Kühtai didn't look like this yesterday!

The weather at the moment is what I would call English – extremely changeable. We had a lovely weekend,  but I didn’t get any cycling done, as we looked after our grandchildren. This was a refreshing chang from training and planning, which really did me good! However I had planned another big trip for yesterday and got up at 5 a.m. specially – it wasn’t raining then, although bad weather had been forecast. After a cup of tea I went upstairs to get dressed, only to hear the rain pouring down on the skylights!  So I went to the computer to do some more planning. About an hour later I realised it was dry again, so I went and got dressed, packed my picnic lunch and my raingear, put my bike in my husband’s car and set off in the general direction of Ötztal Bahnhof, where I had planned to start cycling to Kühtai – a round trip of about 90 Kilometres with a 1200 metres elevation. As I drove throught the Gurgltal, the clouds did seem to be covering the mountains, but as an optimist I carried on regardless.On joining the motorway at Imst I had to go a couple of hundred metres towards Landeck before taking the loop in the direction of Ötztal and Innsbruck. The sky there was as black as the ace of spades. My reaction was too slow to change lanes and leave the motorway again, so I went through the Roppener Tunnel. When I came out of this, it was as if the heavens had opened.  “OK, just keep going – it’s got to get better somewhere”, so I drove down to Mötz and up to Mieming, where I had considered another tour to Strassberg. But in the meantime it was raining there too and it didn’t look as thought it was going to stop all day. When I passed through Obsteig and up the Holzleiten Sattel, I was surprised to notice that the road was still dry, but it was just starting to rain and by the time I got home, it was throwing it down here too! I had been “round the Tschirgant” – a trainings route I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, but with my bike in the boot of the car!!! The weather carried on teasing me all day. Every time I realised it wa dry and considered cycling, it started to rain again. I am not afraid of getting wet (I probably will next week), but to start off in such torrential rain is really not appealing, especially when I want to go uphill. I did a “trial pack” in the evening – it looks quite good!

It didn’t rain all night, but the forecast was bad again, so I decided not to get up at 5 a.m. again this morning. At 7 it started to rain and I had a session on the exercise bike! I hope it will be dry enough this afternoon for me to cycle to my dealer in Mieming to have the bike checked over ready for the “big trip” and have the new puncture-proof tyres put on.