July

This month has been rather busy again. We finally dusted off the motorbikes for our first tour of the season. We did a fantastic day trip going over the Schallenberg (a small pass that is a favourite amongst those on motorbikes and crazy cyclists) Then along the north side of Lake Thun. It was unusual to be riding to up on Duncan's motorbike but we wanted to see how Michelle's knee would hold up.  The weather has been very mixed so we took the opportunity on the 15th to go up the Rothorn Mountain. The views from up there were fantastic you could see from the Emmental to the mountains , looking down on lake Brienz and Interlaken.  There was a sky show on in Interlaken so we where able to look down on the plane acrobatics. On the Sunday we did another short tour over the Moosegg on two bikes. The middle of July is Duncan's Birthday, we celebrated with a nice dinner. Michelle managed to surprise him with a voucher to hire a Goldwing for a weekend. It is the Motorbike Duncan has always dreamed of.  The last weekend saw us off on a 2 day Motorbike tour. On the Saturday we did from Thun along the North side of the lake, up through the Justiztal down to Interlaken over the Brunig pass, the Panoramastrasse with lots of hair pin turns then through the Emmental for a late but well earned lunch. Poor Duncan had to work quite hard on the hairpins whilst Michelle enjoyed the very comfortable armchair they call the passenger seat.  It is certainly a different sort of Motor biking. It is a sofa on wheels with a great sound system The evening Duncan studied the Manual that came with the bike, or should we say encyclopaedia. Sunday morning saw him installing the MP3 player. Then we headed of in a different direction, towards the Jura this time on two bikes. There are some great tours in this region, but we don't go there much we're not really sure why maybe because it is French speaking. We headed off with cloudy skies, but it never actually rained, it just threatened to. We started the tour near Solothurn going over the Weissstein, this is a lovely curvy mountain. The road keeps on crossing under the chair lift that goes to the top. Then we headed of to Moutier then down to lake Biel, because the weather further west looked dodgy. The we cut cross country through the Seeland area, a surprisingly flat part of Switzerland. We went over the Leug in the Emmental before returning the bike to Thun. It was sad that the weekend was over but it was a fun 482 kms. If you add the trip to and from Thun on our own bikes then we did over 550km in two days. Duncan said the seat on the Gold wing is much more comfortable than on his bike, and that it didn't really feel like we had travelled this far.  Disaster stuck at the end of the month, we wanted to update the webpage and discovered the hard disk with all our digital photos had broken. It took Duncan several days of hard work to restore all the data. Thank goodness he knows about such things. Michelle was back at the Orthopaedic surgeon for the next check up, he is very pleased with her progress with her knee. She is now cycling for 1 hour at a time and is in the weight room twice a week, she also has to do lots of balance exercises, all good practice for skiing. There was bad news on the hip pain though, she has torn the edge of the hip socket, so will need surgery to fix it. She is now waiting for an appointment with a specialist. Looks like with the time scales here that it probably wont happen until after the ski season.

Powered by Qumana