Sunday 23rd May
I woke up around 7am to the very unwelcome sound of rain falling on my tent. We got up and started to pack our gear. As we were doing this, the steady rain turned into a torrential downpour. We sheltered in the shower block for a while then decided to put our waterproofs on and set off anyway. We set off at around 8am.
We found our way back to the autobahn with no real problems. After around an hours riding the rain had stopped, so we pulled in and took our waterproofs off. As we were only planning on riding about 200-250 miles that day we decided to leave the autobahn and do some A roads.
Unfortunately when we left the autobahn the rain started again and got quite cold - 9c at one place. Also the roads we found were a little tedious - just straights between towns filled with traffic. During this section my oil light was occasionally flashing on and off. I decided to check my oil at the next petrol stop. Because of the rain and the disappointing road we rejoined the autobahn to make some good progress towards Switzerland. Once back on the autobahn the weather became very nice and quite warm.
When we stopped for petrol I discovered that my bike was very low on oil - it had burned nearly a litre of oil since setting off. I filled it up and we continued on our way.
We got the Switzerland in seemingly no time and paid 30 euros for the road tax. This covers you for all the roads in Switzerland for a full year - which I didn't think was bad at all.
Once through Basel the scenery was truly amazing. Everywhere you looked was like a picture postcard, with lots of tunnels through the hills and mountains; we seemed to never stop going down. Unfortunately we were on the motorways and couldn't stop and take pictures. When we found parking places they were surrounded by trees blocking the fantastic scenery.
We decided to find somewhere to camp - this proved to be a little trickier than we thought, as we struggled to find somebody who spoke English. Eventually we found a couple who spoke a little English and with the help of the map and a lot of sign language we managed to get good directions to a super little campsite nearby.
The people on the campsite also spoke no English, but by this time Daz was getting really good at sign language and managed to understand where they wanted us to camp, park the bikes and pay.
We had heard that Switzerland is very expensive, but we must have stumbled upon a very reasonably priced campsite - as it cost us 29sfr (around £15, £7.50 each) for both tents for 1 night, we then had steak and chips with a beer and that only cost us 35sfr (£9 each).
We had a few beers - and again finished the night off with hot chocolate!