In July and August of 1988 I went on a three week bike trip to Austria and Switzerland. I started in Vienna in late July, and met a friend there who had already been riding for a couple of weeks. We rode along the Danube to Salzburg and from there to Innsbruck.
Click here to read Biking in Austria >

We took the train to Switzerland (only had to bypass one tiny mountain range!), stopping in Zürich. From there we rode to Lucern, Lausanne and Geneva, among others.

A couple of funny things come to mind when thinking about this trip. First was that I had never been on a bicycle trip before, and when planning this trip, I hadn't owned a bike in about 10 years. I bought a nice touring bike, and borrowed some saddle-bags from a friend (thanks Pete!). Then I started riding. After one of my first practice rides in the flats of Mountain View, CA, my knees started hurting a lot. I guess you're supposed to work up to these things! So I went to the Palo Alto Sports Medicine Clinic where they prescribed some Naprosyn which I used throughout the trip to keep the knees from hurting. Alps, here I come!

Another funny thing was that my friend Rony knew that I was "interested" in her. She wasn't "interested" in me, at least not in the same way. So before we went I had to swear that I would behave like a gentleman, which of course I did.

Both the knees and the friendship survived the trip!

One last story. Since I had ridden my bike every day for several weeks, I decided that upon returning home I'd ride my bike home from the airport in San Francisco. The ride down El Camino Real was the bumpiest, smelliest, dirtiest, ugliest stretch of roadway that I had seen in a month. And the drivers were by far the least considerate. As I rode, I was having second thoughts about returning home!

These pages consist of the postcards that I obsessively wrote every evening. (Maybe that's why she wasn't "interested" in me!) I have typed them in exactly as originally written, with only minor changes for spelling and punctuation errors.