On The Lake

Car Train Adventure

We are back in the Alps in the small town of Domodossola. We stayed at a regular hotel in a ski town and concluded that it was owned and run by the gypsies. I’ve never seen such a combination of brilliant pinks, oranges, reds, greens and rust colors and plastic flowers everywhere. We did find humor in the decorations. The breakfast was skimpy and probably the worst of the trip. Jamie ordered hot chocolate again and again she got hot chocolate pudding. There are major snow covered mountains in every direction and each way feels so close that you could reach out and touch the tops. To the South and North you can make out the breaks in the mountains that make up the entrance and exit to the valleys. We are going up canyon this morning for what is supposed to be a drive of a lifetime. The guidebook says that you really should do this drive once but that you will not want to do it again. Jamie was nervous about the descriptions of the drive up the hill. At the end of the drive there is a train that takes us and the car over otherwise snowed in passes. We have taken a ferry across a lake on the motorcycle but never a car by train. It should be a good experience

Later

On The Lake

The drive up the canyon was one of the most picturesque ever. Mountain roads, snow covered peaks, sheer cliffs, thousand year old villages, spectacular alpine panoramas, and, did I mention sheer cliffs? A couple of times I had to have Jamie turn away from the window and talk to me until the exciting parts past. The roads were pretty good although very narrow and occasionally required stops while we communicated and negotiated by telepathy with a car coming the other way for appropriate protocol. Jamie was happy to find a second stage of the car train that would take us past the most interesting of the mountain roads so she was happy with the alternative of speeding through a pitch black tunnel sitting in a bouncy car. It was a little like being on Mr. Toads “E” ticket wild ride If I have any young readers, go ask your mother about an “E” ticket. Somewhere in the back of our minds we were wondering if they had the OHSA equivalent, not so much in Switzerland, but certainly for the Italian part. So, after a drive-train-drive-train-drive we were descending out of the Alps on the Swiss side

The geography on the two sides of the mountain are pretty much the same but the sociology is quite different. Switzerland is much more prosperous appearing, with newer, better cars, much more shopping, and, distinctly swiss architecture but also newer better quality buildings. We did stop in a small village for lunch and found that we were much less able to decipher the German menus than we had been for the Italian. The waitress found a food words list in English and German to help us It had about fifty words and their English equivalent, none of which were on the menu. I finally ordered a _______Chiken sandwich. It was one of only three words I recognized on the whole menu. The other two were, “Donald Duck” (we seem to have a Disney theme today). It was a great sandwich with hearty German brown bread and two thick layers of butter between a thick slab of cheese and something that looked suspiciously like Ham. It turned into a happy mistake.

We looked for hotels while we drove. Usually that is more frustration than it is success. The really nice places are not typically on the main roads. We did the GPS finder and tried a couple of places. The first two were a bit too quaint. The third was on the lake just outside of Interlaken and had off season rates of $360 if we took a non-lake view. We were a bit discouraged and decided to drive on in to Interlaken. On the way out of the lakeside drive we saw one last hotel that was so classy and perfectly situated with a lake view that I almost didn’t stop. Turns out it was very reasonable and was the best hotel of the trip. We also had the best dinner of the trip at the recommended restaurant with its orchid draped dinning room built out over the water. This morning, an elegant breakfast with linen and silver made it the perfect last stop of the trip. We are off now to Interlaken to turn in the car. After that we will walk to the train station and railroad our way into Zurich. We have a hotel close to the airport and will be on the westward flight in the morning. See you all soon.

Here are todays pictures