July 27, 2023
Evionnaz to Leysin
Tobias slept in his new, much bigger, sleeping bag last night and at some point at about 4am he realized that he'd lost his arm in the sleeve so woke up and spent ablut an hour awake and wriggling around. He then slept in till almost 9am but I was still feeling pretty grumpy.
He made friends with the Swiss kids next to us this morning and with some help from me asked to play petanque with them. Their collaborative version of petanque was running up the little hill then running back down giggling to pick up the balls then running back down again. He also showed them every of his little autos. It helped with packing the tent up.
On the road late we only made it to Saint-Maurice to get bread and lunch food. There were so many options for places to sit and eat it felt a bit odd. The whole town seemed to have more park benches than people.
We only had 12km or so to ride from there to Aigle and Tobias wasn't particularly tired so we took our time. The route was a pretty well signposted mostly separated cycle path and we came across plenty of friendly people. Closer to Aigle we still had plenty of time so we detoured past the UCI cycling centre and watched some bmx. Velodromes aren't so impressive from the outside.
We had time to buy our tickets for the cog train up to Aigle and locate the little train before Tobias woke up. Luckily we had plenty of time to load all our gear up into the carriage and no one else with a bike tried to join. It was a really scenic ride and we were grateful to skip the 850m climb to get up to Leysin. We were headed this way to stay with Geraldine, an old uni friend of James' Mum and her partner Michel. We've been meaning to come since we've been living in Europe but never made it, so it was great to finally incorporate it as part of this trip.
Geraldine came to meet us at the station which was lucky because the door of our carriage wouldn't open and we couldn't just walk through to the other one, so she went and got the driver to open it. We had plenty of help lowering our stuff out onto the platform. Geraldine pushed Tobias in his trailer and guided us to their house through the town. We felt immediately at home and enjoyed a beer with a fantastic view and then a home cooked meal. Geraldine and Michel have kids a similar age to us and it was really interesting hearing about life in Switzerland with a family from a Kiwi perspective.
Since we have been meaning to get here for so long we are going to stay a few days to catch up on some laundry and take a look around.
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Today's ride: 22 km (14 miles)
Total: 2,478 km (1,539 miles)
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