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Douglas Brown's Travels
Day 28 The previous night while eating dinner we could see lightning striking the mountains in the distance. Within half an hour the wind had come up and ten minutes later heavy rain began to fall. The rain, lightning and thunder persisted all through the night and we awoke to a very wet and cold morning. I ride leader decided to change routes for the day, missing the passes he knew would be blanketed with cloud. This still meant that we had a ride of 321km in rainy conditions. I once again volunteered to go tail end charlie. However, this was not a wise choice as our unskilled American was to join us for todays ride. At 8:30am with full wet weathers on we set off North to Warth then through Hochtannbergpass, 1676 meters. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hochtan nberg_Pass# Our American friend had improved his riding. However, he and I were soon far behind the rest of the group, with the rain making him even more cautious. From Hochtannberg Pass we headed West through Furkajoch Pass, 1761 meters. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furkajo ch Continuing West we crossed the birder into the principality of Liechtenstein. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liechte nstein Liechtenstein has the highest GDP the world and is the second richest country in the world behind Quatar. However, blink and you miss it as it only took us 35 minutes to cross it. From Lichtenstein we deviated from our planned route missing the high passes which most certainly would be cloud bound. We travelled along the valley to Andermat. Passing farming villages along the way. Once we left the valley we climbed to Furka Pass, 2429 meters. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furka_P ass The last 20 minutes of the climb to the summit was in cloud with visibility reduced to approx 10 meters and just as we turned the last turn to the summit we burst into cloudless sunlight. It was cold at the summit with patches of snow packed on the ground. A good opportunity for me to do a snow angel. We spent some time taking photos of the view down into the valley and the surrounding mountain peaks,before descending into the valley. Our very slow American was getting tired and once again riding deadly slow around the switchbacks. He then resumed the feet off the pegs technique. We were now lagging far behind the rest of the group. Our final pass for the day was Grimsel Pass, 2164 meters. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimsel _Pass This pass had an incredible number of cyclists on it who we seemed to come across at the most inopportune moments. It was an agonisingly slow decent following my American buddy and I was glad to get back on the flat land. From here we took the motorway to our destination at Interlaken. We had a short walk of 100 meters to a resturant for our dinner.
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