get both electricity and WiFi, so I’m updating listening to the sound of the rain beating on the tent. 😉