Day 12: Disentis Abbey

In order to stay cool last night, we decided no fly would've necessary on the tent. This was a great idea until 5:30am when the sun rose and beat down on our tent. No one was able to sleep past 8:30, Matt got up just to put sunscreen on.

After a lazy European breakfast of bread, cheese, and meat, Matt set out to find another bike shop to figure out what was going on with his back brake. The grease and new cable did not do the trick.

There is one bike shop and town and the mechanic barely spoke English. After he replaced the brake cable once again (after a failed attempt to explain it had already been done) he noticed the housing for the brake lever was bent a little and the brake lever was catching on that. Problem solved!!

On his way back Matt ran into the rest of the gang and they headed into town for the day. The only highlight of the town is a Benedictine abbey. It's a huge abbey (one of the largest in Europe) and has a beautiful church inside. True to Benedictine culture, there were no priests in sight.

After a quick lap through the abbey, we tried to find some lunch. Nate wanted more Donner Kabab (big surprise there) but Matt was getting pretty sick of Donner and wanted something different. So we began a search...

... and ended up at a Donner place. Thankfully there were other items on the menu for Matt.

We met a couple nice guides/carpenters (guide by winter, carpenter by summer) who gave us a couple great places to checkout on our route. It seems like half the people in this town work in construction, and construction on the roads is worse than Ann Arbor.

The rest of the day was filled with beers by the river and cooking dinner.

It turns out that this river is a popular place for panning for gold and there were many people here looking. We met a nice man from Holland who is using part of his holiday to fulfill a childhood dream of finding gold. He was going to leave today but claims he might have found something so best of luck to him!

Tomorrow is a long and grueling climb over another pass and then down to Andermatt!