• Couple more things: Switzerland has a lot of cycle routes, they are pretty well signposted once you know what you're looking for (usually small brown arrows with the number and blue symbol, but only really where you need to deviate from your current course) so if you can find one going in your direction it makes navigation easy. They keep you off the major roads very nicely (though these quite often have a bicycle lane anyway), but also tend to route around town centres, which is fine except you just see the suburbs...

    Be warned that they almost certainly will have gravelly sections, which can spell disaster for normal road tyres (we toured last autumn on such routes with 28mm tough commuting tyres and no problems, but this week I got 4 punctures in one go with 25 mm road tyres).

    Having a quick look at

    https://www.schweizmobil.ch/en/cycling-in-switzerland.html

    and

    https://map.schweizmobil.ch/?lang=en&land=veloland&etappe=2.02&bgLayer=pk&season=summer&layers=Veloland&resolution=250&E=2746893&N=1159701

    suggests you could pick up a route near Tiefencastel, then follow the route 2 to Disentis and Andermatt...

    The app is a pretty handy way to plan and navigate.

  • @Georgel As much I would love to, I only have so much holiday leave at work!

    @xrayspex Some more great tips - thanks! With this in mind, I've realised that there's quite a few sections near the Splugen Pass which Strava has tried to route me on the Via Spluga which looks like more like what you say - gravelly. That's not ideal for us on road bikes (28/25mm tyres), so routed onto the more main roads instead for those bits. I think I need to take some time to learn the naming convention of Swiss road network to avoid ending up on faster roads though.

    The first link is really handy & gives me a bit more confidence that it might be rideable on road bikes though, as it Google StreetView seems to give out after about a kilometre. I'm hesitant to route on roads you can't StreetView (not very adventurous sounding, I admit) after a very muddy experience of trying to navigate Le Parc Naturel Narbonnaise en Méditerranée last year. May give it a try!

    @Tor sent the route we had to a former colleague who lives in the Alps & has returned some really handy advice which we've yet to look at properly. From a quick look at the suggestions, one was a query about whether a road existed. Intrigued, I had a look at my route & eventually figured out that it was between Bivio & Juf. Strava seems to think that there's a perfectly rideable trail between the two over the mountain. I don't think so!

    At the weekend we did some bikepacking in the Forest of Bowland & on the ride over we popped in to see our favourite bike mechanic, Marek, at his workshop Aurelius Cycles. He's done some touring in the Alps & said the route looked great but that it would be far more economical to spend more time in Italy than in Switzerland. I suspect that he's right, personally informed by a £17 G&T in Geneva airport (thankfully paid for by insurance money). Might just mean less time in bars/restaurants & more time spent in shops instead. We'll have to see. I had a little look at camp site prices & they all seemed reasonable, apparently food is the killer. As long as the pastries are affordable I'm generally fine though.

    Supposed to be looking at the route in more detail tonight but I think we might be riding to the pub instead to enjoy the last of this weather before the cooler conditions eventually return this evening. In the meantime, I've refined a version of the route.

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