Category Archives: Travel

Into Deepest Switzerland

Driving to Switzerland took a little over an hour. They didn’t even stop me at the border. Leaving the rental car return, I had to walk along the street for about a quarter mile and through a parking lot to get to the airport, then through the airport to get to the train station.

I was planning to get lunch in downtown Geneva, but the train I got on happened to be going to Montreux, which is the end of the Golden Pass line, so I went all the way to Montreux. I had time before the next train to Interlaken, so I walked along the lake. I didn’t see the Freddie Mercury statue, though.

The Golden Pass Classic is a set of refurbished older trains from 1914 and 1964. I mistakenly got on one of the first class cars, a fact the conductor discovered after I’d already settled in and there was no more room in second class. But I could pay to upgrade to first class. This required him to work through some elaborate calculation that involved talking to himself in both French and German, then concluding that I owed 12 francs. Thus for about $12.25 I have entered the ranks of the elite. Who knew that status could come so cheaply?

The train went through Gstaad, which, based entirely on The Return of the Pink Panther, I had always thought of as a ski town high up in the mountains. That’s sort of true. It is a ski town, and it’s generally in the Alps, but it’s surrounded by farmland. As a town, it didn’t look especially noteworthy, although I didn’t actually get off the train to look at it.

Interlaken is a nice-looking town in a beautiful setting, but my hotel reservation was waiting for me halfway up the mountain. From Interlaken Ost station, I took another train to Lauterbrunnen, a cable car to Grütschalp, and a narrow-gauge train along the edge of nothingness to Mürren.

There are goats in Mürren.

I’m staying at the creaky and atmospheric Hotel Blumental. Manuel from Fawlty Towers carried my bag to my room. Really, I swear it’s him.

I had dinner at Stägerstübli, where the owner generously accommodated my attempts at German. Horse steaks are on the menu, but I went with the chicken mit pfeffersauce.

Summit of Aiguille du Midi

Ascent to Aiguille du Midi

I awoke to clouds. Not a good sign. I took a shower and got dressed. Still cloudy. I checked the weather report. Supposedly it was sunny and would be all morning. Hmm.

I got a croissant and some “expresso” (as the menu said) and walked over to the tourist information office, but it was Sunday and they were closed.

Well, okay. My original plan was to go to the top of Aiguille du Midi, then descend to Plan de l’Aiguille and hike to the Mer de Glace glacier, spend some time there and take the train down. Then I decided I didn’t want to do a 2.5-hour hike in my Nike Frees, so I would do the mountain and the glacier separately with a multipass. If the mountain was clouded over, I would just do the glacier.

I walked to the cable car station to find out if it was going to clear up and decide which ticket to buy. I asked the lady at the ticket counter if it was going to clear up. This was obviously a very stupid question as it was clearly sunny right now, as anyone could see by looking at the webcam. Oh. So I asked for a multipass so I could take the train to the glacier. But the glacier is closed, she said. It’s closed? Stupid question #2. It’s closed for the season, as everyone knows. Thus my options all converged on a single point, and I bought a ticket to the summit of Aiguille du Midi.

Which was spectacular. I didn’t see anyone doing ballet on the side of the mountain, but the view was amazing. 12,600 feet is the highest I’ve been on the ground. The best part of Aiguille du Midi is that you actually take an elevator to the summit. I think that mountains like Everest and Kilimanjaro would be much improved by such an approach.

There were views.

And more views.

And a clear platform that was smaller than I thought it would be.

The view from the restroom was just as good, and I could stand in front of the heater.

I met a Filipino couple and we exchanged picture-taking services. (That’s Mont Blanc behind me.)

The last platform I visited was up a long flight of stairs. I took the stairs two at a time, like I usually do. This was a bad idea at 12,000 feet. I had to stop about two-thirds of the way up and gasp for a while. When I got to the top, there was…a display on hypoxia. Clearly someone’s idea of a joke.

While I was recovering, I read about what happens to your body at high altitudes. There was a little gizmo that you could stick your finger in to determine your heart rate and blood oxygen level. I had a little smiley face next to mine, so all was well.

