Category Archives: Switzerland

Saturday 25th June 2022 – I’M GOING INTO …

… the innkeeping business.

This afternoon while I was driving through the Jura mountains in eastern France I came across a tavern called L’Auberge du Grand Git. With a name like that I just HAVE to buy it, don’t I? It’s quite appropriate.

But anyway, be that as it may, this morning I was up early yet again and had a nice shower.

And I can’t believe how much stuff there was on the dictaphone either. And shame as it is to say it, it didn’t get off to a good start. In the time that it took to find my dictaphone I forgot most of the first adventure but it was to do with writing out notes about something and something to do with a guy but I can’t really recall what was happening about this so I’ll have to forget it and think about it again.

Later on, someone had written out a list of subjects like “can you ride a bike” or “do you know someone who speaks a foreign language” etc and had published it in one of the newspapers that I read. I decided that I’d have a go at this little game and try to work out who was living there and what they were doing and what they’d heard as well. I made a start on it but it was much more difficult than I thought trying to think of different people who had done this and that in the past. It was very complicated.

This was something else about lists that you’d have to write out about things that you’ve done, people that you have seen. It was rather more complicated. I went all the way down to the very last question before I ran out of time and inclination to finish it off. I went back to the Jeep in which i’d been sitting and sleeping etc.

There was one of these great big Winnebago mobile home things that hadn’t been moved for years. We had to go to take a present round to someone, their kid so we decided that we’d get this thing going and go round in that. eventually we managed to make it fire up but it must have bene stuck in gear or something because it lurched backwards and went rhrough a kind-of ad-hoc fence and a few plant pots and things like that

I was back working at Shearings or somewhere. Some man asked this actress or someone who was speaking if she’d thought about plastic surgery. She said that she was all in favour in certain circumstances so he asked why she didn’t go to have something done instead of coming round visiting him and scaring the children looking how she did right now

Finally I was in a hotel wanting to get into the lift to go up to my room. The lift wasn’t working and I can’t go up the stairs so I had to wait in the foyer. It was occasionally going up and they said that they had workmen in to fix it but I didn’t see any workmen. In the end there were more and more people waiting downstairs and this went on. The clerk wasn’t paying very much attention. We were waiting there 3 hours. In the end after waiting 3 hours I went over to the clerk and told him that having waited 3 hours I’d shown that I’d been patient enough and insisted that they take me upstairs in the lift immediately. The receptionist went into the lift and rode it manually up to my floor with a few other people. We could hear some kind of knocking going on from somewhere but we didn’t see any workmen. I asked “where are these workmen who are supposed to be fixing the lift?”. He replied “they are definitely here” but I don’t think that anyone at all believed him.

After we’d had a leisurely breakfast Jacqueline went for a walk into the village as she had things to do.

Jean-Marc and I went to see his mother and on the way we stopped off so that I could buy some flowers for her.

She’s 91 but still quite active and energetic and I enjoy talking to her. We spent a very pleasant couple of hours reliving the time back in 1970 when I stayed with her and her husband, Jean-Marc and his sister for several weeks.

Back at Jean-Marc’s we had lunch of the vegan pie that Jacqueline had made, and then while I made some space in Caliburn, Jacqueline cleaned the oven and we loaded it into the van.

So now I have a proper oven at last. I just need a unit in which to install it but as I mentioned the other day, if things go according to plan I’ll end up just half a mile from the biggest IKEA in Germany.

In temperature of 33°C I hit the road and melted on my way eastwards through the Jura mountains. The Lady Who Lives In The SatNav picked a new route for me today, one that I haven’t used before, past my favourite inn.

Where I am right now is a little further on down the road in the Cluse de Pontarlier.

It is an ancient route between what is now Switzerland and what is now French and in antiquity was a very important trading route. There are all kinds of traces of ancient watchtowers and the like but in 1227 there is the first mention of a Chateau de Joux.

This gradually involved, following a series of renovations and additions into the Fort de Joux that we see up there today.

In the later years of the 18th Century and up to 1815 it was a prison and many notable people were detained here and since 1996 it’s been a Monument Historique

Just down the road I cross the border into Switzerland near Neufchatel.

A few miles further on we began to drop down the hill towards the Lac de Neufchatel. It took me a few minutes to get my bearings as I usually come in by Lac Leman, or “Lake Geneva”

There were some kind of roadworks here with a working area where I could pull up, because the view of the lake from here was really spectacular. It gave me a good opportunity to stop and take a few photographs.

After I’d passed Neuchatel I began to look for a hotel and found one in the small village of Dombresson.

And it took some finding too because the road on which it’s situated is quite a long one that passes through several villages all of which share the same postcode.

Although it’s expensive, it’s the cheapest that I could find. I keep forgetting how expensive Switzerland is. And breakfast is included in the price so it’s not quite so bad. I’ll have my money’s worth there.

But right now I’m off to bed. I had a bad night and I’m surprised that I kept going all day without crashing out.

Tomorrow I’ll be carrying on into Germany if all goes well..

Thursday 30th July 2020 – STRAWBERRY MOOSE …

… and I have arrived at his favourite holiday resort. And we had to stop so that Strawberry Moosecould have his usual photo opportunity

We’re staying for a couple of days while we get our respective heads together, and we need to do that too because of the dreadful night that I had last night. Never mind what time I went to bed – I was still wide-awake as late as 03:05 with no sign of ever going off to sleep.

But I must have done at some point because not only did the alarm awaken me at 06:00 (and I even beat the third alarm to my feet) there was something recorded on the dictaphone too.

A girl whom I know from Crewe put in a visit last night. She was going off home and I’d lent Caliburn to her to tow a caravan. I walked back through Shavington to Vine Tree Avenue where Caliburn was parked. We could see my brother and father in the distance – my father was getting ready to come home from work – it was 06:00 and he was getting in his vehicle. As we went past, down the street was a policeman who was interrogating a couple over a book which was something like a book by Kerouac or something. He saw the two of us and made some kind of remark to which I made some kind of remark back and mentioned the book that I was reading. He clouted me with a book so I clouted him back with a book. By this time I noticed that this girl was actually holding my hand as we were walking down the street. One thing that was going through my mind was that the tax on Caliburn had run out and I had vehicles without tax parked all over the place. I was wondering if ever it came to the push that they might be towed away where was I going to put them. I got to wondering what my father would have to say about me lending someone a vehicle that didn’t have any road tax. And more to the point what would a person say, where would she be parking it or leaving it and the closer I got to home the more I was thinking about this.

There was plenty of other stuff to do this morning and then I went to breakfast.

My room is over there in the annex so I had to cross the garden to reach the main part of the hotel. On the way over I passed the postman delivering the mail. What cought my eye was not the postman or the post that he was delivering but the machine on which he was delivering it.

50 or so years ago everyone laughed at the Ariel 3, and yet here we are today, which just goes to show what proper publicity and marketing could have done for the British motorcycle industry had they put their minds to it. But being stuck in a timewarp of the early 1950s, british industry totally failed to move with the times.

I had to decline the cheese and the ham but the rest of the breakfast (included in the price) was very acceptable and despite the cost of the night’s accommodation, it was all pretty good value for Switzerland.

Collecting all of my stuff together I headed off – as far as the local Co-op. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that there had been an issue at the Hotel last night in that the Swiss plugs are different from the rest of Europe. The hotel had lent me an adapter but I had to hand that back this morning.

It’s not the first time that i’ve been caught out by the lack of a Swiss adapter so I reckoned that I may as well buy my own while I was here.

While I was here, I bought a baguette. In France it had cost me €0:45 but here in Switzerland where there is no Common Agricultural Policy it cost me €1:90. The silly Brits are going to be in for quite a surprise once the Transition Period is over.

Most of the day was spent driving all the way through Switzerland in the sweltering heat. Slightly north of east towards the Austrian border at Dornbirn.

Stuck behind slow-moving grockles for most of the day, and roadworks after roadworks after roadworks, it took ages to cross the country. It really got on my wick.

With the temperature at 35°C and feeling like every degree of double that, I was driving along the side of Lake Lucerne from Luzern north-east when I came upon a scenic viewpoint at the side of the road.

The views from here were tremendous. For example, down at the end of the lake I could see the town of Kussnacht where I turn off eastwards and head eventually for the Austrian frontier.

