Summary: long, hot day, with hordes of mountain bikers.
Breakfast at 7:30 (Madeleine put up a token resistance to the early time the night before, but she is morphing into a real hiker, and she was down on time :-), and shortly after 8:30 we set off again. The day was an unusual one for the HxH: many kilometers, but not much up and down, which was just as well after the previous day.
However, there was a drawback: being flat, the trails were well-suited to mountain bikers, and I think that the region has sort of specialized in the sport... at any rate, there were signs along the way for the Swiss Mountain Bike Marathon, and many trails were marked as for mountain bikes as well as hikers. The bikers were in general quite pleasant and considerate, but for a hiker it is not the same experience being slowly overtaken by panting bikers (on the uphills) or rapidly overtaken by gravel-scattering bolides on the downhills.
But the weather was fine and the landscapes were beautiful (a couple of big lakes, two narrow valleys, some huge meadows and vistas... I wouldn't want you to get the impression that we were suffering!).
At one point towards the end of the day we passed a group of free roaming horses and Madeleine was drawn as if magnetically towards them... and they, or at least one colt, towards her. I'll see if I can post some of the photos she took. She tarried with them a while and then jogged, with a full pack and after almost two full days of hard hiking, a fair distance to catch up with us (unnecessary, because we would have of course waited for her... but she was charged with new energy from her seance with the horses :-).
And the first one to our hotel at the Ofenpass at the end of the 7.5 hour day? Madeleine. There was a minor issue of her elbowing aside her Dad, who slyly took a short cut at the end, but we won't talk about that ;-). Impressive stamina and vitality!
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