On the way down in the cable car, the people next to me pointed out a donkey on the side of the mountain below. I wasn’t fast enough to get a photo, but I’m sure it was Al.

For the rest of the day I just walked around Chamonix talking pictures, buying shirts (nice ones), eating, etc. Dinner was tapas and Irish coffee at a British restaurant and bar overlooking the river Arve.

Tomorrow: Geneva and beyond.

Seborga to Chamonix

We departed Seborga at about 8:00 AM and I dropped off Lobo and Alcalde at the Terminal 1 Kiss & Fly of the Nice airport. There was no kissing, but they were able to fly anyway. Apparently the airport is flexible about these matters.

It took me awhile to get back on the A8, due to the strange and occasionally impossible guidance of the car’s navigational system. I was halfway up the mountain behind Nice before I finally got suspicious. I eventually made it out of the city through the selective veto process that had worked fairly well with Lobo’s GPS.

I managed to find my way back to the Starbucks in Monaco and got a Ristretto Bianco and wrote a post card to my mom. It already had Seborga and Italy stamps on it, but now I was in Monaco, so if I wanted to mail it, I needed a Monaco stamp. I started wandering around Fontvieille (in the opposite direction than we had gone before) and came across the Monaco stamp museum, which sold me a stamp and mailed the card for me.

I walked around a little, then took off for Chamonix.

I stopped for gas just outside of Monaco — €77.76 to fill the tank! Pulling out of the gas station, I nearly t-boned a Rolls-Royce. I wonder how understanding they’d be getting hit by an American in a rental car with Swiss plates. Probably not very.

But I made it back to the Grand Corniche and the nav system guided me through Italy for 4+ hours without incident, except for occasionally beeping to tell me that I needed a break. Like I’m going to take orders from a car. I did take one break to get a doppio macchiato and use the restroom at an Italian rest stop, but otherwise I ignored the break notices. Stupid car.

Final toll for crossing Italy: €50.10
Toll for driving through the 11.6km Tunnel du Mont-Blanc: €44.20.

The nav system became hopelessly confused once I got into Chamonix, and Google Maps wasn’t any better. The car has a British accent and Google Maps has an American accent, but neither one can pronounce French, and some of the streets they guided me to do not seem to exist. I finally gave up and parked, then walked around looking for the hotel. It took me about two minutes to find it that way.

Hôtel Le Chamonix is across from this church.

The hotel is a creaky old wooden building that has just what I need and nothing more. My room is on the second (i.e., third) floor, but to go up the stairs I have to step over this dog.

I spent a couple hours wandering around the village (which is bigger than I was expecting), had pizza provençale sans anchois for dinner, located the t-shirt place recommended by Lobo, and returned to encapsulate the day in this blog post.

Statue of a Pregnant Woman Next to a Saguaro Overlooking the Mediterranean

R4TS4&T2Mash and TWH Recap and Riviera Notes

The Mash (and Mash it clearly was, despite some peevish braying from the less adventurous) has concluded, and the Mash attendees have gone their separate ways, better for the experience, except possibly for the experience of watching Dondi, which was even worse than expected.

Seborga is beautiful and charming and slightly odd, and almost exactly as I remembered, except that the weather was much nicer this time around. Lobo’s choice of a house was perfect, even to the point of accidentally renting from someone I had met and talked to 16 years ago.

We rented the top two stories of the house in the center of this photo.

It has beautiful terraced grounds.

We parked the car at the upper corner of the steep driveway. (Note the Seborga flag.)

Further notes:

Motorcycles and motor scooters in both Italy and France pass on both sides wherever and whenever they feel like it. Almost nothing they do would be legal in the US, but here you can just ignore them and it seems to work out.
The toll roads are pretty darned expensive.
Limoncino is tasty, but very strong. I was going to get a bottle, but thought better of it. I’d probably drink the whole bottle and have to be treated for alcohol poisoning. Besides, who wants to carry a glass bottle through the Alps?
Nice is nicer than Cannes.
The most useful languages to know in this area are French, Italian, and Donkey.
That song from Birdemic is always funny, and it always will be.

