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5.00 am… No one could sleep. Or at least no more than half an hour in one go. I wonder if that was because everyone wanted to get on the road or just because the train trip was so bad. The train was speeding the whole night and stopping at stations. Every time you had the feeling you will fall off. When in motion it was no better.
We stepped out and refreshed ourselves…then waited for the next two hours to pass. We got off at every stop to try and have a smoke. At first when we asked the conductor how long the stop at the station will last he replied 3 minutes. We quickly jumped off for a cigarette but were immediately waved back by an other conductor. We wanted to argue but he enlightened us that the train is three minutes late so they have to catch up. Well, for us folks from Hungary we just stared at him wondering since when do three minutes qualify for a delay…
We then had the breakfast they served and were staring out the window taking in the beautiful scenery that passed by. We slowly slid into our gear and were all wondering if it would have been better to make these 731 km on the bikes?
When the train stopped we quickly got off an headed for the bikes just to receive some bad news: we’ll have to walk all along the station to the other side as they will pull the waggons there so we can disembark the bikes and cars. We walked and then waited until the train arrives and we could get our bikes off. We packed our stuff and agreed to look for some place where we can have a normal breakfast and coffee. Our destination for the day was Lausanne but as it was only 7.30 am we decided to check the Jungfrau and  go through the Furkapass. 
We were tricked unfortunately by the GPS devices – or shall I say by the fact that we trusted them blindly. As we did not want to take the highway we set the GPS to avoid all highways, toll roads and Autobahns. that proved to be a mistake as only avoiding the toll roads would have been sufficient. But one learns until they’re dead… With this mistake we managed to cross Switzerland on small roads. 

The road wasn’t bad but we were still missing those fearful bends. We stopped to eat at a place called Sattelegg near the road and had breakfast (N47 07.648, E8 50.800). That was the highlight of the day. We ordered some ham and eggs and while waiting to get served they brought us some bagels, bread, croissants, various cold meat, jam, butter, and tea / coffee. All that for 12 CHF / person. Having admitted failure we agreed to head straight to Lausanne. We went through Luzern, Bern and Freiburg so we finally reached our destination from the North. We arrived at our hosts’ around 6.00 pm. Gyula is an ex colleague who lives in Lausanne with his wife and who was kind – and perhaps naive – enough to provide us with accommodation for the night. He knew 3 of us though so we were not complete strangers to him but his wife never met us. Freshly prepared dinner and cold beer awaited us at his place. We got three separate double rooms as the house was big enough so we could settle in and head for the shower. I mentioned above that breakfast was the highlight of the day. F***k I was wrong. Shower was the highlight. Especially after two days and one night on the road. We then had a great dinner and chatted about things of life while sipping our beers and Hungarian Palinka while watching the sunset above Lake Geneva. 

 

We finally got to bed around midnight… 


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