This Is Why We Bikepack (Cycling the Alps)
why do we do this why when presented with the opportunity to escape the stress of normal life our jobs our chores the cherished but constant work of being part of a community why do we choose to make things harder for ourselves beautiful views help but we could be relaxing on the beach we could be driving to most of these places but instead we've intentionally sought out a steep and difficult route strapped a bunch of camping gear and food to a home of Steel and rubber and spent days grinding uphill through heat waves and rain and there's nowhere we'd rather be why I mean the easy answer is the downhill unfortunately the nature of bike packing means that the time spent grinding uphill always outweighs those Blissful downhill flights usually by an order of magnitude so there must be more to it than that while we figure it out we are really going to enjoy that downhill we're working on our last big climb of the trip seems like we've been climbing for days but soon all that hard work is going to be rewarded and from what we can tell on the map we're going to be spending more time going downhill than uphill which I am grateful for what goes up must come down eventually right [Music] so we only have like 13 km until ponina which is where we are planning to sleep tomorrow so we've spent most of the afternoon here in this beautiful place having a nap and we're probably going to cook a little bit of dinner here boo I'm back how was your walk that was wonderful you ready for dinner [Music] [Music] well good morning we were not planning on rain but the weather does what it wants so we're hiding right now for a few more minutes hoping it [Music] stops Suns out guns out sorry for [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so we're heading down to a gondola Hut we're going to try and see if we can ride it but the question is we don't really have anywhere to store our bikes while we're on it so if they'll let us store our bikes then maybe we can ride this thing up the mountain we don't really know anything about this we don't know if you need reservations or what but we're going to go ask well we got our tickets and reca and our recola cuz we're in Switzerland apparently and even some nice Men Let Us stash our bikes in the basement in a locked room so we'll be gone for a couple of hours and we know that it's all safe so now we're on the thing chis it's ready Rec in my mouth your silly little hat my silly little hat my my camera on my neck let's go see some things back ler [Music] [Music] so at the at the ticket counter they said it should take about 2 and 1 half hours to walk down we didn't clarify how exactly to walk down we have our GPS we just don't see exactly the route from here I don't know if you can see this but right here there's this is a supposed to be a permanent snowfield they used to ski on it all summer long yeah but it's been melting so much lately that they have to cover it in the summer so that it's still there for the Winter Ski season I believe we go down there ready all right let's go starting to rain a little bit should be fine what come on in the water's fine it's frozen see you can ski all [Music] [Music] summer when we bought our tickets we asked if we needed any special equipment for the route down she said oh no you don't need any poles or axe we need CRS right I mean we're fine right now the snow is so soft we've spent a lot of time navigating in steep Snowy Mountains so we're pretty comfortable here but usually we find people air on the side of caution and fear Mong green when we ask these questions so we're honestly a little surprised by the terrain my turns were a little sloppy you're out of prac this you like my camera baby in just a few short months Hillary will give birth to a video [Music] [Music] we made it finally to the bottom and now it's time for some lunch yeah and then down the hill to our hotel don't walk into the electric P oh yeah the Ethereal glow is not just an illusion we actually are in heaven it's been a perfect day we went for a hike and we didn't even have to do the uphill and then we biked on like perfect flowy single track down a beautiful Valley Trail in the world this is amazing we're staying in the sport Hotel sport Hotel this is what 224 Swiss Franks gets you a budget Queen yeah this is this is the cheapest hotel room honestly it's pretty nice yeah and it comes with a great locked bike storage room and a bike wash and a spa oh and free laundry oh yeah free laundry now we're relaxing in our robes and watching YouTube yep good night good [Music] night w [Music] what's my morning oh yeah we that a little we just sitting on myone [Music] another floating upam living in my dreams so [Music] nice so we're cycling past Sil PLO Lake which is apparently where the philosopher friedrick n spent a lot of time and when he was sitting next to this Lake one day he came up with the idea of Eternal recurrence which is the idea that history repeats itself even down to the minute details including the life that you've lived so you're going to have to repeat your life over and over for Infinity that's a pretty waterfall oh look at these heavy truckers on I don't speak your language I it's exced about it though uhoh oh it's closed is what he was saying please use a detour showing okay okay okay detour okay I'm not going to be able to do that ah Jesus anyway nobody really knows if he actually believed this or if he just used it as a thought experiment to sort of assess your actions in your life to see if you are living your best life repeating this day over and over wouldn't be too bad yeah without a [Music] little without the sunshine the BL [Music] n house is that actually n's house it actually was n's house as we learned from this nice man who was also really excited to hear about our trip enjoy thank you he gave us a tip on where to get some lunch and wait out the rainstorm that had been building all afternoon to make a mess the top is really crispy and the middle is like pudding but good [Music] [Music] after all the hard work it took to get up into the elps it's a little bit Bittersweet to be leaving the higher elevations already the Silver Lining is that over the next 10 km or so it looks like there's a couple of really flowy hopefully fun sections of uh switchbacks on the way down so I'm looking forward to that [Music] we were just biking on this Trail and passed by this family that was bent over the ground collecting something and we asked them what it was and they said in Italian they said it was strawberries so now we're picking [Music] strawberries so we thought we had a plan we thought we were going to go down to this town and stay in a campground but it is a little bit less crowded here than we expected so now we're not sure we just got a bunch of water and we might end up finding a place to Wild camp but we'll see we'll keep you in the loop it's quite steep though well it got way too steep there's no camping to be had here also there's like some sort of blasting happening across the valley that we weren't sure if it was shooting so we're just going to probably go as sleep in a campground I got lost so we ended up in