There wasn’t any shade at all here unfortunately, not even in the lee of Caliburn, but having been stuck behind all kinds of traffic in the streets of Luzern and Merlischachen, I was running much later than I wanted to and I had been ready for lunch for ages.

Chewing on my sandwich I had a good look around at my surroundings.

Across the lake from me is actually a “seaside” resort, the Strandbad Seeburg. That would have been a great place to go for lunch had I had the time. A nice relax on a sandy beach would have done me the world of good and I might even have gone for a paddle.

There are also bound to be several good hotels over there too, because the town is the birthplace of César Ritz, the founder of the “Ritz” hotel chains. He died there in the town in October 1918.

It’s a shame that we aren’t going that way.

That’s the spine of the Alps down there, on the border between Switzerland and Italy and it would seem to be the place to be right now because it wil be much cooler up there at those kinds of altitiudes. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that WE’VE BEEN IN THE SNOW UP THERE WTH CALIBURN in July.

If there hadn’t been as much haze around today, we might have been able to see snow. But as we’ll be pushing on into the Tyrol we might be lucky in finding some snow ourselves – or at least some cooler weather.

With that in mind, we pushed on into the town and then headed east.

In between Lake Lucerne and Lake Zurich we pass over a high range of mountains heading north-east, climbing out of one valley into another.

As we climbed up the pass, there was quite a distinctive mountain away to our right in the east that seemed to dog my viewpoint. I’ve no idea what mountain it might be but it piqued my interest. Eventually I cane to a place somewhere in between Steinerberg and Sattel where I could pull off the road and take a photograph it.

And it wasn’t just the mountain there either. There’s a modern concrete viaduct of either a road or a railway over there too, and there is some type of large bird, maybe an eagle, flying around over there too. And I didn’t notice that until I returned home.

The views were just as interesting to the south as well.

That’s the town of Steinen down there, I reckon, with Seewen in the distance, all of them in the valley of the Lauerzersee. We can see the spine of the Alps in the distance and just imagine how spectacular this view would be in cold weather when there would be no heat haze. But then again we wouldn’t have been able to climb up here in Caliburn as easily as this in the middle of winter.

Having taken our couple of photos, we headed off north-eastwards in the direction of St Gallen and the Austrian border.

A little further on we pick up the railway that has been following us through the mountains much more precariously that we have been travelling on the road.

As we drive through the Sattel Pass through Rothenthurm and out of the other side on the way to Biberbrugg the railway line makes another one of its regular level crossings across our path and I’m in luck at this one because as I approach it, the barriers come down and a couple of minutes later a train rattles past.

This is one of the 11 Sudostbahn, the South Eastern Railway FLIRT RABe526 trains made by Stadler, a model of train that works on the railway networks of many countries all over Europe and North Africa and even in North America, the city of Ottawa having purchased 7 for the upgrade of its “Trillium” Line and its new link to Ottawa Airport.

Eventually I reached the border and crossed into Austria.

Just outside Dornbirn I fuelled up with diesel. €1:06 a litre which is a relief after the prices that I saw in Switzerland and I subsequently saw it even cheaper too.

From Dornbirn there are two ways on into the interior of Austria. The first, and most common way, is along the main road, past Bludenz and either through the Arlberg Tunnel if you have plenty of cash or over the Arlberg Pass.

But there is another way – the Bregenzerwald Bundesstrasse Highway, the modern-day L 200, over the mountains. Despite it only being 63 kms long from Dornbirn to Warth, It took an unbelievable 75 years to build, construction having been started in 1879.

The final section, from Schrocken to Warth, despite being only about 10kms, took 25 years to build and was not finally completed until 1954.

It’s quite narrow, especially at the older Dornbirn end and not possible to take a coach over it which is why I’ve never been that way before. But Caliburn, Strawberry Moose and I managed it quite comfortably.

It’s a spectacular road and one of this days I’ll post the dashcam footage. You’ll find out why a 53-foot touring coach wouldn’t ever come this way

At Warth we turned off towards the Fern Pass and after a good hour in the mountains from Dornbirn, we ended up in Lech. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE and on several occasions too, including once with Nerina. It’s a place that Strawberry Moose, Caliburn and I really like.

Once we’d taken our photograph, we had to hunt down my hotel.

And it took some finding too. House numbers in Austria don’t follow any logical sequence and someone once told me that they are numbered in the order in whcih they are built.

Considering that it was one of the cheapest hotels in Lech, this is one of the best places where I have ever stayed and I’ll let you know tomorrow about the breakfast. If it’s anything like the rest of the hotel, it’ll be tremendous.

Having smuggled my slow cooker into the hotel I was able to make some tea.

While it’s cooking, I can tell you about my room It’s quite small but very comfortable and a nice view looking north-west. With it being the height of summer it’s staying light pretty late and we have a beautiful red sky at night- a sure sign that Zug is on fire, I reckon.

And having had my tea now, I’m going to bed. After that dreadful night and the fact that I haven’t crashed out at all today, I’m ready for it.

A few days here to recover my strength and then I’ll see where we go from there.

Wednesday 29th July 2020 – TONIGHT I’M IN …

… Switzerland.

This morning I was awake at 06;00 which was quite a surprise seeing as I had a really bad night when it took ages trying to get off to sleep. And even more surprising, I actually beat the third alarm to my feet.

It was a really beautiful morning again out there but I didn’t have all that much time to admire the view.

First task was to write my notes from yesterday. Everyone else was still asleep and I’d forgotten to ask for the internet password so I wasn’t able to upload it – that’s something for tonight.

But anyway there was a group of people setting out to cause mayhem in an Egyptian city last night, planting explosive and everything like that. Somehow I’d become roped in to this. We’d worked out our whole plan and tactics to do this. On the very day I had to go to meet them in the morning and they would communicate all right . I would have to walk into town with this and we would meet up somewhere and I’d pass the dynamite out to various different people. This was what I set out to do. I set out but I remembered that I had my fitbit on back to front or upside down or something and everytime I pressed one button it gave me the wrong reading. I started to develop really cold feet. I could see all things about treatment in an Egyptian gaol and surviving to be executed, all this kind of thing. I made up my mind to go to the British Embassy and give them the dynamite but walking into the British Embassy with an overcoat full of dynamite – all this came into my mind about how on earth do I get rid of all of this stuff and do it safely?

Sooner or later everyone else came out of their room and we all had breakfast together, followed by a nice long chat that went on for hours. And that’s quite a surprise really because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m not usually the sociable type.

When it came to about 12:30 I reckoned that it was time to leave. If I stay too long in one place I start to put down roots and after all I still had a long way to go. So I said my goodbyes and Caliburn and I headed off into the hills.

We drove through Macon, confusing ourselves as we always do and ended up on the by-pass which was not the way that I wanted to go. I was hoping to head through the town centre and have a look around as I passed by but it didn’t work out like that.

On the way through some small village I stopped at a supermarket (it was lunchtime and all of the boulangeries were closed) to pick up a baguette. We carried on through Bourg-en-Bresse and then began to climb into the mountains.

The road that I’m on is the D936 that winds its way through the mountains from Bourg-en-Bresse and Dorlat, and at Corveissiat it drops down onto a clifftop following the meanders of the River Ain.

Just along here is a scenic layby with a good view overlooking the river and if there is a better place than this to stop and admire the view as I ate my butty, I would love to see it because it really was splendid.

The colour of the river was interesting too. I’m not sure whether that emerald green colour is actually the colour of the water, the reflection of the sky, the reflection of the forest, a trick of the light, a trick of the camera or a combination of one or all of them. And I pondered over that as I ate my tomato, hummus and salad baguette.

The town of Corveissiat is not without interest either.

There are the ruins of an old medieval castle – the Chateau d’Arnans – in the vicinity and htere’s a church, the L’église de Saint-Maurice d’Échazeaux which is very rare indeed in the western world because the last modernisation of the church took place in the 14th Century. It managed to escape the “Victorian Frightful” scale of modernisations that ruined just about every other church in western Europe.

there’s also a well-known cave system in the rock, complete with a submerged chamber that is said to be the favourite place for many divers to practise. As well as divers, it’s full of bats too. At least 7 species of bat have been recorded here .

But unfortunately I don’t have the time to go exploring. I’ve a lot to do and a long way to go today and not much time to do it.

A really nice drive through the Jura mountains brings me into Switzerland where there is the really weird road junction and border post

And then we reach our most favourite spot in the Jura mountains.

