I heard it through the grapevine

THE ANCIENT VINEYARDS IN LAVAUX, SWITZERLAND.  LAC LEMAN IN THE BACKROUND

We apologize for the delay in the Roobeck blogcast, but it has been many days without easy access to the internet.  We now return you to your regularly scheduled update…

We departed Paris for our date with the Galibier and the Alpe d’Huez still almost a week away so we aimed plotted a course for Starship Enterprise toward Lusanne, Switzerland for a rendezvous with the our friends the Sofields who have spent the past year living near Zurich.  We engaged the engines and headed down the highway at warp .000003.  In no time at all (it was actually like 4 hours), we found ourselves in a tiny little campground near Nuit St. Georges, on the Cote d’Or the heart of the Burgundy wine region.  We got settled into a nice shady spot and still had plenty of time for a pleasant spin through a string of hillside villages.  The grapevines and fields fo sunflowers glowed in the early evening sun as we stopped at the halfway mark of our ride top enjoy a cold beer.  I will note at this point that one area in which the U.S. (at least the PNW) has Europe beat is beer selection.  Although the Kronenberg we had while gazing at the vineyards was pleasant and refreshing, it was really our only choice.  There were a few other selections on tap at the local pub/pizzeria, but all were variants on your basic lager.  I don’t need four different IPAs to choose from, but a little variety would be nice.

The drive to Lusanne offered us our first taste of mountain driving.  I should mention here that Hannah’s fondness for operating heavy machinery (you should have seen the giddy smile on her face when she was operating the mini-excavator we used on the driveway last summer) apparently extends to operating RVs.  She enjoys driving and I’m perfectly happy to navigate and stare out the window so I’m typically playing copilot to her captain.

After some very frustrating cell phone experiences (the guy who sold us the SIM card failed to mention that any incoming or outgoing call or message outside of France would cost approximately a million dollars) where my preloaded Euros allowed for a 30 second conversation, we managed to meet up with Darrell and Ruth and set off on a classic Sofield guided adventure.  We rode a few short kilometers along the shores of Lac Leman to the Unesco World Heritage site of the Lavaux Vineyards.  These grapevine terraces have been in place for something like 1200 years.  Crazy.  We wound our way up and through the terraces on single lane roads that were all above 18% gradient!  Too much steeper and we might have tipped over backwards. 

As I mentioned earlier, our trip was being guided by cartographer extraordinaire Darrell Sofield.  For those of you who know Darrell, you probably also know that we were in for a bit of an adventure.  What was supposed to be an easy 40 km spin turned into an epic 70km grand tour of the hinterlands bordering the Laveaux Vineyards.  After some tortured route finding and a good stretch of gravel road (complete with dumptrucks and excavators) we were found our way back home for a traditional Swiss dinner of raclette.  I think the Sofields plan on treating many of the B’ham crew to a similar experience so we won’t spoil the surprise.  If you want to know the details, you’ll have to whip out the old Wikipedia.

The evening ended with a rainstorm worthy of a true Asian monsoon.  The drops pounding on our mobile Quonset hut made for quite the racket but we eventually drifted off thinking about our impending dual with French Alps.