roland is at the moment in germany for work and came by yesterday for a ride at my area! yesterday we did a real nice ride: took the cablecar for some uphill, did a downhill of about 600 meters, riding and hiking up back agein (i was really impressed by his uphill riding skills!!). and from the top we did the 1300 meters downhill! it’s one of the trails here with the best view…but we had fog all day long. also today (he stayed at our place for the night), we did an uphill by buss, a other small one by the muni some up and down and an other 1200 meters downhill (roland had to catch the train at noon). two locals enjoined us on this ride.
it was a lot of fun, and also some nice riding (but maybey for that roland can say something)
What a paradise of muni. You can take a gondola up, ride around bit on incredible mountain trails, grap a cup of hot coffee at a mountain top chalet, then bomb all the way down the hill at high speeds despite the deadly drop-off to the left (if you’re Turtle).
I think the fog cut down on the incredible views a bit, but that just made the ones we did get even better. Plus, riding through the clouds in the mountains has its own charm.
I would put our first-day ride in the ‘personal epic’ category. I think we were out for about 5hrs, usually riding up or down. Great fun. At one point we were both huffing salt out of a salt shaker at a restaurant to avoid cramping up (seemed to work). By the final down hill I was happy to just stay up on one wheel while Turtle was flying down at high speeds. Good practice for me in technical downhill with a brake.
After a lovely night of playing with the Marcus and Alex’s kids and eating fondue we headed out the next morning with two other local riders Sarah and Andy.
We rode through a few small villages in Lichtenstein, complete with clanging cow-bells, tunnels through the mountain, and sunbeams through the foggy forest. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyCsfrnFmuY
I got to admire the V’frames but unfortunately we didn’t get a chance to re-size them so I could take a spin. We rushed to the station after the morning ride and Turtle somehow managed to delay the Swiss train (you know how they like to be on time) long enough for me to get a ticket and jump on. It was like one of those scenes out of the old movies where I was trying to say good by and thank you and how much I want to come back and ride more as the train was starting to chug along and Turtle was waving good bye. But his mountain riding will continue, and he will continue to taunt us with his incredible ‘pictures from my latest ride’, and probably draw more visitors up this train line into the mountains of Lichtenstein.