Strawberry Moose has to leap out of Caliburn and go for a look for himself at the view. There’s even a handy little bench on which he can sit. And I have to say that I was glad to see it because we had been roasting inside Caliburn even at this kind of altitude.

Where we are is actually by an old Roman road that runs between St-Cergue and Trélex in Switzerland. The modern road is a windy, twisty route full of hairpin bends but the old Roman road just goes straight up and down the slopes.

Where the Roman road and the modern road meet, there’s a scenic pull-in where we can stop and admire the view, and take a few photos here and there.

Down there is Lake Geneva – Lac Leman – and the fertile alluvial plain. We’re looking towards the south and somewhere in that direction off the photo to the right is Geneva. Beyond it are the Alps and we pass back into some more of France and encounter Mont Blanc on the border with Italy.

We’d be able to see all of that if there hadn’t been all of this haze. That’s a real disappointment this afternoon.

Down there at the foot of the hills on the shore of the lake is Nyon, famous for being the headquarters of UEFA.

We’re going to be driving all the way down there to the lakeshore and then turning left, north-eastwards towards the interior of the country and the Austrian border. We aren’t unfortunately going to get to see all that much of the mountains in the background as we travel and the hazy afternoon means that you can’t even see then properly from here..

So down the hill we went until we hit the lakeshore and then headed for Lausanne. At Lausanne we left the lakeshore and headed inland up into the hills.

Having consulting the internet, I found myself a motel, the Motel La Poularde, in Romont.

This is the most expensive hotel yet, but then again this is Switzerland and the place is good value for money. My room is enormous and I could even hold a ball in my room.

As is usual, I have forgotten to bring my adapter with me for the electrical plugs but they managed to find one at reception. That means that I can cook tea and then use the laptop. I must make a mental note to buy an adapter tomorrow because knowing my luck, I’ll be stranded here in Switzerland again and I won’t be able to find one.

ut talking about tomorrow, tomorrow I’m pushing further on and we’ll see where we end up. But right now tonight I’m off to bed.

Wednesday 27th June 2018 – WHAT A DREADFUL …

… night that was!

It was stifling hot in that bedroom so I had opened all of the windows. And not long after going to be I was joined by a moth and a mosquito. That put paid to any hope that I might have had about a decent night’s sleep.

No breakfast at the hotel either, so I had another shower and then my laptop decided to crash. It was clearly not going to be my day.

Having sorted myself out I took my stuff downstairs and handed in the key, to find the proprietor and her friend tucking into a hearty meal. “Kein frühstuck” indeed.

All in all, what with one thing and another, I wasn’t very impressed. But you can’t win a coconut every time and I’ve had some pretty good deals in the past.

Outside, all of the streets were full of policemen. I’m not sure why, unless they had heard that I was in the vicinity.

Apparently it is something to do with the roadworks and they are directing the traffic.

But all of Switzerland’s roads seem to be undergoing repair right now. It’s like one huge building site and there’s no end to it.

The road to Zurich was fairly rapid for a change and it didn’t take long for me to arrive there. But driving around it took me much longer than it might have done. It’s changed considerably over the last 30 years and the last time that I was here it was dark.

Another thing that they have a habit of doing is putting the main destinations on the “motorway” road signs and only the small villages on the ordinary road signs. And when you only have a small-scale atlas, it doesn’t help.

No point in asking The Lady Who Lives In The Satnav. She doesn’t recognise Swiss Motorways as being toll roads and doesn’t understand the concept of “avoid all motorways”.

Winterthur was easy to negotiate, although people there don’t understand the idea of roundabouts, and I had not one, not two but three close encounters at various times.

At St Gallen, I gave up. No idea of the village on the Swiss side of the border and “Bregenz” was only advertised by the motorway, so I bit the bullet and went that way.

I dodged off at the exit before the border, and luckily there were no police patrols checking for motorway toll stickers, and crossed into Austria at Lustenau.

Diesel was only €1:21 at Lustenau so I fuelled up Caliburn. I also fuelled up myself – Austrian bread is nothing like as good as German bread but a couple of bread rolls with my salad and that was me organised.

Through Feldkirch and onto the S16 eastwards, and I took a little diversion.

The Arlberg Pass has always been my preferred destination over the Alps but there’s another pass over the mountains between Partenen and Tschafein that I had never taken. So boldly going where the hand of man had never set foot, Caliburn and I set off.

But somewhere stuck up a blind allet is the little village of Silbertal.

Somewhere else that I had never visited before today, and it’s one of those villages that in a country that had 99 out of the 100 prettiest villages in the world, Silbertal is well in the Top 10.

Unfortunately parking was an issue here, as was time, so I didn’t have the opportunity for a good look around.

At Schruns, where I was trying to find a place to stop to take a couple of photographs, I nearly squidged a pedestrian who couldn’t make up her mind whether to cross the street or not.

Having both dillied and dallied, we decided to advance at exactly the same moment.

But eventually I found a parking space and could whip out the Nikon and show you some of the beautiful South Tyrolean scenery.

I’d parked up on the car park of the local football club, FC Schruns, and seeing as the ground was open, I went for a wander inside to see what was happening.

Certainly an improvement on many French football grounds that I had visited, although when I saw the prices for a season ticket for the forthcoming season’s matches, I’m surprised that they weren’t playing at Wembley Stadium.

“Somewhat elevated” would have been an understatement.

Over there, that’s not Schruns but those houses on the side of the hill are in the town of Tschagguns.

I’m not sure how the name of the town should be pronounced, and so I’ll leave you to pronounce that as you see fit.

All I can say is the name sounds very appropriate if you have to carry your heavy shopping up there. You can rule me out of that, no matter how idyllic the view might be.

Tschagguns has a very good claim to fame in the realm of Winter Sports, in that it’s a ski-jumping centre.

Not that you would, of course, expect me to be up there. For me, I’m all in favour of terra firma when it comes to skiing. The more firma, the less terra.

And even so, they can’t be much good up there because even Eddie the Eagle once beat an Austrian ski-jumper.

And now I realise why I’ve never come this way before.

Just up there shortly before the head of the Pass is a toll booth. And they expect me to pay €21:50 to pass the next 40 kilometres to Landeck.

Even having negotiated the price down to €15:00 that was still €15:00 more than I was ever intending to pay, so I turned round and retraced my steps.

Maybe it might cost me more in fuel, but it’s the principle of the thing.

Now, this is much more like it. I’ve made my way all the way round and this is St Anton at the foot of the Arlberg Pass.

When you see the road up there, that’s been improved considerably since the late 1970s when we used to struggle up there with 47 passengers in lightweight Ford R1114 coaches in the good old days of Salopia.

Caliburn leaps up there of course, as you might expect and one of these days I’ll post a video of the climb.

Only one town in the whole wide world where Strawberry Moose and I would be right at home, and that’s the town of Lech.

The name is quite appropriate.

Nerina and I first came here on our honeymoon in 1988 in a beat-up old, rusting Ford Cortina estate OCC 883S (which, by the way, was younger than Caliburn is now, although you wouldn’t ever think so).

And we so liked the place that we vowed that one day we would come back.This is the second time that I’ve been here since then.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I came here in June 2014 in the snow, although this year, the snow is way up the mountain.

I do wonder sometimes if Nerina ever made it back. Knowing how things pan out, I’ll probably bump into her walking through the streets here tomorrow morning.

And in case you are thinking that I’m joking, it did once happen in Brussels like that in 1991. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

I went to the little guest house where I stayed before but that was closed up and deserted.

Several other places were fully booked but one hotel, although totally deserted like the Marie Celeste, had left its doors open and the internet switched on.

Consequently an on-line booking agency quickly found me a room that was well within my price range only 390 metres from where I was standing, and the Lady WHo Lives In The Satnav did the rest.

So here I am. A nice comfy single room run by an Australian landlady (yes, Australian, not Austrian) but the plugs won’t fit my slow cooker so it’s a scratch tea tonight.

Apart from that, no complaints whatsoever and I’m going to be very comfy here.

I hope.

Tuesday 26th June 2018 – I DON’T KNOW …

… what happened today, but at about 16:30 this afternoon despite having been on the road for about 5 hours, I’d covered just 190 kilometres.

I’d started bright and early too, being up long before the alarm went off, thanks to whoever it was who decided to make a loud noise at 05:00.

When Jacqueline awoke, she baked some bread which was delicious and we had breakfast – home-made bread with home-made cherry jam. And chatted for a while too, but at 10:30 I hit the road. There’s a lot to do.

