Under the Umbrian sun

At long last, the story of my two first weeks of holidaying - in Italy, without an internet connection. Hence the fucked up chronology. But, I have the pics to make it up to ya'll, wheee!

I left Oslo on a Thursday and made reasonably good speed, reaching the Danish-German border and then some before nightfall. On Friday I had a hellish drive through Germany, from the very north to the border with Austria and then into Switzerland and Liechtenstein (notch up another country!). I had to pay a ten day toll for the Austrian roads and the exorbitant TWENTY-NINE fuckin Euros for the Swiss road tax.

I first looked for a room in Liechtenstein, but at the first place I came to there didn’t seem to be anybody in the reception (I called) and the second one was full. I think I spent all of 15 minutes in Vaduz, and I’m happy to report it wasn’t much of a town. I snapped a few pics of the stunning mountains and left again.

I spent the night in a Swiss town called Chur, in a hotel much too expensive for me, but I really had no choice. I was dead tired, dizzy from driving and dirty. Wanna know how dirty I was? Well, I had spent two days on the road eating gas station food and downing sodas and sitting perfectly still in my car - yet when I weighed myself in my hotel room in Chur I was the exact same weight as when I left. I had sweated it all out on my way through Germany. (A quick nightsnack at the local McDonalds soon took care of that.)

Saturday I drove through the stunningly purdy Swiss countryside. There were impossibly tall mountains, deep blue lakes, green hillsides and dark forests everywhere. Swiss roads are engineering marvels and the vistas were simply breathtaking. I made the final stretch into Italy and was subjected to the insane Italian roads, with long, long traffic jams several places on the way down to Florence. South of Florence there were no jams, but by this time I was so tired that I still drove below the speed limit. I finally reached Tuoro at 4PM.

The apartment was big, with two large bedrooms with double beds and a small one with two single beds (a double bed more than I had thought!). There was a nice living room and kitchen and a satellite TV with hundreds of channels, most of them pimping Arab phone sex lines.

There were two bathrooms, and there was some trouble here, because the one that had a detachable showerhead (European bliss!) had very low water pressure and there was no curtain around the bathtub - while the one shower with good water pressure had a curtain, but still managed to send the water flying everywhere... and it was not detachable. Argh. To top it off, the water in the swimming pool was freezing for the first days, it took almost a week for it to warm up properly.

One word on the local food - I bought some tomatoes at the supermarket in Tuoro, and sweet Jeebus, these are the real thing. Big, juicy and tasty. Later, when my yank friends Albie and Court came, Albie lived on a diet largely consisting of bruscetta, tomatoes and mozarella cheese...

Ok, some pics from Liechtenstein: