All the way up
For me this was the first major milestone of our tour. Getting over the alps. The night before after talking to another bike packer we realised that we had 2 options to get over the alps, the Splügen pass and the San Bernardino pass. The route on both seemed quite similar and it seemed going over Splügen pass would make it easier for us to pass the city of Milano which we definitely wanted to avoid. In the end after some research however we stuck to our initial plan going over San Bernadino. The road condition were described as superb and and the main traffic is routed through a tunnel, meaning only very little traffic on our route. So safety first and it in the end we never regretted that we went this way.
To get to the pass to our route took us on a small road through some more small villages away from the main road, unfortunately with some climbing as well, which meant we did the first 150m of climbing just to go them down again before the actual pass started.
As expected on the pass there was barely any traffic and the road winded itself up the mountains in the beginning on some serpentines. Anja again went ahead and this time she also had the time to take a really cool picture of me.
After 90 minutes and 670m climbing we made it to the top. The last kilometers the terrain got really rough and there was still some snow next to the road. The road was actually opened to traffic after winter closure just one week before we got there. As we arrived in such situations I get quite excited running around proud as hell, taking as many pictures and selfies as I can, while Anja just made sure Anouk is doing fine. Unless the rest of the stage up there it was quite cloudy so after some pictures we made sure we had our warm gear on an started our descent. More then 30kms downhill. Oh yeah!!!
On the way down again the wind picked up and we had strong headwind. Unfortunately this time it was there to stay. But since we were going down and it became warmer every minute it we just enjoyed it.
In the end the stage became quite long since the first campground squeezed in between train tracks and highway did not appeal to us, so we went on. But in the end we found another one which was really nice and we could set up our tent for the first time on our trip.