First stop was the Chateau de Chasselas, well-known to all Monty Python fans of course.

Last time that I was here I’d bought a dozen bottles of wine to give as gifts. There are still plenty left but as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I can’t get at them. So I need some more.

And it was quite a hike to get there too as they were resurfacing the driveway and we had to go the long way round.

But this was just one more unnecessary expense. This “relying on friends to return favours” is costing me an arm and a leg. Far cheaper to pay for everything professionally than to go through what I’m going through right now.

That building there on the corner used to be the village café of Chasselas.

Jean-Marc’s grandmother was the owner of the place back in 1970 and this is where I stayed for part of the time that I was here back then.

Of course, it didn’t look like that then. It had much more charm back in those days.

I headed into Macon because I had noticed diesel at €1:39 a litre last night, and Caliburn could do with a drink. And from there I headed off through the centre of the town and across the Saone.

And I don’t recognise a thing about Macon these days. I’d be totally lost wandering around there today, it’s changed that much.

The road out was uneventful, but quite slow behind all of these grockles in their mobile homes. And also due to the multitude of roadworks and diversions that interrupted everything. Not to mention The Lady Who Lives In The SatNav who took me on the scenic route through Bourg-en-Bresse.

But at Lons-le-Saunier it all went horribly wrong. Too busy trying to beat a long line of lorries across a roundabout I must have missed my turning and ended up on a road that I’ve never travelled before.

It took me deep into the Jura Mountains and right over the top of a series of mountain passes, at one of which I stopped to make lunch.

We crossed into Switzerland at a frontier post that I never knew existed and round another mountain pass that presented me with this beautiful view of Lake Geneva and what I was expecting to be Lausanne.

And I would certainly have known if I had seen this view before because this really was so stunning. I joined another pile of grockles busily photographing the scene.

But it wasn’t Lausanne at all as I found out as I dropped down to the lake, but Noyon, home of UEFA.

And I couldn’t remember exactly where Noyon was, so I guessed, guessed wrong, and ended up going about half an hour in the wrong direction before I realised.

So back into Noyon and back out the other side, in plenty of time to hit the 17:00 rush-hour queue at Lausanne, where I could leisurely take photos out of Caliburn’s window while we waited in traffic jams.

I’d been feeling quite ill for the last couple of hours and had been wishing that I could stop. But once I got beyond Lausanne I found my second wind.

Here I could put my foot down and I began to eat up the miles. And it was amazing just how quickly and how far we managed to move.

But another major road-works and diversion meant that there was no time to reach my favourite motel opposite IKEA on the outskirts of Zurich so I pulled up at a guesthouse in a small town off the beaten track.

Switzerland is frightfully expensive so having negotiated a price of €60 cash (I didn’t have any Swiss money – that’s something else stuck back in Virlet) I wasn’t expecting much.

And it’s just as well, because I didn’t get it. This place would have been fine 50 years ago, but they might have changed the carpets and the electrical wiring.

For tea tonight I have a tin of potatoes, a tin of mixed veg, a tin of lentils, some gravy browning and a slow cooker. and furthermore I managed to make it plug in (I forgot about Swiss plugs, didn’t I?) And it was all very delicious too.

I ended the night with a shower, and now I’m having another early night.

It’s been another long day.

Saturday 15th August 2015 – NIGHTMARE AT DORVAL

We had another “sleep of the dead” last night – this change of air must be doing me good. So after a shower I went off to see if my room rate included breakfast, but of course it didn’t. Whatever was I thinking of? Breakfast is another 11:00CHF. It’s a good job that I picked up those bread rolls last night.

On my way back to my room though, I couldn’t help but admire the view from the window right outside my door. I thought that I could hear aeroplanes close by.

So in a minute, I’m off back to the airport even though there is hours before my flight. I might find a power socket somewhere that I can plug into – there are none here of course.

The tram came pretty quickly (so quickly that I forgot to photograph it) and the journey was quite simple. And while I was travelling to the airport, I came to a conclusion. My really bad experience last night was caused by nothing more than my lack of preparation – and the hotel can take most of the blame for this (just for a change).

Had it been clear in the hotel’s publicity that there was no shuttle to the hotel (but trams 10 and 12, and bus 510 pass in front of the hotel and a 24-hour bus pass can be obtained … etc), that breakfast was 11CHF extra, and that a Swiss adapter was needed for the electricity, then I would have been prepared, and my stay there would have been quite acceptable, instead of the totally chaotic mess.

But to give you one idea of the hotel, the coffee machine in the hotel sold at 3:00CHF. The same machine installed by the same company selling coffee to a captive audience at the airport was selling at 2:50CHF.

Negotiating the maze that is the airport is by no means easy, and we had another pig-ignorant security guard who doesn’t understand the word "please". All these people who were kicked around and bullied at school when they were kids have really been able to wreak their revenge on society with the massive expansion of what is laughingly called "security". The place was totally packed with people too

But on thing will tell you all that you need to know about the mentality of the Swiss – the "security" screening decants you straight into a huge duty-free shop.

And the number of people wandering around the airport carrying "duty-free" carrier bags shows that this shameless selling technique really works. It would probably work even better at the other side of the security check-in too, especially if it were to sell tranquilisers to calm the nerves (and pickaxe handles to deal with the security staff).

I’m here watching them load up my plane. It’s an Airbus A330-300. And what’s more, I’ve even found a plug that will charge up my laptop.

In fact it didn’t take too much finding – rows and rows of empty seats all over the airport but just one row every now and again with hordes of people congregated around it

Boarding the plane was straightforward and, much to my surprise, the plane seemed to be almost new. Luxury wasn’t the word and the flight over to Montreal, although the longest that I’ve been on to date, was very comfortable. My meals were excellent too. The entertainment was not really my choice – I was even offered the chance to see The Great Escape
– however it wasn’t Christmas so I didn’t bother. Instead, I had Shaun the Sheep, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
.

One downside of the flight, nothing to do with the company of course, is that my neighbour’s idea of personal hygene was even less than my own.

With a window seat, the views outside were superb. With the airport being busy, I’ve never seen a queue like this of aeroplanes lined up in the queue waiting to take off. It was like the M25 at rush hour with all of them here.

The plane in front of us was something quite big and we had a wonderful view from right behind of it taking off. It’s probably the most impressive sight that I’ve ever seen, and there wasn’t much room between the tail of the plane and the ground. You can understand why so many tail strikes are recorded.

Having flown over a great big pile of tundra, we hit the St Lawrence River right at Sept Iles, and I recognised it immediately from the air.

The bay itself was easy to identify, with its seven island and a pile of big ships anchored there, but what gave the place away was the huge Alouette aluminium smelting works and the port facilities that I’d seen in 2012 on my trip up the coast.

I’d wanted to see them from inside, but failing that, a view from the air is good enough.

Another thing that I have mentioned in the past are the huge LaFarge quarries on the outskirts of the city. They are not very easy to photograph from outside, as I had discovered once when I had driven past them, due to all kinds of fencing, lack of parking and so on.

However, here we were this afternoon, flying right over the top and here I was, sitting by a window seat. This was far too good an opportunity to miss, wasn’t it?

But don’t get me started on the ariport and Immigration, will you? Every day, during the mid-afternoon, about 20 long-haul jets arrive at Pierre Trudeau Airport, Montreal. If they are all full, that’s about 6,000 passengers (plus however many come in from other destinations).

The Canadian Government’s response is to have just FOUR (and for a short while, just THREE) immigration officers on duty.

My ‘plane was about 8th in, and I had a wait of 2.5 hours. I feel really sorry for the people who came in near the end and who were stacked up on the balcony because the immigration hall was full. Nowhere to sit, no water to drink, not possible to visit the bathroom. I could go on and on … "not with a bayonet through your neck you couldn’t" – ed.

Luckily I had some good music to keep me company, and that always calms me down. But finding, once through Immigration, that all of our suitcases had been taken off the carousels and dumped on the floor (and no-one knew where they were), and discovering that I’d left my cap on the ‘plane too, and I was off again, wasn’t I?.

Luckily the hotel bus was already there so I had to take my leave of my delightful companion with whom I’d been spending a little time just recently since I encountered her in the queue and we drove the half-mile to my hotel down at the end of the runway.

