Tour de Suisse

Sometimes, the magical part of living abroad is the things that just happen around you. Where a lazy Sunday turns into something pretty exciting.

We got a letter in the mail.

Side story: Have you ever thought about how long the mail takes to read? Probably not. You can pretty easily figure out if something is junk mail, a bill, or some piece of vital information. You know why you can do that? Because you can read it. And by skimming it in 20 seconds you know if you toss it out or if you need to do something. I can no longer do that. Reading the mail has become a significant chunk of my time every day. Oh, and EVERYTHING comes in the mail. You send an email to try to get a doctor's appointment, a week later you get a physical letter back saying they’re not accepting new patients. Google Translate’s hover picture feature is my new bff.

I’m back from my detour.

We got a letter in mail from the city we live in. It said (based on Google Translate) “due to important events in your area, you may not use your road by car from 6:30am to 4:30pm on June 19th”. No other info. Just that. So again, Google.

Eventually we figured out that the Tour de Suisse bike race (think Tour de France, only the Swiss version) was coming through our city and they were closing all the roads around us.

So we decided that since we couldn’t leave the house by car, we’d just walk out onto the street & watch the race. The day they came through our area was a time trial, so riders were sent off from the starting line at 90 second increments meaning that we had a nice steady flow of bikers to watch.

Each rider was preceded by a police officer on a motorcycle and followed by a chase car most of the time carrying 2-3 other bikes.

Charlotte & Olivia got really into cheering for the bikes. Also the thin air.

Olivia even cheered for several people who were just out for a Sunday bike ride and not affiliated with the race. It’s hard to tell if this was appreciated or shunned…still learning my German body language cues.

Apparently, Remco Evenepoel from Belgium won the stage the day we watched and Geraint Thomas from Great Britain went on to be the overall winner of the Tour. Neilson Powless, the lone American in the race finished 4th place.