We'll try that later

The only section we have left to complete the Swiss cycling "Route 1" involves riding over the Furkapass, a very steep climb. We're not quite up to that yet, so we're putting it off "until we're fitter". In the meantime, we have been spending spare weekends cycling around the canton of Geneva and discovering a side to the place that we weren't aware existed.

Yesterday we were accompanied by our friends Bob and Zydre. The picture shows us having a coffee break in Vernier, which is a gorgeous village but unfortunate to be under one of the flight paths from the Geneva airport.

The canton (state) of Geneva has a large wine growing district called Satigny that was our destination. We resisted the temptation of the numerous wineries and stuck to cycling amongst the vines. We had lunch on the banks of the River Allondon near Russin, then headed around through Peney to Vernier, then back into the city.

The path we followed for most of this 43km ride is "Route 102", which starts from the back of Cornavin Railway station in the Geneva city centre. An excellent day's ride, without a mountain pass in sight.

Why not to buy a cheap bike rack

Straight after our glorious achievement of cycling 140kms in one weekend, disaster struck. As we were driving home with our bikes strapped on the back of the car, they flew off and crash landed in the middle of the road. Thankfully no-one was driving behind us and we managed to drag them off the road before causing problems for fellow motorists. The bikes were in pretty bad shape, with Peter's coming off far worse than mine.

After getting over the shock, the challenge was to find a bike repair shop with someone who could speak some English, or at least guess from our miming abilities that we wanted them to check our bikes and quote on repairs.

After one failed attempt, where we managed to get our perfectly good tyres and tubes replaced but no fixing of the buckled wheels, we found a shop that could help us. They declared Peter's bike a write-off and mine repairable, which made Peter very happy as he had the perfect excuse to invest in a new bike (pictured).

We're now back on the road and Peter is very pleased with his new Swiss bike. The crappy bike rack has been ditched (although it was not entirely to blame) and for now we'll be depending on trains to get our bikes from A to B.