Having checked in, next task was to hit the city, and there’s a bus stop right outside the hotel. The bus 202 took me from here down to the Metro at DuCollege, and the metro took me to Snowdon where I made a stunning discovery – an Indian restaurant. From Calcutta, they are, but it was the nicest Indian meal that I had had outside Stoke on Trent. Beautiful, it was.

Bad news, though, is that my little ice-cream place on the Cote-des Neiges has closed down. A tragedy! So I had to make do with some mandarins from the outdoor office.

Getting back from the town is not quite so easy – I have to go miles to find an overpass across the Cote-de-Liesse, but I came across some nefarious, nocturnal dealings here. There’s a whole pile of school buses, all from Nova Scotia and all on temporary licence plates, parked down the road. The drivers are, apparently, staying in my motel.

It seems that they are all time-expired (you can only use school buses for a limited number of years) and are being traded in for new ones, to be driven back to Halifax.

And back here, 22:00 (04:00 in real time), I just crashed out. And that was that.

PS- my phone number seems to be working, much to my surprise. It’s the same three figures as the last 4 years, but then 740-6186. If you don’t have the first three numbers, send me a message.

Friday 14th August 2015 – ZURICH IN THE RAIN

Having crashed out at some silly times like 22:00 last night, and having slept the sleep of the dead, I was up and about, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, by 06:00, admiring the view from my hotel window. And a nice warm shower quickly brought me round into the Land of the Living.

By 06:30 I had finished watching the film that I started yesterday, then edited all of the photos, uploaded them onto the web and then brought my blog

up to date, all by 08:30.

I’ve had a good breakfast too – I’m not sure at all that there will be something for me to eat on the plane to Zurich and while I’m now in possession of a fruit loaf and some biscuits (as well as a bottle of water), thanks to the Carrefour Hypermarket in the gallery down the road, on these kinds of journeys the plan is to eat when I can.

I’ve uploaded a pile of radio programmes to the laptop too, to refresh the radio library, and with a few other things that needed to be done, I was out of the hotel and gone by 10:45.

At the station (the other side of the station) there was a tram already parked at the platform ready to go to the airport so even though there’s a €1:00 supplement (on what is already a steep fare) for tickets bought on board, I wasn’t going to hang about. A bird in the hand … and all of that.

Lyon airport is something of a maze, and to make matters worse, you have to look long and hard for a baggage trolley. I couldn’t find one, and at first I thought that they simply didn’t have one, but I later saw someone at the check-in with one so they must exist somewhere. But the terminal is big, clean, light, airy, and there are not too many people about. At the baggage check-in, I didn’t even have to queue. There was an assistant waiting for me.

Even the passage through “security” was relatively stress-free, although the woman at the scanner had a good moan about my camera. I think however that that is more to do with the fact that she was of the moaning type, rather than for any other good purpose.

As for our plane – well, what can I say? It was nominally a Dash 8-400, built by Bombardier in Canada, but you don’t need to be an aircraft expert to recognise this for what it is – a Vickers Vimy.

Orville and Wilbur Wright were at the controls, Ameilia Earhart was sitting at the back, and I had to move Glenn Miller’s sandwiches off my seat. That’s the kind of plane that it was.

I shan’t say much about the flight. The events speak for themselves. We had to wear our seatbelts throughout the entire flight and they refused to serve tea and coffee at any moment during the flight. All of the kids were screaming during the flight, and one or two of the adults were too. Not for the faint-hearted, this particular flight.

And as for the landing – well, we didn’t actually land. It was more like we were shot down over the airport. But even that didn’t deter the passengers, many of whom rose from their knees to give the pilot a round of applause – presumably to celebrate the end of the flight

And it was here that everything started to go wrong. I was waiting for over an hour for the hotel shuttle bus to arrive, which it never did. And no-one answered the hotel telephone. Eventually, another hotel bus driver told me that there wasn’t one for the Ibis Budget Hotel. He offered to take me for 20:00 CHF

However I’m not easily taken in by this kind of thing and I walked down to the bus station. Here, one friendly river with whom I had quite a chat with whatever German I could remember. He sent me over to the 510 bus an while the driver was a little on the grumpy side, he put me off at the right place and pointed out the way to the hotel from there – all of 50 metres.

At the hotel, there’s no electrics for guests. All of the sockets are these two-pin mini-continental sockets and you need to buy an adapter – cost 10CHF.

We had a few words about that, and at the end of our debate she finished with "is there anything else that I can do for you?"
Well, she was in her early 20s, long blond hair, a nice shape, but I remembered where I was."No thanks. You’ll probably want me to pay for it".

When the rain stopped (did I say that it was p155ing down?) I walked back to the airport for a recce. I ended up walking past the car park for a hire company. And here parked at the back was an old Land Rover snowplough that had clearly better days.

In fact, this is quite a rarity here in Switzerland. There are all kinds of old cars in the country but mostly quite expensive and fully-restored. I can’t say that I have ever seen a vehicle in this kind of condition lying about like this.

Yes, I really did walk back to the airport. It took me all of about 15 minutes. And I’m glad that I did because it gave me an opportunity to photograph it

I discovered that a 24-hour ticket would cost me 13:20CHF to cover all of the zones that I need to get into the city, and so I duly did. Had I done that earlier, instead of paying the bus driver for the single journey, I would have been quids-in. But you have to pay to learn.

I found an all-night supermarket, lots of water, and a main-line railway station where, inter alia a train goes every evening to Budapest. I made a note of that. But I’ll tell you something – I was astonished by the number of beggars (mostly young, fit types) loitering in the streets.

Another thing that I noticed was that allbut one of my night-time images of Zurich didn’t come out. I’d gone into the city with the intention of trying out the camera on the phone at night in an urban environment, and the result has not been succeesful. The daytime ones work fine as you can see, because everything to date has been taken with that.

And on the way in, I noticed at the Haldenbach tram stop an imbiss type of place so I leapt off the tram (such are the advantages of a 24-hour tram ticket) and yes, they did indeed sell falafel.

So I’m fed and watered and ready to bed. But I’m struggling to come to terms with Swiss prices.

Sunday 17th May 2015 – WELL, WASN’T THAT EXPENSIVE?

There I was, deep in the arms of Morpheusin the small hours in my little rest area at the side of a Swiss Autoroute when there was a banging on the door and a cry of “Kontrole!”

Yes, the Swiss police are not noted for their sense of humour but then they do have a job to do, I suppose, and I duly presented my papers.

While they were being checked, I had a lengthy chat with one of the other officers about this and that, and then it came down to the crunch “where’s your vignette?”

If you use a Swiss autoroute you have to buy a special sticker to give you the necessary entitlement, and in all my years of travelling I’ve never ever bothered with it. But sooner or later I was bound to be picked up, and sleeping in a rest area on the autoroute made it an odds-on certainty.

No complaints from me about it, although it stopped me going back to sleep again. And while I was lying there in half a daze, it occurred to me that I’d carried on a conversation for about 15 minutes in German without even pausing for breath. Things are looking up!

Next morning in the bright sunshine, a took a photo of the rest area just to prove that I had been here, and then I made myself a coffee. Nothing else though, because I realised that I had forgotten to buy anything for breakfast

I was definitely having a bad morning.

The irony of all of this is that just about 15 minutes later, The Lady Who Lives In The Sat-Nav directed me off the autoroute and into the Jura mountains for a leisurely drive home, most of which was completely uneventful except for at the boulangerie where some woman moaned like hell because I had the nerve to complain that she had blocked me in on the car park. Silly four-legged animal well-known for giving a high-quality dairy drink!

My road back took me via Macon and that gave me an idea. I telephoned my friend Jean-Marc who lives up in the hills at the back of the town to see if he was in for visitors, and to give him an opportunity to flee the country before I arrived.

We first met when we were both 16 – Crewe was twinned with Macon and we exchanged families during one summer. I went to live there and he went to live in Crewe. And we met up again last year under the most bizarre circumstances, as long-term readers of this rubbish will well-recall.

We had a long chat and discussed old times for quite a while, and drank a couple of cups of coffee, for which I was very grateful.

And then I had a completely uneventful drive back home, arriving at about 20:05.

And as Barry Hay once famously said during a live Golden Earring concert on Scheveningen Beach back in 199(3?) – “let me tell you one thing, man, it’s always good to be back home!”

-2

Saturday 16th May 2015 – IN SWITZERLAND

It’s taken me long enough to find a ferry on this journey, but nevertheless here I am.

