Swiss roll - day 5

Andermatt to Göscheneralp to Newbury

Our final day of the tour dawned brightest and once more called for an improvised route plan.  We settled on third exit off the roundabout, which happily was negotiated with handlebars firmly in place.

At Göschenen we turned west and began ascending to Göscheneralp, the top of which is marked by a reservoir that sits in a spectacular landscape.  On such a beautiful day, the 9.9 kms up 679 metres of climbing was a great finale to our week.  The road was relatively free of traffic (though nothing compares to the diminished traffic flows that an avalanche can cause) and the steady pace that such a gentle gradient allows saw us arrive at the reservoir comparatively fresh and able to soak in the scenery.  Warmed by the sun, we paused to recover and decided that ice cream and coffee would be required to fuel our descent.

The Berggasthaus Dammagletscher has an extensive balcony that surrounds two sides of the building and, on a day such as today, provided a picture-perfect setting in which to spend a relaxing half-hour.  Our waitress’s mastery of English matched our proven excellence in German, and we established that it is entirely possible to place an order for food and drink with neither party fully understanding the other.  When it arrived, it was self-evident that our respective language skills left a great deal to the imagination.  It transpired that our delightful host had imagined we wanted something completely different to that which we thought we’d ordered.

Whilst eating someone else’s ice cream and drinking another person’s coffee we discussed plans for our return to the apartment.  I confess to egregiously lying to Philip about the ascent to the hotel to convince him it was an easy ride which he should undertake.  He’d planned on luxuriating in the back of the van for the final part of the ride and I was having none of it.  The small (and it was really short) part of the climb that rose at 12 – 14% was flattened to 7% in my telling of the route and the Pipster allowed himself to be conned.  With Philip on his bike, the girls were left to retrieve the van alone, which they had left in the mountain top car park.  Without a man to assist them, Lord T was concerned about their ability to raise the barrier at the exit.
  ‘But how are you going to get out?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ll pay,’ answered Caroline.

  ‘But where?’ he persisted.

  ‘At the ticket machine,’ said Sarah.

  ‘You can do that?’ said Lord T, with not a hint of condescension.

  ‘Honestly,’ said Sarah, ‘being with you is like being in an episode of Mork and Mindy.’

She had a point.

Unusually for the Swiss, the Fangfluh road surface wasn’t terribly smooth, which was a shame because the descent has brilliant sight lines and a constant gradient that should have allowed for rapid descending, but which constrained us to not much above 60 kph.  Nevertheless, it was an exhilarating finale, save for the final climb back to the Andermatt Reuss, which may have engendered a mild complaint from the Pipster regarding the veracity of my claims.  Once back, we finished the last of our food supplies and returned our bikes to Oliver, who demonstrated considerably more proficiency in changing bike saddles than we’d witnessed earlier in the week and managed to replace them without inverting the bikes.

We weren’t done with our attempts at ‘engineering’, however, as we still had the ever-reliable Mercedes van to take us back to Zürich airport.  Throughout the week the van had been configured to allow us to sit with ample leg room, whilst allowing enough space for mine and Philip’s bikes when we decided to wimp out.  For our final journey though, we needed to accommodate all our luggage, which meant sliding two rows of seats forward.

It is possible for one woman (Sarah) to easily slide the back row of seats forward to provide enough space for six suitcases and cyclists’ day bags to be stored.  It is equally impossible for three men (Rob, Philip and I) to move the middle row of seats forward to allow adequate leg room for the smallest rider on the tour.  Fifteen minutes of effort saw us completely remove the single split seat from the middle row and slide the double seat forward.  Regrettably, a further fifteen minutes passed with us trying to restore the lone seat to its runners, which we eventually managed, but only after sliding the double seats back to their original position which afforded me zero leg room in the back row.  By this time, Lord T’s legendary patience was exhausted (in reality it was exhausted considerably earlier than the thirty minutes of seat wrangling would suggest, but we weren’t going to let that bother us), so we abandoned our efforts lest we miss our flight.  It made for an uncomfortable journey back to the airport for me, stretched out as I was across the seats, but the view of Lake Lucerne, which had sprung to life with weekend windsurfers, yachties, jet- and water-skiers, compensated for the discomfort.

At the airport, much to Lord T’s distress, we found the hottest, least air-conditioned spot to sit for a final meal together, drawn by posters for a cheeseburger meal-deal.  At just CHF 26 (GBP 21) it was neither a deal, nor a meal, as we discovered that drinks and fries were not included.  I’d have cut mine in half to make it last longer, but regrettably, there was little benefit to be gained from reducing something so small to a lesser example of itself.

Our return flight was as equally uneventful as the flight out.  The plane left on time, duly arrived, and the ground crew delivered our bags to the designated carousel in a timely fashion.  The hordes of non-EU chattering tourists, who might otherwise have got in our way at the baggage claim, were detained by immigration officials who are, no doubt, relishing the prospect of massive overtime payments in a post-Brexit Europe as they’ll have to process the multitudes of purple passport carriers that will pass through their customs hall.

We said our goodbyes as we prepared to go our separate ways; me to the leafy confines of Newbury; Paul and Rob to their respective Towers in Teddington and the Pipster, Sarah and Caroline to the flatlands of Cambridgeshire, where I promise you Philip, you won’t find a hill over 7%.