🇮🇹🚴⛰️Simplon Pass⛰️🚴‍♀️🇨🇭

A tough ride over Simplon Pass into Switzerland through rain, cold, and noisy traffic led us to a perfect evening at our Warmshower home. Brian and Marij with their children Leann (14) and Steven (12) are a truly multi-international family. The Marji is from Belgium and only speaks Flemish to the kids, Brian is from Connecticut and speaks English with them, and in school they learn in German. The kids have 3 passports (Belgium, USA, and Switzerland), and they think they have been to almost 20 different countries so far. We share a rice, carrot, and chicken dinner with apricot sauce for dinner. After dinner we ate apple cake and Lisa and I taught them the card game “dimes.” A truely delightful evening! Simplon Pass was about 18 miles of climbing with tunnels and quite heavy traffic. We started the day about 8:00am to hopefully beat the traffic, but it didn’t really work. One savior was there was a lot of construction which led to large waves of traffic which we would pull over and let pass us, and another good thing was no trucks on Sundays! The rain and cold got worse at the top and we stopped for a warm snack at a restaurant near the top. We also put on dry clothes and almost every piece of warm cycling clothes we had for the descent. The descent was cold! For the first 4 miles we were shivering 🥶 so badly our bikes were shaking under us. Once we got into the valley of Switzerland 🇨🇭 it was a bit warmer and we found a place near the city center to reward ourselves with a large plate of fries. 😀Read more