This is the ferry across the Bodensee, or Lake Constance for the English-speakers amongst you and it sails from Friedrichshafen in Germany to Romanshorn in Switzerland and I am about to make my triumphal entry therein – the first time on this journey.

The waterfront is quite modern too, and unashamedly so. and not the result of wanton vandalism on behalf of the civic authorities but wanton vandalism on behalf of RAF Bomber Command in World War II.

Not that too many people can have too many complaints about that for once (although they might protest at the lack of accuracy) because there are at least two good reasons why the town of Friedrichshafen was a legitimate military target in World War II.

And indeed not to mention World War I because the first ever bombing raid in World War I took place here just a matter of a couple of weeks after the start of the war took place here and given the primitive state of the equipment and navigation, was a stunning success that matches anything that the Dambusters could come up with in World War II.

We’ll be going for an inspection of these two legitimate targets in due course.

But it took me ages to arrive at the Bodensee as I was being continually interrupted.

This is a suspension bridge over the River Argen. according to a sign at the bridge, it was built in 1896/97 under Kaiser Wilhelm, and that shows you just what a really big man he must have been because the bridge really is quite impressive.

Today it’s flanked by a railway bridge and a modern pre-stressed concrete road bridge, but this one outshines them all.

The village of Eriskirch a little farther along the roa was full of surprises, and this is just one of them.

It’s one of our old friends a wooden covered bridge. We encounter dozens, if not hundreds of these on our journeys around North America, but Europe has its fair share to offer as we have seen in the past, and as we shall indeed see again before we are much older. I would have gone for a wander through here, but it was closed for repair.

And that’s not all. Eriskirck also came up with a Ford Cortina Mk V too, excet that this is a mainland European version called the Taunus.

This was parked in a yard with half a dozen other noteworthy cars. I gave it a good going-over and I reckon that a good weekend’s work would have this back on the road. There didn’t seem to be much wrong with it and it was solid in all the suspect places

It’s amazing the things that you encounter on your travels but seeing this flying over me as I travelled further west reminded me of what I was doing down here in the first place.

And that’s just a baby too. could you imagine something maybe five or six times as big flying over your head, because that’s what used to happen in World War I when these monsters were legendary.

Yes, well done that man. It is indeed a Zeppelin and here on the outskirts of the town of Friedrichshafen are the headquarters of the company.

On a Bank Holiday weekend it was expecting too much for me to be able to go for a trip around, much as I tried, but I had a nosey about instead.

And my hat went off to the intrepid pilots of November 1914 who flew here in rickety string and canvas biplanes who managed to fly here from France and hurl a bomb into a Zeppelin shed, even if they didn’t manage to accomplish very much

I did say that there were a couple of legitimate military targets here in Friedrichshafen. The second one was the Dornier aircraft factory here.

Dorniers were known mainly for their seaplanes and they were built and tested down on the waterfront, hence the bombing raids down there. They also made bombers, the Do-17 and Do-217 but manufacture of those was dispersed throughout Germany

The only aircraft here from before the war are those that have come from elsewhere, such as the flying boat which, if we are to believe the registration number on it, is that flown on the Amundsen expedition to the North Pole in 1925 but which I strongly suspect is a replica.

No Do-17 though – not even a replica and I found that very disappointing. I can understand there not being a real one, although if they made an effort they could certainly find some bits, but no replica is a shame.

Back on the ferry now and I forgot to take any details of the boat upon which I was sailing, which isn’t like me at all.

Anyway, it was a boat that looks very much like this one. This is sailing in the opposite direction to us and while they might not look very big, they are ten times bigger than the Hatteras Ferry boats that sail across the Hurricane belt in the Carolinas.

I’m back in Germany again and that’s the River Rhine just there.

The town in the background is called Diessenhofen, a beautiful little walled town that is first recorded in 757, although there are considerable remains from much earlier than this, even as far back as the Stone Age, and a substantial Roman hoard was discovered here.

To cross the Rhine is a substantial covered bridge, and this was part of the secret of the wealth of the town – the tolls that were generated by people wishing to cross the river.

Today though, there are no tolls, and not even a border post, despite Switzerland not being in the EU. I simply wandered across unchallenged.

But why I crossed over back there was so that I could cross back here. That’s the border and the Rhine is behind me. Theres a little finger of Switzerland that is north of the Rhine, near the village of Ramsen and this was the favourite spot for escaping prisoners of war to cross the border from Germany, where they didn’t have to contend with the Rhine.

On the German side of the border here, the guard was asleep and in the Swiss hut, the place was deserted. And the border was so unguarded (well, relatively, anyway) during the war that one escapee passed through and out the other side where he was recaptured, without even realising that he had been in Switzerland.

Ive come here to see the Rhine falls at Schaffhausen. This was somewhere else where I came on my honeymoon with Nerina and with it being mid October, the river was fairly low.

This time of year is the peak time to see the falls as the last of the snow melt roars through and it certainly was impressive from up here.

From close to, while they may not be as impressive as the Niagara Falls, they are certainly as good as anything else that Europe has to offer and it’s well worth the trip to come to see them, even if you do have to fight your way through the participants of a bus trip from the local mosque.

But be warned – it’s quite a hike back to the top again so I was glad that it was late evening when I passed by here.

I now try to find some accommodation for the night and I’m not very successful. I forgot about the Bank Holiday weekend and everywhere is either full or closed.

I do manage to find an old Renault van from the 1920s, in a very sorry state, so it isn’t all doom and gloom, despite the fast-approaching night.

In the end, I give up and head for the autoroute. There will be a rest area there and I’ll sleep in Ccaliburn tonight.

-2

Friday 4th July 2014 – WOW

I have never seen rain quite like this. Diving into Lausanne at about 18:30 this evening the sky went the blackest that I have ever seen it. A high wind sprung up out of nowhere and the next minute we got the lot. You haven’t seen anything like this rain because I know that I haven’t.

It was impossible to see more than about 5 yards in front of your face with the rain teeming down and bouncing off the road and every time I put my foot on the brake about 50 litres of water cascaded off Caliburn’s roof down across the windscreen. At least he enjoyed it – he’s not been as clean as this for quite a long time.

The rain was so bad that it was not possible to see any hotels (if there were any at the side of the road) until I reached Geneva and the first hotel that I tried (CHF120) made me give up and I’m now in a layby at Valleiry, somewhere between Annemasse and Bourg-en-Bresse.

I’ll be sleeping in the van tonight again and this has taken some effort to arrange as across the road from my motel last night is the Zurich IKEA and there was a sale on. You’ll have to wait until I unpack before you see what I bought but I spent CHF179:00 there. That’s not including the breakfast that I had there either. For CHF3:50 I had two bread rolls, some jam, some juice and some coffee.

But a word of warning about IKEA in Zurich. You have to pay for the parking, even if you have just spent a fortune in there. That’s something of a rip-off if you ask me.

So that was my morning gone and then I headed off for the border via Luzern, Bern and Lausanne. And a torrential rainstorm. And wih a bit of luck, God’s help and a Bobby, I might even be home tomorrow night.

-5

Thursday 3rd July 2014 – WHEN I SET OUT FROM BENDERN …

… There was 670 kms to travel in order to reach home. By the time I’d done a day’s driving, there is all of 520 kms left to travel and I’m about 10 kms from Zurich airport.

You might wonder how this could possibly be, but it all went wrong about 15 minutes after leaving the hotel. However before I get too far ahead of myself, just as you would expect seeing as how today is the day that I’m moving on, we are having a gorgeous day of clear blue skies and not a cloud in the sky. What a contrast from yesterday when I was walking around in the rain.

So to resume my story, there was a guy in uniform stopping the traffic and interrogating the drivers. Some he was allowing to continue, and others he was directing elsewhere. When it came to my turn he asked me where I was going. When I replied “France”, we had quite an interesting and lengthy discussion of which I caught about one word in 20, but enough to discover that there had been a landslide in the mountain pass that I needed to take. He recommended a diversion over another mountain pass that involved a detour of about 60kms.

Off I said and eventually found myself on a Swiss autoroute – without a vignette of course because I had no intention of driving on the autoroutes here. Realising my mistake I took the next exit, where there was of course a police barrage. Having dealt with that, and luckily the police didn’t notice the absence of vignette, I took the wrong turning at the roundbout and ended up climbing up the side of a mountain.

