Euro Day 49 - SOW Day 6

Sunday, 11 August 2019

After a hot day, last night was punctuated with loud cracks of thunder accompanied by the sound of pounding rain on the roof, so today was always going to be muddy!

When we arrived at the event we sat next to a small paddock with alpacas and horses. It was interesting to note that the horses were indifferent to the action that was going on around them, whereas the alpacas were beside themselves with curiosity - I don't think I saw any of them stop staring around them all day (they are in the distance to the right of Paul's knee).

and again later (below) - note they are still staring! BTW The person standing next to us is Eric. He and his family are making us look like holiday lightweights, as they've been travelling since January and won't be home until next January! Their next stop is Munich for a month, where they will take a break and their son will catch up on some school work.

Today the event centre was 1.5km walk from Gstaad, and as a special treat we got to take the chairlift up to our starts. Unfortunately we all had early starts so it was still raining intermittently and pretty foggy as we prepared to start and headed up the mountain.

The top of the chairlift

The foggy start

When it's raining my glasses get both foggy and rain covered, so I can see neither the terrain or the map. If I take off my glasses I can't read the map, but I discovered today that I still can at least follow a compass bearing which was helpful! It was still really difficult, and I had to go fairly slowly as a result (stopping frequently to clean my glasses, take a quick look at the map and continue), but overall I was pretty happy with getting around the course when I was legally blind for most of it. I managed to be 17th today and 13th overall which is ok given my various navigational blunders during the week.

Everyone else seemed to go well and we're all sorry to see what has been a super fun week come to a close.

After the event Paul and I decided to take the chairlift back up the hill past the start and hike a stage of Switzerland's Via Alpina trail, which traverses Switzerland from east to west and is 390km long. We did about 13 kilometres of it, up and over the Col De Jable (which is actually a language border, so if we had been able to, we would have switched our conversations from German to French).

Unfortunately we didn't see a scrap of view from much of the high portions of the trail as the cloud was so low. It's a shame as the mountains above us would have looked awesome. We heard a lot of cowbells, and walked past a lot of small farms with farmers tending their small herds of cows.

Going up

The Col de Jable

Going Down

We finally started to see a bit more as we descended towards the Cheese Cellar we stopped at on the rest day. This was also the end point of the stage and conveniently a short drive for Jon to come and pick us up.

Despite the lack of visibility it was a nice hike and I'm glad we got one last taste of Swiss terrain (hint - it's steep, and sounds like cowbells).

When we got home I could see that Jon had been busy..

While we were hiking he'd dealt with our extremely gross orienteering shoes, sorted the clean washing, and took the kids to the rubbish and recycling station. He's the best.