Alps 2024 — Day 2: Singen, Germany to Buchs, Switzerland

This morning we woke up pretty late because we’d had such a long day yesterday. We had several things to do in the AM before we could head out, including coffee and breakfast, a bit of shopping, (medical tape, more ibuprofen) and Harald had to replace his tire with the new one he bought last night. The new tire isn’t a folding tire so it can only be transported with us if we put it on the wheel.

The tire was a bear to install, and we actually broke both of our tire levers doing so. So add one more stop on our way out of town: new tire levers!

Today I’d ride with my sprained finger sistered to my little finger. It worked well and for the most part I couldn’t tell. #couldbeworse

Of course, I put the tape on before my riding gloves and… Duh… there’s a hole for each finger so I couldn’t get the gloves on! So I had to rewrap the fingers after this picture was taken.

Finally we were ready to roll at around 10:30, which was a pretty late start. It looked to be a beautiful day though.

First stop was the Swiss/German border which was pretty anticlimactic. No signs or anything. Certainly no “Welcome to Switzerland Enjoy Your Stay” and Harald joked that it’s intentional on their part. Could be, though mostly Swiss people seemed nice enough!

Next we’d cross the Rhine at Stein am Rhein. It felt like a classic tourist city center with lots of shops and a pedestrian area that we walked our bikes through.

Up until this point today, the riding had been pretty flat, but soon we started our first big climb of the day, taking our leave (for now) from the Rhine river.

Once up, we almost immediately dropped into a series of hilltop towns that we hopped between for a few hours until lunchtime. We had a bit of a tailwind, but it was also getting fairly warm. One thing we appreciated all day in Switzerland is that most towns had free water spigots so we were able to stay hydrated better in the heat.

Eventually it was time for lunch, which we sourced from a small local Spar grocery store. Breads, vegan yogurts, espresso and other goodies.

After lunch we started climbing again, slowly heading towards the High Alps. Up until now we’d been in lower foothills (that would all seem high in Wisconsin!) but now we were catching glimpses of big tall mountains.

Eventually we came up over our last pass of the day and were rewarded with a fun, curvy descent back down to the Rhine that took about 15 minutes with some sections of gravel. I spent a lot of time on my brakes today!

Once down, we had about 25km to ride along the Rhine. We popped over  into Austria to distance ourselves from the Swiss Autobahn, and quickly made it to our destination city of Buchs, Switzerland (recrossing the Rhine) just as the rain began to fall… Nonetheless, we had to put on raincoats to avoid arriving soaked.

In Buchs we had arranged a hotel that was 100% automated checkin, so there was nobody to tell us we couldn’t bring the bikes into the room..so that’s just what we did!

We were hungry and anxious to hit a grocery store for calories, but they all closed at 7pm and we’d just missed that. So we had to settle for convenience store food and I had a McDonald’s curry veggie burger which was pretty good.

Overall it was a nice day without mishaps; a bit shorter at 78 miles but still challenging with beautiful scenery!