Saturday, Teesa (from Boston) and I decided it was a beautiful day and why not bike 20km to the nearby town of Vevey (my uncle Tommy, avid cyclist and adventurer, may not be so impressed)? There is a bicycle rental company here where you can rent bikes by the day, leaving only a 20 Franc deposit and an ID (there is no charge)! There is some advertisement on a basket on the back of the bike, which is how the company makes money while allowing you to ride it all day for free.
Since the new metro which could take us from the bike rental place to the road on the lake in Ouchy, we thought it would be thrilling to take our first new metro ride with the bikes, and, realizing that the train was right there and about to leave, we hopped on. However, we thought it was strange that a new metro would have a car that seemed like it was a few decades old. We also thought it was strange that the metro was going up hill (away from the lake) instead of down. It was even stranger when we passed a cornfield, a sure sign that you are definitely NOT in the city anymore. So we got off, and realized that we had actually been on a northern-bound commuter train!
Luckily, it was all downhill back to Lausanne, so we biked our way back on the street. Here, bike lanes that you are encouraged (maybe even obliged) to use tend to appear and disappear on the road, so we half stayed on the road and half went onto the sidewalk. Part of the problem for us was not knowing the laws here for bicyclists: were we even allowed to be on the road? would the cars and buses pass us or treat us like cars? could we pass a stopped bus? what do the road signs mean, anyway (they're different here)? But I was wearing a helmet and therefore had some sense of security (here, again, uncle Tommy might not be so impressed with our semi-vehicular-potentially-illegal road cycling). But we made it to Ouchy without causing any accidents.
The rest of the ride to Vevey was amazing. On the left, what seemed to be the major wine producing region in francophone Switzerland looming in terraces up a steep hill. On the right, Lake Leman (Lake Geneva) and across that the alps rising above some fog. Because of our earlier misadventure, the sun was ready to set and it cast a golden glow over both the lake and the vineyards.
The bike path (which was just some roads linked together with signs telling you which one to take) went through several small towns, some of which had wineries. It's grape harvesting season, and as we passed one of wineries, people were emptying huge yellow boxes of grapes into a vat, presumably for future wine. You could even smell the smell of slightly rotten grapes as you passed these places.
We eventually reached Vevey just before it got to the point where we would have needed lights on the bikes, deposited our bikes at the place there (we had to pay 10fr to leave them in a different city), and took a walk around. Strangely, there was KNIE, the Swiss circus, in town, so we took a look at some elephants and camels before heading back to Lausanne on the train!
Want to see where we were? I'm having a bit of trouble getting the map to zoom in to the right place, so you'll have to do it yourself. Just Zoom In until the lake takes up the screen! I'll try to fix this soon.
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1 comment:
"Impressiveness" of a ride isn't the amount of distance; it's how much one is pushing the envelope of _any_ aspect of their cycling abilities. This includes aspects that few cyclists, no matter how seasoned, ever even think of. Just look at my Northeastern Pennsylvania Bicycle Messengering blog http://Route62226.blogspot.com or, perhaps better yet, my introduction about it today at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Chainguard/message/26430 .
In the latter, I unapologetically (a new thing for me when it comes to those of my rides that don't start and end in my driveway) explain how low of a percentage of my bicycle-messengering (or paperboying in more conventional terms) outfit's delivery miles are by bike as opposed to by motor vehicle: Scores of motoring miles, and only perhaps 3 to 5 (if that) cycling miles!
Just like you didn't expect me to be impressed, I don't expect those in my Chainguard audience who cycled more than 4 or 5 miles before 7:30 on those same Sunday mornings (and who, as they did so, perhaps utilized, for example, a brighter headlight than my deliberately-marginal one because they don't have to venture up the driveways of sleeping customers - or who haven't used a kickstand since they were kids, let alone worried about things like keeping that kickstand well-oiled for _quiet_ deployment at the tops of the customers' driveways) to be impressed. But that's their loss.
If you want to start perhaps a _cacophony_ of responses to your question about whether you were required to use those bikelanes, try asking it at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CyclistsAgainstBikeLanes . The most-potentially-affecting-of-me place where the law-book-thumpers say that you have to use a bikelane if one exists, is New York. I often ignore that law when I visit Binghamton; just one of the things that those law-book-thumpers overlook is that snowbanks often force one to ignore it.
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