Tuesday, August 3, 2010. Santa Barbara, CA

The Golden Gate

This is the first blog by either Gary or Susan Gleason about their bike ride across Switzerland. I suspect that it will be mostly pictures though.

We left Santa Barbara at 4:00pm on Tuesday, August 3rd to arrive in Geneva the next afternoon. We are arriving two days ahead of the bike ride to both adjust to the 8 hour time change and recover from 16 hours in airports and planes. We stay at the Hotel Les Armures in the old City section. I've stayed at this hotel twice before. The first time I happen to have been seated next to then President Bill Clinton in the Hotel Les Armures' famous fondue restaurant. He joined his now recently married daughter, now Secretary of State wife and several other ladies in a surprising and whirlwind entry. We were sat next to the presidential party. Spotting no secret service, I introduced myself when Bill finished his dinner. For the time we chatted, I was the only person in the world. Remarkable charisma. Further highlighting the occasion, me waving goodbye to Bill from the restaurant's balcony appeared on the front page of Geneva's major newspaper the next morning. But I digress.

The last time we stayed there was with Sue's brother and sister in law. Last year only I fondued there.

I've been testing and playing around with various social networking websites. Figuring out Facebook, Blogger etc. forces you to learn the meaning of URL's, SMS, MMS, IMAP, some computer code, the Cloud and understand just how public everything you do on the internet really is. Postcards were a lot easier. I tried this last year but finally figured out how to post to Blogger and Facebook several months after returning home. Hopefully this bike trip journal/album will be better and more easily documented than last year. I am reluctant to use Facebook fearing an extension of Facebook friends beyond the immediate family. No offense please but I am not interested in an obscure high school classmate's going-on (nor are they probably in mine) which is the price you pay to extend your postings to all.

Although it is a bit strange to look forward to 3 flights totaling 16 hours, I am comforted in the fact that we scored business class in a Boeing 777 with newly installed private pods. Unlimited movies, my ipad and Edward Rutherford's novel "New York" should help time fly by in the friendly skies. It looks like the late afternoon arrival in Geneva may be the time to arrive at our hotel and crash (ugh) after a long flight.

You can visit the tour details at bikeswitzerland.com or from the blog for a preview of the trip. We are on the Lite Tour. I did the Challenge Tour last year with a group of serious and experienced riders from all over the world. I am lighter this year but not as quite as I hoped. That tour was really a challenge with several high mountain passes to climb. Hopefully the passes will be lower but the weather as spectacular as last year.