2018 - Mountains : Alps: Tuesday

Today was billed as the Stelvio ride out since the focus was to ride the 48 hairpin pass, but also many of the other passes on and around Swiss / Italian border. Steve felt like taking the day of the bike to make use of the free cable car guest passes on offer at the hotel, so I opted to ride with Steve Freeman our tour leader along with Les, Cliff, Sean and Alan. The start of the day didn't look too promising with low misty cloud so we set off later, around 10, but by the time we reached Livigno for a coffee stop we had blue skies and sunshine.

Quite warm sat outside in the sun before our ride up the Stelvio via the toll Munt La Schera tunnel, one of the best narrow brick tunnels I've ridden that travels up an incline all the way 2 or 3 kilometres then spits you out right on the lake ahead. Great fun, traversing those hairpins and all the guys could ride at a good pace too. A fun place to ride, one for the bucket list but more of a novelty pass since it's not as free flowing as some - but there are some good bits... see the 5 minute video below:

That said hundreds of bikers up and down both sides and the top was rammed with bikes and hot dog stands. We carried on over and headed back down soon enough after a quick photo stop.

Afterwards we set off to ride the Oberalp pass of which was much faster. I was following Alan who was riding the very fast RR and I have to say I was keeping up well around the switch backs, but he lost us all on at least one section of straight. All of us enjoying endless bend after bend on the smoothest of surfaces you could ever hope for.