June 26, 2012
Ah, the wall is simply different...: Geneva - Lausanne
WELL, in the end, the wall was there, around the lake. Oh, it wasn't the wood and posts that my childhood imagination had insisted but it was just as real and even more irritating. For all day, just as happened when we rode beside the Great Lakes in the USA, we barely got a glimpse of the water. It was all hidden by posh people's houses, by people who had the money to enjoy the view and hide it from everyone else.
Just now and then there were short roads leading to the water's edge, largely because there was an opportunity to spend money there, but the only way to get along the lake was by the busy road set back a few hundred metres. There was a bike lane and the traffic was considerate but there is something disappointing, very disappointing, about knowing there's something beautiful just out of sight.
The people who planned the national bike route that comes this way had the same trouble. Every so often their arrows would send us left, off the road but into the hills, steep ones, only to descend a few kilometres later.
It was as though they felt they hadn't earned their money if they kept us just to the obvious route. In the end we learned to ignore the arrows that pointed inland and to follow just those which, later in the day, went off down towards the water.
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It was a pleasant ride but a disappointing one. It ended with further disappointment, too, because we deliberately stopped short of a full day's riding so that we could visit the Olympic museum at Lausanne. Our camp-ground was right beside the Olympic movement's surprisingly small headquarters. We knew the museum was further into the city but we didn't know until the last moment that it was closed, that some of the contents had been transferred to a paddle steamer moored beneath dark clouds.
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We looked around but it was just a cursory glance at what could have been fascinating. And it poured with rain. And we got soaked and we got overcharged for a pizza. But, as in the Olympics, some races are won but many more are lost.
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