In 2015, I was exploring on a mountain bike when I found a road above La Rippe that was closed to traffic, so I decided to explore it. I managed to cycle a certain distance before I met a rockfall blocking the road, so I had to turn back. I then tried again in 2018 and I got quite close to the top but decided to give up and turn around.
richard - Jun 6, 2021
I photographed more of them. I will share them later.
Gorgeous! I saw a massive, massive rose bush in the front garden of a nearby apartment complex that had a massive number of huge, happy roses. Such a burst of happy on a walk. :)
Sometimes you go for a daily walk and all the roses are starting to emerge, and these are not tiny ones. These are saucer sized roses. They are mainly growing at the side of orchards. These are Red and pink, but there are other colours, so if I walk in the right places I should find them too.
I could have posted these images to Instagram or Facebook, but I’d rather post them on my own website, for the world to see, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually, three to six years from now.
Thanks to the incompetence of leadership during this pandemic Switzerland went from a low of 21 cases per day in June 2021 to a high of 3600 or more over Christmas. This is really a shame. For a short period up to the 21st of June Switzerland really looked as if it would end the pandemic.
On the 21st of June the government made a mistake. It reopened society. The rational was that the pandemic would soon end and that slowly we could return to life as normal.
Switzerland is currently toying with the idea of forcing people to wear masks outdoors but it’s not clear whether this would be for cities or whether it would be for villages and even rural walks. If the obligation to wear a mask at all times is enacted then I have two reactions.
The first is that I never leave the house without a mask and that I wear it when I am forced to walk within a few meters of people.
Until recently every time Switzerland moved from one phase to another the number of new cases per day increased slightly but with the latest phase the number of cases has increased by four or five times the number of new cases.
From March until mid June we could go to the shops with the recommendation that we should wear a mask but not the obligation. I wore a mask anyway. From Wednesday onwards masks will become obligatory for people visiting the shops, and on public transport.
Self-Sacrifice and Pandemics are intimate friends. In order for a pandemic to end we must learn to do without things that we need. We go without meeting friends for months, we go without hugs or handshakes for months. We go without restaurants, bars, cafés or cinemas for months. We go without needing the internal combustion for days at a time.
Human Contact I mention all of these things looking at the past 76 days.
Switzerland “expects to return to normality” within the next few days and weeks. As of tomorrow groups of up to thirty people will be able to meet. That’s good for all of the activities that I like to do. It means that the Via Ferrata, hiking, climbing, and other seasons can begin shortly.
D-Day - 6th of June 2020 From the 6th of June onwards cinemas, theatres, zoos, ski lifts, camps, swimming pools, and higher education will begin again.
For several days I have not been looking as seriously at the COVID-19 case graphs for Switzerland because we the storm waves of new cases that we were getting before are now no more than ripples on a pond. The situation seems to be under control in Switzerland.
A graph of the daily new cases - we see a consistent degradation of the wave.
As we look at the graph above we see that for at least a month the number of new cases was high every day but that by the fifteenth of April the number of cases decreased week, by week, until the number of new cases per day seems imperceptible at the scale of the graph above.
Earlier today or yesterday at some point I was thinking of the song When I’m 64, and that I should share it. I’m not 64. Quarantine hasn’t aged me so drastically. I felt the need to make that joke.
Recycling For the first time in two months I went to the recycling centre today. For at least two months I cleaned everything that could be recycled and sorted it into the correct bag.