Bloody Gutless Wonder Part 2

Ha! Psych! This isn't really part two.

Bloody Gutless Wonder

I have gotten the green light to blog about our van (the only reason we can let the parents know about it is the fact that we are no longer riding around in it).

Anyway, we christened our grey fiat van The Bloody Gutless Wonder. It was rented in Switzerland for fifty bucks (or franks, I'm not sure) a day. It get's around nine hundred kilometers per liter and has a touchy stick shift. For two weeks it was our only transport and quite often our bed too.

Schyler was our driver, and we could not have asked for a better one. As Liesl put it, Schyler was born to drive in Europe. The drivers here are insane daredevils who stretch roads, traffic laws and their cars to the limit. Speaking of limits, I don't think they've even heard of the one for speed. And Schyler plunged right into this chaos with an enthusaism that would've made any European proud. By the end of the trip I would've trusted Schyler with my life. In the middle of the trip, I often didn't have a choice.

Let me start off the telling of our most harrowing adventure by talking a little about swiss road design. Swiss cars are tiny, but for some reason they half the roads they build can fit only one. You have to drive off to the side to let another car past you. Secondly, they don't believe in guard rails. This may be due to the fact that they expect the people who drive their tiny roads are capable enough to not drive off them. Or perhaps they just needed the room to let cars traveling in opposite directions to pass eachother. The Swiss also have a lot of cows... just fyinformation.

Add to this the Bloody Gutless Wonder (BGW). We were practically the biggest car on the road (except for the Mercedez trucks... All the trucks here are made by Mercedez and half of the busses are too. It's super cool). BGW was not really worthy of much trust (although we did make it the whole trip without a single breakdown). For one thing the airconditioning didn't work. The closest we could get was a lot of warm air blowing at us. Second of all, BGW's engine overheated whenever we went uphill unless we had the heat going... So we spent a lot of time with the windows down.

Add to all of this...

THE SWISS ALPS!

to be continued...

Footnote thingy

Ok... I am now super mad at the computer as it just deleted this post. And it was a good one. Now I have to try to write it again and be just as funny and clever. Sigh.

Ok here it goes...

As I was saying, I feel it is time for me to explain my process of writting blog posts. I start by selecting the photos I wish to talk about. Once I choose them I hit "upload images" and wait for the computer to load the pictures. And wait. And wait. There is nothing really to see in the computer room... just five boring gray tables, a few chairs and two computers. Very old computers in Italian with wacked out keyboards. The windows are too high up the wall to relieve my boredom as I sit here watching the upload animation not move. Anyway it's night out. I have a half drunk "Fanta" can sitting on the table next to me. Fanta is an orange pop, very common over here. It usually only comes in one flavor, athough you do occasionally find it in different colors in supermarkets. You can't get anything, but orange in the restruants (and it comes in tiny amounts. I often lament the fact that I could buy two liters of the stuff at the nearest Ipercoop for the same price). I purchased this particular Fanta from the vending machine in the room next door. I also bought a "bueno" bar. The wrapper says "bueno white" which apparently distinguishes it from other, less colorful "bueno" bars. It is super good though. Like an "Angel Baby" on steroids. I am a little ashaimed of the fact that it is a "kinder" bar, but not ashaimed enough to not eat it. There is actually a real name for "Angel Babies" I just don't know what it is. "Angel Babies" are a wafer candy that can be purchased in huge bricks at any gas station and I have become thouroughly addicted to them over the course of our trip. The images are still trying to upload. I decided to go back to my room for a book, but I don't feel like packing everything up so I sprint instead. Out past the vending machines, past the front desk where I have to turn in the key to my room every time I go out. Through the hall, up ten flights of stairs, through another hall and to my room. 457. I unlock the door, grab my Grisham and notice that the milk bottle in my bathroom sink is dry. I fill the sink back up then out the door, down the hall, down the ten flights of stairs, down the other hall, back through the lobby, past the vending machines and back to the computer room. Nobody has stolen my camera, or my half drunk pop, or my watch, or my half eaten "bueno white." The computer is still loading. I read two chapters. I check to see if the computer is locked up. I read two more chapters. Finally the images are loaded. I quickly write something plithy and post the whole thing to my blog.

