Day 19

Sleeping location: B&B Hotel Milano
Distance (km today/total): 175 / 2107
Estimated climb (m today/total): 1100 / 13200
Temperature swing during the day: 25 degrees
Day in three words: Locarno isn’t Lugano

The day started with me all cosy in the marquee, and getting up and putting on my still wet cycling gear was not fun. Made good time early on through some beautiful scenery, down a river valley with huge cliffs either side and dozens of waterfalls after yesterday’s rain. Lots of pretty towns too, and I saw some ibex hanging out in a field. This was probably my favourite bit of Switzerland.  By 9am it was clear that Switzerland had pulled an Alsace and followed torrential rain with a scorcher the next day.

The day’s defining mishap happened mid morning. I had heard of Locarno and Lugano, but just assumed they were the same place as they have such similar names*. I knew I needed to go to “that place”, so when I saw bike route signs for Locarno I deviated from the major route and went that way.  Turns out I actually needed to go to Lugano. 15km later I realised my mistake and planned a new route to Lugano on google maps. My second piece of ineptitude was not remembering that google maps’ grasp of what constitutes a “cycling route” is not the same as anyone who has ever ridden a bike. This committed me to horrendous stony path with a constant gradient of between 15% and maybe 40%, which was mostly impossible to cycle and meant pushing my 35kg bike up for well over a kilometre in the hot hot sun. The whole screwup probably cost me about two hours and several litres of sweat.

After this I had to get a hustle on to make Milan by nightfall, which wasn’t fun in the heat. I got a couple of dips in but, this being Switzerland, most of the lakes had been entirely privatised and there were hardly any public places to swim. The last 15km of Switzerland and first 40km of Italy was total crap, busy roads and endless built up areas. Initial impressions of Italy is that the driving and the roads are terrible, but nobody cares so you can basically do what you want.

Got to the hotel (treating myself after the last couple of days) about 9pm and immediately got all of my possessions out for drying. There is a tent on half of my bed and it will probably stay that way overnight. Went to a pizza place because I hadn’t eaten much today because of the heat - the “large” was indeed large but didn’t even touch the sides so I had to order another one. The potentially poor driving/roads may well be offset by the excellence of the carbs here.

*This isn’t quite as stupid as it sounds, lots of Swiss places have multiple names because of the multiple languages, eg Basel/Bale and Lucerne/Luzern

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