this Campground and it's not as much of a parking lot underneath a highway as most European campgrounds are but there does happen to be a shooting range like right across the valley seems unfortunate for us this is pretty nonstop it is I don't know if you can hear it she said it ends at 8 it stopped right on schedule at 8:00 which made our camp dinner of local sausage and pasta much more [Music] enjoyable with so many slug friends well we're getting ready to start the last full day of cycling on this Adventure we had planned the trip as a loop so we were planning to camp in one of the same campgrounds that we stayed in earlier in the trip but the weather forecast has been kind of variable and so we started looking for other options and one of the things that we've always wanted to try out is staying in an Agri Turismo which is basically like an Italian Farm stay and we noticed that there was one on the route that was a good price and was available so we're excited to see what that's like but first we have a few kilometers of downhill [Music] now a castle yep that is that is a castle The Palazo Castle mure was built in 1723 and renovated in the 1850s when it was bought by the son of a Marse pastry shop owner after becoming a wealthy man and gaining the title of Baron he returned to his mother's ancestral Village and restored the castle we heard some version of the story a few times in our journey down the valley local families moved away to seek their Fortunes in major European cities afterwards returning to invest in their local community unfortunately the Castle's main floors weren't open for exploring today but the basement was this is clearly an ex excellent party location the base of a castle but they also have bathrooms just like normal looking bathrooms it feels kind of like being in the subway [Music] [Music] we're stopping for a quick lunch because we found this cute little cafe and we just couldn't not but first an apagado dessert first kind of day why not celebrating our last full day of cycling It's Too Short The Kitchen was closed so it's just cake and ice cream for us today he said dessert first it's also dessert second kind of day what is it Chestnut cake never had Chestnut cake it's good it's sweet it's very moist [Music] [Music] [Music] grass biking [Music] oh [Music] God as we got further and further down the valley things had been feeling more Italian that is except the prices finally we arrived back at the Italian border where everything cost about a third as much as in Switzerland oh that's a thing well preserved example of a community wine press hey Chris where are we we are in a community wine press a system big enough to press the whole Region's wine wow it's just a whole tree this platform is where you put all your grapes that will eventually be squeezed into grape juice that will drain into this uh Reservoir the squeezing is done by raising and then lowering this giant screw that actually lifts an entire tree so that it can be lowered onto the grapes we stopped in this little bar which the bars are the things that are open around lunchtime and the guy said he could make us a sandwich and it was the best sandwich that we've had real sandwich it's real delicious we're Americans and we really like like mayonnaise or some sort of sauce and that doesn't you don't usually get that on a sandwich in Italy wow it had lettuce and tomato and brola which is this dried beef that they have around here and mozzarella and this like dark bread that was so good and I could have eaten like four of them and then not moved all day but now we're going to go see an old church the oldest in this Valley it's from the 11th century so there it is [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] woo I love [Music] it oh I don't know but I want to live here [Music] we're almost at our hotel for the night the farm stay and the landscape is definitely taking a turn from Alpine pasture land to wide open corn fields in Hay it pooped out a hay bale it was very full but the mountains are still really pretty I'm excited to get ever sing tonight so I'm excited to see what this is going to be like well it's a beautiful place it's a little awkward yeah mostly because we don't really know how this whole this works I'm Hillary Turismo yeah okay yeah we haveing yes yes see okay see we arrived they were great they gave us some water um they told us we were crazy and then you know eventually we were like maybe we could get into a room see where to put our stuff they're like okay and then they showed us the room here's our room welcome bed feels fine it's nice it's clean little bathroom and the best part even though there's no air conditioning there are two fans which is something we haven't had yeah this is the first time in Italy that anyone has provided us with fans yeah so I think we're going to be fine points for that yeah but we're going to have dinner here tonight so we'll see how it goes Al I have this like I don't know what it is I think I might be reacting to my sunscreen and it's very it burns I think we need a shower yeah we're getting we're getting a little ragged at the end of our trip Cheers Cheers very happy we stayed here hey yes working out there are a lot of kids running around and a dog it's just nice feels like being in a home I like it calling an Agri Turismo a farm Stay doesn't tell the whole story after World War II family run Farms were on hard times and farmers were moving to the cities to make ends meet this meant Italy was losing large amounts of Farmland to development threatening both its food supply as well as its world famous food traditions in 1985 the government passed a law that provided financial support for working Farms that hosted Travelers because of the support AG trees me are strictly regulated and in general a certain percentage of the food has to come from the property or from nearby it's very cheesy very cheesy she's made here by Bruno Bruno Bruno rink a little bit of [Music] mine and champagne and champagne this is more than we normally drink [Music] [Music] the next morning we cycled a few short kilometers down Valley to the train station where we boarded a train to Milan to catch our flight home the following day I know that this video made our trip in the Alp seam ad dilic and honestly we loved this section but we've been processing it since we left trying to understand why we didn't end up with the same sense of nostalgia as our previous Adventures it's given us a lot more time to talk about why we like traveling by bike and no it's not just the downhill there's a sense of adventure that we didn't feel on these well-groomed trails and in these perfect little towns we also realized that a pre-planned route removes some sense of discovery that we enjoy plus it was a little lonely we love meeting people but we rarely found anyone interested in Sharing stories probably because we were just two of hundreds of other tourists they saw that day don't get us wrong this is a trip that we will remember for a lifetime but we know our future trips will be different and it's not to know that about ourselves we're looking forward to the next one and we hope you'll join us
2024-12-09 03:43
