Bicycle Trip: The Rhine River Tujetsch, Switzerland to Amsterdam: DAY 7: Eglisau, Switzerland

Having stayed in our campground for a couple of days, it was actually sad to leave, because we had met several wonderful people in the camping area. As I mentioned earlier, tent camping here is very different. You don’t get a particular site assignment. There is just a general area where everyone pitches their tents and shares amenities (charging stations, water pump, picnic tables, etc.). As a result, it is more social and we find ourselves engaging with the neighbors (despite the language differences) more than we ever have in the U.S.

We had one neighbor woman who was completely obsessed with our bike. She insisted on letting Mark take her on a trial run in the morning before we set off. It was hysterical watching her ride up the hill singing Queen’s “I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike” in English at the top of her lungs.

Today was a lot of ups and downs… both literally and figuratively. We went through lots of very hilly farm land and wooded trails. We encountered two detours that required us to do a lot of extra uphill pedaling. Along the way I stopped to admire gardens of wildflowers and cows engaged in mysterious business (see video below). After a lot of hills, we made it to Rheinfall (Rhine Falls), where there is a pretty spectacular waterfall.

For any of you that are still following us, the rest of this post will be bittersweet. It appears that today may well be the last day of our bicycle adventure, even though we only finished 1/4 of our planned ride.

We had an equipment failure on a piece of our setup that is pretty critical to move our gear around. Our tandem, created by Bike Friday (Ours is actually the Tandem TwosDay) is designed to fold and disassemble in order to fit into two rolling Samsonite suitcases that have been specially designed for this purpose. The bike traveled with us to Amsterdam in the suitcases and we carried our gear in backpack duffle bags. Once we were at our starting point, Mark built the bike, the duffle bags went into the suitcases, and the suitcases are attached to a frame with wheels to become the trailer. Perfect set-up, right…..?

Well, from the day the bike and trailer arrived back in the Spring, Mark has been concerned that the quality of the trailer did not match the quality of the bike. Even back in the summer when we were doing test rides, Mark had made modifications to the trailer hitch system as the tubing was starting to separate. You might remember that Mark was seeking duct tape on Day 4 to address this problem. Well, the duct tape solution survived, but the trailer frame didn’t. The metal axle sheared on a tight downhill curve, causing us to loose a wheel in a cornfield (in Teufen, Switzerland), and drag our suitcases along the ground, creating even more damage, before we could stop on the hill.

Friendly and concerned locals helped us get to a boat dock at the bottom of the hill where we could catch a small ferry to the town of Eglisau which has a train station. Luckily the Swiss train system is phenomenal, and we will be able to get anywhere we want, once we decide what to do. We still have over 3 weeks here, but now we are saddled with two heavy suitcases that no longer can be a trailer. So continuing with the current plan is not really possible.

On the bright side:

1. We had a awesome ride.
2. We are still in Europe and there are plenty of things we haven’t yet seen.
3. We are not discouraged and we will come back and finish this route someday.
4. We had already decided that the trailer was too heavy for any trip that had any significant hills and we were discussing ideas on doing “loops” in the future instead of starting and finishing in different cities so that we could leave the suitcases somewhere (a willing hotel or airBnB) and utilizing more pannier bags and racks to move our stuff (and further reduce unnecessary gear).

Thank you for following us on this abbreviated trip. We’ll update to let you know what we ended up doing.