On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

After 6 weeks in Europe, a combination of some work and more vacation, there's a bit of culture shock coming back the the United States. Sprawl: flying into SFO, the sprawl across the East Bay was extensive. Residential development in Europe tends to be more clumped: areas of density immediately adjacent to rural. Suburbia is much, much less extensive. Being immersed in English: this feels wrong, sort of like cheating. I'm not complaining, though! tasteless food: I cooked some California brown rice and cooked it. The taste, or rather lack, was a bit of a shock. In Switzerland, all of the food I had was rich and flavorful, fresh and good. A lot of food in the US tastes empty and stale, produced for quantity rather than quality. California stops: after assembling the Ritchey Breakaway and riding to the train on Monday morning, after my return Sunday night, at the first intersection I hit where I had right of way and cross-traffic a stop sign, a driver did a California st...

Adding to my collection of profiles for climbs I've done, here's one for the Axalp climb, approximately 10 km west of Meiringen, Switzerland, on the south shore of Lake Brienzersee. First the profile. I used my Garmin Edge 500 for position and altitude. On the climb up, I lost GPS signal for a bit, which resulted in a data gap. Since I take the data straight from the FIT file, I rely on Garmin's distance determination, which would normally be good if my Powertap had been functioning, but the super-cheap alkaline LR44 batteries I got off Amazon don't last as long as silver oxide 357's with which the Powertap ships. As a result, I needed to rely on the Garmin's GPS distance determination, which doesn't interpolate across gaps, unlike Strava's distance determination. It was easy enough to convert latitude and longitudes into distance, but the Garmin's smarter than that: local variation in position turn straight paths into zig-zags, and the result...

There's a great rush of satisfaction in knowing you've gotten things right. Of course, we have infinite options, so the probability of picking the "optimal" is mathematically zero. If true optimization is the goal, we're doomed to failure. Some steadfastly hold themselves to this standard anyway, and indeed they meet with the failure which is mathematically certain. I'm not talking about this sort of pathological optimization, I'm talking more about when faced with a cloud of uncertainty, options taken did a pretty good job. I write this on a train from Bern to Basil, having started in Meiringen. In this case, the choice was fairly simple. I popped open my SBB.ch app, typed in "Meiringen" to "Basel SBB", and it gave me a bunch of options, all starting with a trip to Interlaken Ost, then transferring to one or two trains to Basel. All took around 2:36. Instead of buying my ticket with the app, as I would normally do, I got it a...

Here's some climbs I've done the past few weeks in Switzerland and France, having been in Basil in part for work. As I write this I'm on a bus from Bourg d'Oisans to Grenoble, having just climbed L'Alpe d'Huez and descended via Col Serenne. What an absolutely spectacular ride that was in many ways.... I'll report on that later. The climbs I report here are relatively modest, perhaps with the exception of Le Grand Ballon, although even that wasn't to the standard of either the climb or the descent I did today. Actually, I don't have GPS data for L'Alpe d'Huez because I took two minor wrong turns, both quickly corrected, the second and more major of which I could have avoided had I looked at the marks in the road instead of staring at the Garmin Edge 500 navigation screen, which unfortunately at the time was on a relatively zoomed-out state -- it tends to scroll between zoom levels. Dornach - Gempen The first climb of interest is the clim...

When Brian and Janet visited Cara and me in Basel, finishing off their extensive tandem tour of Europe, Brian told me he'd used Strava route finder as his primary source of routes. This had obviously worked well for him, and it motivated me to rely on it a bit more for my rides here. There's a variety of ways to make routes with Strava route finder. I'll go through some of the approaches I tried, and how they worked for me. Enter endpoints, blindly follow First was my ride to Gempen, which actually preceded Brian and Janet's visit. There I selected my starting point at the apartment, and the end point, the town of Gempen at the top of the hill. I'd expected to be routed up either of the two main Strava segments I'd seen which climb to Gempen, one from Munchen, the other from Dornach. But when I blindly followed the recommended route, I found myself doing a dirt climb, one which started as a well groomed "fire road", but which ended up on a st...

On Friday afternoon, I decided to try again for a paved climb up to Gempen. I wanted to climb the road I'd descended on Thursday, the one I'd seen so many riders climbing. My nominal goal was a Strava top 10. I thought this should be attainable from the VAMs I saw on the leaderboard if I was feeling good. I decided to head out along the Rhein, crossing the river near where I was staying to the northern shore (German-side, but not Germany here), then heading east, crossing again near where the Birs river feeds into the Rhein from the south. Then I'd head southward to Dornach and begin the climb from there. I once again used Strava route-find, this time putting constraint points at the base of the climb and at the river crossing where I planned to recross the Rhein southward. I was mostly able to follow the thus designed route, and it was again an okay route, but not as scenic as I'd hope. That bridge crossing wasn't great, with some slightly dicey navigation...

As I write this, I'm on a TGV waiting to leave the Paris Gare de Lyon station for Zurich. I get off in Basel. The total trip is little more than 3 hours. Really remarkable. It's considerably more distance than the train between Santa Barbara and "San Francisco" (really Emeryville), the Coastal Starlight which is a 1-a-day affair in each direction. Delays of several hours are common. The TGV, on the other hand, is of course precisly on time. Indeed the entire timing board in Gare de Lyon was "á l'heure". Prior to the weekend in Paris, I was in Basel last week. A search on Strava Segment Explorer turned up one obvious "local" source of climbs: the road to Gempen, a nearby hilltop town, small and rural, remarkably isolated from the Basel semi-sprawl. There's two main paved climbs from Basel to Gempen. The most heavily trafficked, by far, is the 2-lane road from Dornach to the west. Dornach is somewhat inland from the Rhein, and ...