Over the Alps on a bicycle by Pennell Elizabeth Robins 1855-1936 & Pennell Joseph 1857-1926

Author:Pennell, Elizabeth Robins, 1855-1936 & Pennell, Joseph, 1857-1926
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Pennell, Elizabeth Robins, 1855-1936, Bicycle touring
Publisher: London : T. Fisher Unwin
Published: 1898-03-25T05:00:00+00:00

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Immediately and abruptly the descent began, and I was on a bumpy, rutty road, with no kilometre stones, no poles, no parapet. The zigzags were the steepest and the curves the sharpest I had come to yet, and for me there was very little coasting down the Spliigen. I cannot say which was the more alarming, to be riding on the zigzags or to be looking down upon them as they lay there, shamelessly exposed, and with J. always ahead, leaning out over the edge at a blood-curdling angle. Below, where the windings lengthened, I could not coast with much comfort, for the road was muddier and rattier than ever, and covered with stones, and lower still, full of dreary and disconsolate tourists.

At Spliigen we were driven into the Swiss custom house and kept there kicking our heels for an hour and a half, for no apparent reason except to make us feel at home in Switzerland again. We had found out that the one thing the Swiss custom officer wanted was a number on each machine, and as nothing else would satisfy him J. made a note of one on his gear case and another on my saddle. He was really too conscientious, for the officer entered them solemnly in the paper he handed to us, without looking at the machines, and I might as well say now that when eventually we left the country at Bale, no one there made the least effort to verify the numbers. The whole thing was a farce, and the most absurd part of it was that at all the frontier stations the officers were so taken up with these empty formalities it never occurred to them that we carried luggage on our bicycles. Our bags were never opened. We might have smuggled in all the brandy and cigars and matches and watches we wanted, and no one would have been the wiser. But was it not another absurdity that, though J. wore a watch worth far

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more than the bicycle, and much easier to sell, and though watch-making is the great native industry calling for protection if anything does, no one ever bothered about it ? Truly the custom house, especially the Swiss custom house, is hard to understand.

MY SIXTH PASS

THE SAN BERNARDINO

In the morning, long before the sun was above the mountains, we were on the San Bernardino. A pass a day was now to be our average, an average that Hannibal or Napoleon or Tartarin might have been proud of. As at Hinter Rhein we had already reached a height of 5,302 feet, according to Baedeker, there were but 1,466 feet more to the top of the pass. But if it sounded a mere trifle after the tramp of the day before, it meant after all ten kilometres of steady shoving. And how those first zigzags through the dense pine forest lengthened themselves out when I was on them ! And how aimlessly and indefinitely the road above the tree level

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