Twingo Selfie

Final Afternoon in Seborga

The Quest for Al really took it out of us, so we drove along the coast one last time, ending up at the same Doner Kebab place in San Remo for lunch. After lunch we bought some gelato and walked down to the harbor. It was a beautiful sunny day, as it has been almost the entire week.

In the afternoon we did laundry and hung around the house. Lobo cracked a cascarón that he’d been saving for 35 years on Alcalde’s head, as one does.

We had our final dinner at Marcellino’s, with a final round of limoncino shots, although we had to buy them ourselves this time.

The Quest for Al

We hadn’t heard as much braying as earlier in the week, but we knew Al was out there somewhere, so we decided to embark upon a Quest.

We started by driving off randomly with no real plan, and quickly found ourselves halfway up the mountain on a dirt road called Passo del Bandido. We searched high and low, but did not see anything that looked donkey-like, so we drove randomly some more.

We didn’t know where Al was, but we knew we were on the right path.

Eventually we found ourselves down a valley road with a truck blocking our way. No one was in the truck, so Lobo went to find the driver. We thought he was going to ask him to move the truck, but instead he asked him if he knew where the donkey was, making donkey noises to get his point across. The man directed us to a farmhouse/B&B down a long gravel road, but there was no indication of a donkey. Lobo knocked on the door and we talked to the proprietor, who spoke some English and told us that:

He had no donkeys, only sheep.
The sheep were “on holiday.”
The donkey was “on the other side,” on Via Casette.

We set off to the other side of the hill, looking for Via Casette. If we’d heard any braying, we might have had an easier time, but Al was curiously silent, so we had to use our investigative skills and gut instincts. Working as a team, Lobo and I quickly lost track of Alcalde, who was using Google Maps. Lobo talked to some people in the post office, but they didn’t know what he was talking about, so we walked a little farther and then split up, circling around the village from opposite sides.

When we circled back to the car, Alcalde was waiting for us about 50 yards away, at the corner of Via Casette. We had parked within sight of it, and, as a team, we had managed to triangulate on it, each bringing our own individual skills to the effort. “The other side” turned out to be the other side of the valley, not the other side of the hill.

Working as a team, we walked down Via Casette until we saw a fenced area with a stable.

And there was Al.

Côte d’Azur Ramble

We decided to get an early start, and were on the road to Cannes by the crack of 9:00. Lobo failed to find the Cannes Starbucks mug he wanted, due to the fact that they had never existed, and then we wandered around for a half hour or so before finding a cafe/boulangerie to procure croissants and espressoses.

This was across from a farmer’s market, where Alcalde treated us to fried zucchini flowers, which are a real thing that I’m not making up. He also bought some peppered goat cheese.

That was the high point of Cannes. Then we drove to Nice. We saw some Brazilian guys with musical instruments discussing something with the local police. They appeared to come to some understanding and walked down the street, occasionally glancing back. When the police were no longer in sight, two of them started playing their instruments. The other two were apparently capoeiristas, and did flips and martial arts moves whenever there was a break in the crowd.

We walked around and looked at things for a while, then looped around and ate lunch right next to where the capoeira dudes were, but they were gone. We can only hope that they stayed ahead of the gendarmerie.

We had some very good pizza, and we learned that when you say sans anchois, you pronounce the final s in sans, because you gotta do the elision before a vowel.

Continuing down whatever corniche we were on, we discovered that the GPS that was built into the car was in fact not that hard to turn on after all, thanks to Alcalde’s quick-thinking techno-wizardry. So now we had three navigational systems to choose from. Lobo started to set the car’s GPS, then switched to the radio and immediately found the Village People. Then we started singing pop songs in Inspector Clouseau voice and things sort of went downhill from there, made worse by the goat cheese, which was becoming more aromatic by the minute.

But we made it to Monaco anyway, and eventually found parking and wandered around in an area that wasn’t really the area I was thinking of. Alcalde and I had a little trouble with a recalcitrant escalator, but we eventually outsmarted it. I bought some Gérard de Villiers novels that I can’t actually read, and we headed back to Seborga, windows open in a futile attempt to air out the car.

Then we picked up some groceries at the market in Seborga and went back and watched Bride of the Monster and Night of the Ghouls. A day well spent.