Riding the Rhone

Cycling through the vineyards

Cycling around Zinal can be hard work - it's either sweating slowly up or a white knuckle descent which leaves your hands aching from braking so hard. For an easier day out, we head down to the main valley to follow one of the many cycle routes.
SwitzerlandMobility covers the whole country - road & mountain bike, walking, inline skating and even canoe routes. The app gives you the country's best mapping for free as well.

Plenty of mapping and signs

Many of the road bike routes are mostly traffic free tarmac and wind through the valley's fruit orchards and vineyards with occasional detours into small villages. Best to head out to the west through the vineyards and villages and then get blown back along the perfect path beside the Rhone by the prevailing winds. In the event of breakdown - you or your bike - you can always just hop on the train to get back to where you started.

Routes through hill villages and orchards

From the upper Valais it's possible to follow the Rhone all the way to the Mediterranean - perhaps the ultimate summit to sea trip - use the SwitzerlandMobility site for the swiss leg then www.viarhona.com for info on the journey through France.

Routes and mapping:
www.veloland.ch/en/cycling-in-switzerland.html
www.lacyclosportivevalaisanne.ch

Rent a bike for an afternoon or two
www.valaisroule.ch/fr/velospot.html
www.rentabike.ch/?dsmid=113360&action=viewdet&id=542
www.veloland.ch/fr/services/location-de-velos-et-e-bikes-0641.html
www.publibike.ch

Tour de Romandie

The Tour de Romandie had a stage finish in Zinal today, won by Italy's Francesco de Bonis. That they were still really racing by the time they passed our house was pretty extraordinary, as was the transformation of the village, with a full-blown media circus, massive lorries with mobile TV studios and enough helicopters filling the air that you might have thought a war had broken out. As a keen cyclist of a non-racing kind, my strongest impression was that there must have been more support cars (and certainly motorbikes) than there were cyclists. It reminded me of the US statistic that more miles are driven in cars carrying bikes than are ridden on them, which I reckon is nearly as silly as driving to a gym to pedal an exercise bike.