We left the hotel bright and early hoping to catch the ferry across the lake and save ourselves 15 kms on the bike as it was already a long ride at 74 kms. The woman in the ticket office wasn’t optimistic that the captain would allow 2 tandems on so we decided to just get on the bikes and ride. It was an easy 15 kms and we got there about the same time the ferry would have.
From there we rode along the lakeshore all the way to Locarno passing through the Italian – Swiss border with just a nod from a Swiss border guard.
We are in Svizzera
The scenery was stunning and an easy ride with rolling hills, no big climbs.
After Locarno we began our climb over the pass to Lugano. George had found a shortcut to save us 7 kms of ascent so we started up the small rural road. After about 1km it got seriously steep then after another 500m we were on cobblestone which wasn’t rideable, only walkable. At this point we discussed turning around and taking the regular route up but decided to keep going, how bad could it be? Very shortly after this decision the road quality worsened and then after that it began to pour. So now we were half way up a steep, wet, uneven cobblestone path in cycling cleats, pushing our tandem bikes fully loaded in heavy rainfall. We had no choice but to carry on. It took us more than an hour to get back to the road via the “short cut”. When we finally got to the road it was still pouring and we had 20 kms to go and possibly more climbing. We were soaked and chilled. We started down the road but before we had gone 5 kms Rob and Katharine got a flat tire! I was beginning to wondering if someone somewhere was testing us.
Anyway the tire got changed Presto and we were back on our way.
There wasn’t much more to climb and other than navigating a busy city during rush hour we didn’t have any more troubles except for being very wet and cold for the rest of the ride.
We clocked 93 kms and climbed 750 meters and rode for 8 hours. We definitely earned our supper.
Looking back along Lago Maggiore towards Stresa
Lakeside lunch stop in Locarno
The Short Cut before the rain
Not tan lines, but dirt lines
geeteetravels 
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