This turned out to be a dead end, after a drive of 12kms, but at the far end of the car park is one of the best views that I have ever had – 1700-odd metres up in the Alps. The Walensee is down there at the bottom of the valley and way, way in the distance is Lake Zurich.

It was such a gorgeous view and such a lovely day that I sat there for a couple of hours and read a book, being joined for a while by a group of old ladies out for a walk

That took me up to lunchtime quite nicely and so I descended the mountain and found a bakery where I bought myself a loaf.

Next stop was at a layby by the side of the Walensee with a mainline railway line just below me. Here I stopped and made myself a butty and read another book, watching the trains go by. After all, it was far too hot to drive anywhere by now. The temperature was registering 34°C

Heading off towards Zurich I hit the start of the rush-hour traffic and it was stop-start for about 15kms and that got me fed up in the heat.

Looking around for a diversion, I noticed a ferry going across the Lake. As you know by now, I can’t resist a ferry at any time, and in this heat there was no question of anything else.

It was gorgeous on the water with a cool breeze blowing, and it was a shame that the crossing came to an end. Mind you, the traffic had calmed down a little and negotiating the streets of Zurich wasn’t quite as difficult as it might have been.

On the western edge of the city I came across a motel and here I am. A whole day and just 150 kms closer to home. It’ll take me a week to get home at this rate.

-1

Tuesday 1st July 2014 – THERE’S ONE THING ABOUT MOUNTAIN AIR …

… and that I was out like a light at 22:00. Didn’t feel a thing at all. And I slept until about 06:30. And I was busy too during the night. I can’t remember where I was (it might have been Electricity Street in Crewe) but I was working for some organisation that was doing something with the public and while our office still stayed in the same place, our job of interacting with the public meant that we had to go to the local shopping precinct that was 25 minutes away on a tram.

We needed a girl to come with us and we asked one of them but she was proving to be difficult. She said that she couldn’t possibly be ready for a 09:00 start as she didn’t arrive at the office until 08:30. I explained about the 25 minute tram ride and how not only were your travelling expenses reimbursed but so was your travelling time, but she was still being difficult about it.

So wide awake, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed I went down to breakfast. And on leaving I was presented with the bill for my evening meal, room and breakfast.

For my three-star hotel etc, it came to a total of €60 and so I’ll be stopping here again, that’s for sure. I don’t think that I’ve ever before slept in such comfort at such a price, and made so welcome too.

Leaving the hotel, I set out to assail the Stelvio Pass, all 2700-odd metres of it. I’ve never been up it before and so I didn’t know what to expect, and I wasn’t disappointed.

From Trafoi the road zig-zagged up to the summit via a series of hairpin bends. I don’t know how many there were, but I lost count at about 47 and there were still plenty to go.

The road itself dates from just after the Napoleonic War when Austria had possession of some territory south of the Pass and needed a road to connect with it. Although there have been many improvements to the road since those days, the actual trace of the road is still the same and that’s something that is quite astonishing.

Mind you, it’s not easy to see how else they could do it.

No vehicle longer than 10 metres is permitted on the road and I can’t say that I’m surprised.

This bus here was having quite a struggle upthe hill, not just against the hairpin bends but also against the traffic coming down the hill that, for the most part, refused to give the driver the room to manoeuvre.

There was plenty of snow at the top of the pass and again, I’m not surprised by that either. We’re at 2700-odd metres of altitude here as I said before, and you may remember that it was snowing in the Tyrol the day before yesterday at half of this altitude.

As an aside, this was once the border between Italy and the Austrian Empire after the reunification of Italy in the 1860s and in World War I there was actually fighting up here at the pass.

Still, Caliburn enjoyed a good wander around in the snow.It’s been a good few weeks since he’s been in it. But who would have expected to have seen him up to his axles in snow on the 1st of July?

Down the hill from the Stelvio Pass there’s a fork in the road and turning right, I’m in Switzerland. Much to my surprise, there’s no border controls here (Switzerland isn’t, of course, in the EU). I suppose they think that if you’ve made the climb all the way up the Stelvio then you deserve the right of entry.

It’s all downhill from here until you need to climb up and over the Fluela Pass to Davos and Klosters. And so what am I doing in a train then? It looks like the Channel Tunnel train but I’m a long way from there.

The simple answer to this is that the Fluela is a pretty desperate road. It takes about 60 or so kilometres and no end of climbing and descending through a series of hairpin bends. However, there’s a 19-kilometre rail tunnel where, for a not-insignificant price, you can make the journey for about a tenth of the time.

It’s a straight road from there to Liechstenstein and the drive there was much easier than finding a hotel. The first hotel that I tried wanted CHF199 for a night and they can forget that. Then there was a whole series of hotels that were closed. Then we had one that was full (no surprise, that) and he referred me to another two – both of which were closed.

I gave up on the idea of staying for a night in Leichtenstein and headed for the Swiss border. And there, just on the Liechtenstein side of the border I found a hotel. Quite basic but B&B is only CHF70 per night.

And so I’m staying here maybe two nights and tomorrow I’ll go for a bus ride into Vaduz. There’s a bus depot right across the road from here.

Monday 30th June 2014 – THIS IS THE VIEW …

… from my bedroom window.

Not my bedroom window from last night, but my bedroom window from this evening. For I am in another hotel. This is actually in Trafoi which is a tiny village in the Alto Adige, the Southern Tyrol, in Italy. It’s halfway up the Stelvio Pass on the way to St Moritz and Switzerland. This was a Shearings destination from the 1980s and didn’t last long, not the least of the reasons being that to road up here from the Reschen Pass is pretty dreadful.

Anyway, it was another item on my list of places to visit – and here I am.

Even more surprisingly, this is actually the first hotel in which I have ever stayed in Italy. All my previous visits have been either with friends, with Nerina’s family or in a nunnery, and I bet you think that I am joking too. "You’re forgetting your skiing trip with Anna in 1996 " – ed.

The Alto Adige is a weird place to be. It was formerly part of the Austrian Empire until 1919 when it passed to Italy in the peace treaty between the two countries after World War I.

After World War II it remained with Italy, presumably due to the fact that Italy had ended the war on the winning side, but you would have a hard job convincing the inhabitants. Here’s a German flag flying outside the house of one of the inhabitants.

Not only that, most of the signs here are in German even though we are in Italy, and the official roadsigns show the town names in both German (which is displayed first) and Italian.

I’ve also seen grafitti to suggest that at least some of the people here are interested in independance.

The border between Austria and the former Italian city-states has always been fluid. This is Festung Nauders, the Nauders fortress dating from the end of the 1830s and there’s another building of a completely different style just across the road and dating from 1840.

It’s not too difficult to imagine that the reason for these two buildings being here in the Reschen Pass is that this was at one time a border crossing following one of the frontier adjustments.

Today the building is a military museum and outside is a display of tanks. The Reschen Pass was heavily fortified and many of the German defences still remain today despite the best attempts of everyone to blow them up and remove them.

The Pass was to be defended every inch during the last few weeks of April 1945 as it is the soft underbelly of the German Reich on a direct route to Munich. However, events at Berlin forestalled everything.

This morning in a torrential downpour I went for a walk around Lech to see what was what. As I said yesterday, I was here in 1988 but I didn’t recognise the place. It’s changed out of all recognition since those days.

I didn’t stay long either because the weather really was quite dreadful too and it was no fun walking around in all of this.

Next stop was Pfunds and this was another place that Nerina and I had visited – and on more than one occasion too. We spent a night here on our honeymoon while we were on our way to Italy and if she were to pass by this place today she wouldn’t recognise it, apart from the name painted on the wall.

Still, 25 years is a long time in tourism and time won’t stand still for anyone.

Not too far away is a little enclave of Switzerland called Samnaun. It was formerly isolated from the main part of Switzerland and so was a duty-free haven. However there is now a road from Switzerland that connects with the area but the duty-free status remains.

Not that is does any good because the place is full of Porsches and the like buying up the perfumes – the entire place smells like a tart’s boudoir – and there is nothing of anything at all that might be of interest to me.

I come here for the views, which are certainly spectacular as you can see for yourself. There isn’t much like anywhere in the Alps quite like this.

Another thing that brings me here is the diesel. 114 cents per litre in Euros (it’s Swiss currency here of course) and that’s the second-cheapest that I have found so far in Europe after Andorra in March.

From here I headed back down to the Reschen Pass and you know the story from here on in.

