Day 45 - Lausanne, Switzerland -> Geneva, Switzerland

Sat, July 27

43.5 Miles (1483.1 total)

Made it to Geneva! It was a nice day of riding, pretty easy. One cool thing though - we stopped by a fountain to fill up, and it happened to be across from the house Ian Fleming (creator of James Bond) lived in 1930! Apparently, he spent some time in the town of Coppet, and his book Goldfinger has some scenes there!

After getting to Geneva, we stopped at a bike shop, hoping they would have two boxes for us to take so we could break down the bikes to fly home. Luckily, they did! Then we took the boxes onto a tram and went to the hotel we will be staying at on Monday and Tuesday, and they said we could store the boxes there until we got there in a two days. It was nice to get that stuff taken care of so we don't have to worry about it. Last thing we'll have to do is schedule a taxi/van for Wednesday morning to transport the boxes to the airport.

After that, we met our host, Sarah, and her boyfriend. We got to talk with them a little before they had to leave for dinner with her parents. They're getting ready for a year-long bike trip, and they leave in four days! But as usual, Sarah is super cool and trusting, letting us stay in her apartment while she and her boyfriend will be out most of tonight and tomorrow.

This has been an awesome trip. It will go down in history as the trip with no rain and the steepest slopes. This trip was the first time we ever did a hill with a 20% grade or higher, and it happened multiple times. Painful. But it's also been the most scenic and beautiful trip we've ever done. I'm going to think back to the water here and think, it couldn't have been that blue, could it? Does it actually look like the pictures I took? And it 100% does. And the backdrop of the mountains is just incredible. We also had no big bike issues! No flats, didn't run out of bolts. Just the two things I ran into (bad fly wheel, broken shifter cable), and they were fixed the same day. But it's nice to be done, be off the bike seat, let the muscles recover, and take it easy.

Dipping the tire in Lake Geneva at the end!