I’m kinda going to talk about today in reverse order. We just had one of the more unique Airbnb experiences of our trips. Where we are staying tonight didn’t have many options. And so I had arranged for us to stay in a room, meaning we would be sharing the rest of the house with the owner. The listing specifically said we wouldn’t have access to their kitchen. Yesterday I received a message from the host indicating she and her family were on vacation, but instead of canceling our reservation, she was going to have her neighbor open the house for us when we arrived. When we arrived her neighbor met us and let us in the house, which is very large, very modern, and very nice, and we won’t be sharing it with the owners. The neighbor then showed us the food the owner had left for us, bread, cookies, fruit, eggs, jam, milk, cheese, spaghetti, spaghetti sauce, and pesto sauce. Thinking there may have been a miscommunication, as technically we didn’t have use of the kitchen, I texted the host prior to using any of it, to which she replied she hadn’t left us anything to eat. Awkward. Eventually we figured out that the neighbor, being kind, had gone shopping for us and stocked the kitchen. While I think we were eventually able to clear things up with our host, the language barrier probably left a few misunderstandings. We didn’t want to leave uneaten food in the house, as the host was on vacation, so we brought most of it back to the neighbor, profusely expressing our gratitude for her thoughtfulness. I really hope we communicated that part well.
Today’s ride seemed so much different than many of our rides in France. It just had so much variety. And with the variety came multiple steep climbs, at least one of which we had to get off and push our bike up. It is good we are hitting this part of the ride with two-week legs. Both of us have improved in pedaling strength over the last two weeks and it feels like we can go up steeper climbs than we could at the beginning of our ride. However, when our two-week legs were too weak, we got off and pushed.
The weather today was great (other than some light rain earlier in the day), but progress was slow. Partially due to the hills I just mentioned, and also partially due to the trail conditions. Much of today’s trails were comprised of crushed gravel. The more loosely it is packed, the slower we go.
We both slept well last night. However, in the middle of the night heard a cat scream. Immediately I thought of the window I had opened an hour or two earlier to try to get more airflow in the home and was sure the cat was actually in our Airbnb with us. After bumbling around the house a bit and finding our headlight, I searched the house for a cat that didn’t exist inside of our house. Gratefully, we were both able to get back to sleep after that. This is one of the few Airbnbs where we slept on the first floor, and we were awakened at about 5:30 in the morning with several men speaking loudly right outside of our window. They probably had no idea someone was trying to sleep behind where they were standing.
We were in Germany for the very beginning of today’s ride, but after not too long we crossed over into Switzerland. We will be in Switzerland until we fly home.
Tomorrow we have a relatively short ride, which is good, as it is supposed to start raining in the afternoon. And then we have a weekday off, which we plan to use to do some sightseeing around Bern.
