Jura Day 11

Our eleventh day, but the first day on the Jura Crest trail.  The Swiss tourist board promised “wonderful views from the ridge, south to the Alps”.  The key thing missing from the promise was “if the sun shines”.

Looking out of the window in the morning, the cloud was almost down to the village.  We left the hotel and started climbing immediately.  The path was very good, and the temperature was cooler than yesterday, but the humidity was close to 100%.  We passed through the village of Regensberg, an old walled town with a spectacular view back down to the valley.  The path continued as a nice, wide, trail and we were congratulating Switzerland on the state of its trails, when it suddenly narrowed along a ridge.  The limestone was dipping at about 70 degrees, and we had to walk along between the beds.  After last night’s rain all bare rock was extremely slippery, and you had to be careful wherever you put your foot, or planted a pole or put any weight on it.  This section was probably about 2km long, but seemed to go on forever.  I was going first, and got soaked with the water on the bushes after last night’s rain.   I even managed to get my boot stuck between two rocks, and had to take my foot out of my boot before I could pull it out.  We finally got back onto a reasonable path through the woods, before it widened to a forest track.  The path then dropped down to Baden.  The rain started just as we entered the town, Christine put her rain jacket on, I ran to the coffee shop.  We had a cake and coffee each and by the time we left the rain had stopped.  We climbed a lot of steps to get out of the town, past a church.  Then we were back into the woods, but on a very good path.  The rain started coming down, so we put our jackets on and covered our bags.  This, of course, guarantees that the sun will shine within the next ten minutes and you have to stop and take your jacket back off.  Approaching Brugg, we cut off the trail and onto a road leading down to the town.  There was lots of thunder and it looked very dark to the west.  We made good progress, and were nearing our accommodation when the heavens opened.  We nipped into the entrance to a car park for some shelter, and put our jackets back on.  After about ten minutes the rain abated and we walked the final 400m to the hotel.