Friday 27th June 2014 – IT DIDN’T TAKE ME LONG, DID IT?

There I was this morning after another excellent night’s sleep in this comfy little spec at Meersburg (and I’ll stop here again, no problem), having breakfast of coffee and half a baguette smeared with strawberry jam, when I began to notice a regular stream of small ships sailing back and to across the lake.

That can only mean one thing – that there’s a ferry connection from somewhere over here to somewhere over there and so Yours Truly set out to investigate.

But did I say a good night’s sleep? I certainly did. And not only that I was on my travels again. I was watching some British World War I cavalry charge up this steep hill to attack a German post there and while they were all almost swept away and almost everyone was unhorsed, they carried the position whilst a few of their number tried to round up the loose horses. I remember saying to myself is that had the cavalry been followed up by a regiment of infantry they could have swept on right behind the lines and caused chaos.

Nothing new in this though – at the Battle of the Somme a detachment of infantry did succeed in breaking the lines in one place on the first day and had the cavalry, standing by in the vicinity, been sent in to exploit the breakthrough, they could have cleared up too. But that was a lost opportunity.

From there, Cecile and I went off to look at the animals at the shelter and an old black-and-white collie fell for me and so I took it home and we lived happily ever after. And there is nothing more unlikely than this, as you all know.

I found the ferry terminal, just a couple of kms down the road and €11:50 later, Strawberry Moose, Caliburn and I were sailing to Konstanz on the other side of the lake. Never a good idea, as you know, for me to find a ferry . After all, it makes me cross.

Getting to Knostanz was one thing – finding the correct border crossing into Switzerland (well, I am here!) was quite something else entirely and I actually crossed the frontier three times before I could find the correct road out of the town. A leisurely amble then took me along the southern shore of the Bodensee and eventually across into Austria at Bregenz.

Bregenz had the first (of many) traffic jams and so I didn’t get to see too much of the town but then a drive over the mountains, into southern Germany and a stop for lunch did the business.

On the way over the mountains between Austria and Germany, I encountered these two vehicles. Single-seater machines and equipped like proper little cars, with steering wheels and pedals. But judging by the wiring that I could see inside the vehicles, they may well be electric cars. However there was no-one around to ask.

Mind you, judging by the names of the vehicles – the red one being a City-El and the white one being a Mini-El-City, electricity is a good guess.

Onto the Autoroute after that, and wasn’t that a big mistake? Say what you like about Germans, when they organise something, they organise it in spades and the traffic jam on the autoroute was a belter. We must have sat for 2 hours without turning a wheel at one point. Stop-start all of the 113 kms to Munich and then fighting the rush hour traffic out of the city to Hans’ place.

So now I’m here, eventually, and after a decent meal and some live music in a pub nearby, I’m off to bed. A shakedown on the sofa. I wonder if it will be as comfortable as my last couple of nights in Caliburn?

-2

Wednesday 29th September 2010 part II – WELL, HERE I AM.

In a motel on the edge of the town of Kitchener in Ontario. $62 plus taxes and you don’t get much for your money.

But having been into the city, tried unsuccessfully to withdraw cash at three banks with three different bank cards and missing my way back to the motorway, I was ready for a good sleep. Mainly because I hadn’t had one on the plane.

Some blasted infant started to scream the moment the plane took off from Zurich and didn’t stop until we landed at Toronto. And at one time it was screaming so much that it gave itself a nosebleed. I was thoroughly fed up with that.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been up, showered, dressed and breakfasted before 08:00 – I’ll tell you that. And up before the alarm as well. Well, breakfasted after a fashion with the rest of the biscuits from my bag – and no coffee either. With the prices that they were charging I’d need a mortgage for that.

And on the airport shuttle bus some American got on board with two of the biggest suitcases I had ever seen, even bigger than mine – while his wife stood and watched him. I couldn’t resist it –
“Wouldn’t it have been easier just to buy the kids a ticket?” I asked him.

And as the bus pulled in to Charles de Gaulle Terminal 2 his wife stood and watched as he struggled one of the suitcases off. And he had to hurry to take the second one off before the bus pulled off to the next terminal. If she had been my wife she would have had a smack in the mouth by now. It wasn’t so much the standing and watching that did it for me – she may well have been disabled or something, you can never tell, but it was the way that she was harassing him while he was trying to do it.

Once inside the airport we are subjected to what can only be called "Skyway Robbery". I’d already lost some dosh in a vending machine at the entrance and it took me ages of wandering around the concourse before I found some nice friendly woman with a coffee trolley who sold me a nice cup of hot steaming strong coffee for a very respectable €1:70. Yes, it can be done, but you need to persevere.

The final words that I gave to Strawberry Moose
before we parted were
“Are you going to be all right, stowed away in the suitcase?”
“Just bung me a bottle of whisky” he said “and I’ll be absolutely fine”
“Badger off!” I exclaimed. “I know you! We won’t be halfway across the Atlantic before you start singing bawdy songs”
“Once we’are halfway over the Atlantic it won’t really matter. They aren’t going to stop in mid-air to search the baggage now, are they?”

He did ask me though if we were flying by Lear Jet but I did explain that it’s spelt L-E-A-R.And in any case, it was a nice, comfortable Airbus 320 that took us over to Zurich.

My only complaint was that there was nothing for me to eat. somehow my request for a vegan meal doesn’t apply to snacks served on short-haul flights.

They said that out plane from Zurich to Toronto was a Boeing 777. Mnd you, it looked more like a 767 to me but I suppose that they ought to know.

And as we flew over Greenland I had my vegan meal. Couscous and roasted vegetables. Not as nice as Liz’s but then again, nothing is.

But you missed all of the excitement. When we were at about 20,000 feet we had the safety announcement. And one of the things that they said was “if you are sitting by an emergency door you must be able to open it”. And I didn’t see the point of that – they didn’t half yell at me when I tried.

As well as that, we had another exciting incident. I always understood that there had to be a good vertical and horizontal clearance between two planes on the same course ever since those two airliners collided over the Grand Canyon years ago.

But there’s not much in the way of separation between us and this Thomas Cook flight that we overtook in mid-Atlantic.

But that’s enough of that. I remained inconspicuous for the rest of the flight with my head down. And at least the skriking infant drowned out the bawdy songs coming from the hold.

We made it in one piece as far as Toronto where the screaming brat finally shut up. I’d made the most of the journey by watching a couple of Hopalong Cassidy films and the new Robin Hood. At least the headphones kept out the screaming.

And the queue into the country was miles long. Half a dozen flights from Europe had come in at the same time as, as usual, the airport wasn’t prepared for them

But good fortune followed me to the car hire place.

They didn’t have a compact car so they offered me an upgrade. After much negotiation we settled on a Chrysler PT Cruiser. Ive always loved these vehicles, ever since they first came out. They reminded me very much of the Ford Anglias and Prefects that my father had when we were kids. And it’s been a lifetime ambition to drive on. So I was more-than-happy with this.

And so in my Chrysler PT Cruiser which I have named Casey (check his numberplate) Strawberry Moose and I head off into the sunset – going west you might well say, along the motorway in the general direction of Windsor, Ontario.

I’m looking for a cash point and then I’ll be looking for a motel. I won’t be doing all of the trip tonight. I’m thoroughly exhausted after the events of today.

-1

EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality

Category Archives: Switzerland

Saturday 25th June 2022 – I’M GOING INTO …

Thursday 30th July 2020 – STRAWBERRY MOOSE …

Wednesday 29th July 2020 – TONIGHT I’M IN …

Wednesday 27th June 2018 – WHAT A DREADFUL …

Tuesday 26th June 2018 – I DON’T KNOW …

Saturday 15th August 2015 – NIGHTMARE AT DORVAL

Friday 14th August 2015 – ZURICH IN THE RAIN

Sunday 17th May 2015 – WELL, WASN’T THAT EXPENSIVE?

Saturday 16th May 2015 – IN SWITZERLAND

Friday 4th July 2014 – WOW

Thursday 3rd July 2014 – WHEN I SET OUT FROM BENDERN …

Tuesday 1st July 2014 – THERE’S ONE THING ABOUT MOUNTAIN AIR …

Monday 30th June 2014 – THIS IS THE VIEW …

Friday 27th June 2014 – IT DIDN’T TAKE ME LONG, DID IT?

Wednesday 29th September 2010 part II – WELL, HERE I AM.

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