Day 4

We decided to ride to shorter loop from Flims to Tiefencastel, then up and over the Lenzerheide Pass down to Chur and back up to Flims. The estimated length was 57 miles or about 4 hours. The reasons for picking the shorter loop was due to Squirrel messing around with his gears and the front break cable until 1AM the night before! ..and because Garbanzo had lower back problems (yeah right!)

So Squirrel and I took off around 11:45. The decent from Flims was a really nice reward for yesterday's climbing. Once we reached the valley we had a few rollers of about 11 miles with a constant uphill slope. At about the 2o mile mark is when wwe started climbing for the first time. About 5 miles averaging about 4% with the first 2 miles of average 6% and 13% max. At the end of the 5 miles we crossed the old Solis bridge over the huge gorge. While we were talking pictures Squirrel fell in love with the Italian Chick! Not because she was riding this very nice De Rosa bike, because of her white shorts!!!

It was a challenge to get him to get focused on the next stretch of road, which kicked up for 1.2 miles at an average of 8.2% and max of 13.5%. He had a short dip and then the real climb up to Lenzerheide started. Total climb was 8.4 miles avg grade of 5% with max 14.9%. The first 4.2 miles however were the though ones, avg at 8.2%. Once at the top we put arm warmers and vest on for the decent. Sure enough, .5 mile into it, it started raining, so we had to take it a bit slower than anticipated, but also because of the slow moving cars. After 9 miles we reached the valley below and luckily the rain stopped, to make it nice and humid for our climb back up to Flims!

Once we got back to the trailer we had 59 miles in 3:43, total climbing 6591ft. In the mean time, Garbanzo, "the-stay-at-home-mom" had made our beds, cleaned the trailer, did the laundry and had gone shopping for dinner. Today's menu included tomatoes with mozzarella, pork steak, pasta, green beans and read wine! Since Garbanzo and I did the cooking, Squirrel had to do the dishes!!!