In the last few days I have become very well travelled, nine
countries in three days. We left Scotland and drove most of the length of
England, spending a little time with my parents in Lincolnshire, the first time
I have seen them for a few months. From there we headed down to Dover and left
England in the pouring rain on Monday morning.
It took us much longer than intended to get across northern
France as we got stuck in the suburbs of Lille and had to do a dozen laps of
the city before finally achieving some sort of escape velocity and emerging
into southern Belgium.
We quickly passed through the country and into Luxembourg,
which despite it’s diminutive size took much longer to traverse, there appeared
to be a traffic jam the length of an entire nation. From there we crossed into
Germany, where we stopped overnight, somewhere in the Black Forrest, not too
far from Stuttgart.
It had been raining hard for the whole journey but the
following day dawned bright and sunny. We hit the autobahns again, our elderly
Transit coping admirably on the derestricted roads, at one point it hit nearly
80mph!
We spent much of the afternoon unsure as to exactly which
county we were in. Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland all meet at
more or less the same place. We stopped for lunch somewhere in one of those
countries, a lovely lakeside restaurant, but I still have no idea which one it
was in.
We were definitely in Switzerland when we stopped for the
night, somewhere on the road between Klosters and Davos. We were woken early
the next morning by the police who seemed curious about the rusty white van
with foreign plates, by far the oldest and scuffiest vehicle in the whole
country and therefore clearly up to no good.
Davos itself was also bright and sunny, it was about 30
degrees when we arrived, which was lovely. We had a bit of a walk around the
town looking for some breakfast and found the big conference centre where the
World Economic Forum is held every year, complete with the sandpit and
playground in the grounds, presumably put there back in the days when George
Bush was attending such events.
From there we headed over to the race venue at Frauenkirch.
Some things were already starting to take shape, the main marquee was up, the
bridge for the flyover was under construction and the pits were marked out.
However, we were told that most of the track could not be ridden, for reasons
which were unclear. We set off on the bikes to ride whatever bits of the track
we could find and, here in the heart of the Swiss Alps, surrounded by
snow-capped peaks and high Alpine meadows, were distinctly underwhelmed by it.
It was, for want of a better word, much too ‘fieldy.’ What parts of the course
we did find were mainly grass fields, a bit of fire-road and a surprisingly
large section of tarmac, hardly the exciting Alpine trails we had been looking
forward to. At least it was sunny though and the detour we took up to Jakobshorn
was lovely.
Thursday was warm and bright, although the track was
still not marked out so we decided just to go for a ride around the area,
following one of the signposted routes up in the hills. We headed from
Frauenkirch up to Glaris and Spina, past the lift station at the top and then
followed a lovely piece of singletrack from Abirűgg down to Sertig-Dőrfli, that
was a lot of fun.
Some of the locals on the trail
There were two other Brits entered into the race, Matt Jones
and Jason Miles, and we received word from Jason that evening that Mrs Miles
was quite ill and he therefore would not be coming. Judging by the parts of the
course we had seen so far he wouldn’t be missing much.
Friday morning was also nice and sunny, although the
forecast for the afternoon and the race on Saturday and Sunday was grim. The
course was now apparently all marked out, apart from the final quarry section.
That could be good, maybe we had underestimated it, riding old quarry workings
is always fun.
We set off to have a look and were soon completely baffled.
There was plenty of marker tape around but no arrows so we had no idea which
section went in which direction and there were so many cross-overs and two-way
sections that we couldn’t even tell which followed which. There was even more
grass field than we had first thought and we only managed to find two bits of
singletrack, the longest of which was only about 400 yards long.
Why wasn't this is part of the course? Less than a mile away
and it was brilliant!
Matt arrived just before 5pm, accompanied by his wife Sarah,
defending champion Daniel Schmidheiney, mechanic Luke and the rain.
Daniel had raced at Davos before and offered to take us out
for a lap. Despite having been there for three days I still had no idea where
the course went and so decided to go with him and Matt out into the pouring
rain. It turned out that the majority of the descending was on fireroads.
Normally these would be used for the climbs, with the more entertaining
singletrack sections as the descents, but a lack of the latter obviously
necessitated that the downhills would also be fireroad. The speed of these
combined with the hard surface and the heavy, thundery rain which rapidly tuned
them into rivers meant that it was nigh on impossible for me to see where I was
going through the spray from the rear wheels in front and from my own front
wheel. Even local knowledge proved to be of little help as Daniel
lead us astray before we retraced our steps and tried to figure out where we
were supposed to go.
The quarry section was something of a disappointment, rather
than drops and chutes down though the old workings it turned out to be a gravel
access road for the trucks. Even when we returned to the arena there was still some
confusion as to exactly where we were supposed to be going, but surely it would
all be fixed for the race tomorrow…
Friday evening was spent in the pit tent fitting
crud-catchers to the bikes and wishing that I had brought a proper set of mud
tyres. I was not looking forward to this.
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