Or in some cases, crash and repeat.

Autocamping

We were tired of driving and there are only so many beaches you can pass before you have to visit one, so we pulled off on a little dirt road and a shirtless old guy in crocks came out and took our Euros and gave us a patch of grass on his property. We unloaded everything and hit the beach. Autocamping would have been more fun except for the mosquitoes. It was too hot to cover oneself properly, so we used liberal amounts of repellant and hoped for the best (I wrapped my towel around my head). The mosquitoes here have a fondness for ears, and super tiny and travel at a thousand miles per hour. They spend about a second on you so you can never squish them and hit you three or four times before they leave you alone.

I also heard a car wreck out on the highway that night... which was a little scary.

Whaaaaat else... hmm... Oh! Calamari! Or... squid! Food that I did eat at this point in time. It was a mile stone. After squid, no creature on earth has the ability to make me not eat it, just because it looks weird.

That gorgeous expance of blue rocky goodness is Croatia! We drove out of the Alps yesterday and into Italy. We ate a dinner of three different types of pizza (non of which I had ever even come close to tasting before) under a tree in the town square. It was raining, but not on us. We drove into the night. And then through much of the night on Italy's superfast highways. I got a lot of practice reading road signs. Around one we were all too tired to keep going so we pulled over at a gas station and slept between semis and campers for the rest of the night. Breakfast was at six the next moring. It consisted of juice and packaged pastries. (croissants, or however you spell them. Ye olde computer here doesn't have a spell check so whatev's. Just another thing you have to deal with). We drove on. I slept most of the morning waking only briefly to pull out my passport on the border of Slovenia. I then proceeded to sleep through slovenia. I only remember seeing one oddly shaped gray building and that was it. Slovenia did win the prize for the cutest boarder guard though. On we drove... through Slovenia and into Croatia.



We decided to take the slighty longer beach road instead of the highway, because 1) it was prettier and 2), we really didn't have any idea where we wanted to wind up anyway. I think we sort of hoped we'd wind up in Split.



A quick example of croatian guard rails.



An island. I imagined Minotaurs living on the island.

Then I fell back asleep.

The Hotel

We pulled off to the side of the road to use the bathroom at a hotel you will see later on in this post (we're still in the alps... and here comes that depth rant again, prepair yourselves).

ahem...

THAT IS SO MUCH HUGER THAN IT LOOKS! SERIOUSLY! IT LIKE A HUNDRED BAJILLION MILES TO THAT RIVER AT THE BOTTOM!



And here's the hotel I promised you. It has a gift shop in the back and if you pay five Euro you can climb out onto a glacier that is sitting by itself up higher in the mountains (you can't see it in the picture, but it is hidden by that little cliff on the right hand side of the road). We did not pay to see it. There were tons of little yellow and white butterflies everywhere up here. I counted fifty in one little patch of grass next to the hotel.




And the hotel bathroom... (I think)... Now that I look at it... it might be one on the border of Switzerland and Italy. It looks a little too new for the Alps one. Anyway... there was a bus that stopped traffic for a long time because it was too long to fit around the switchback. Tallis has a picture of it (because he took about a thousand pictures during this portion of the trip. All of them from the car. He has one of this guy weedwacking next to the road, just a little past the hotel. He took it as we drove past. The road construction is crazy over here. They don't have any signs or anything. They just go to work and traffic has to fit around them. Very cool)

Return to the interweb

HellooooOooooo all twelve of my faithful VUoooooors! I have arrived in Viterbo (although you couldn't tell by the pictures) and have re-established my connection with the rest of the world through the wonders of technology (which keep crashing by the way). For all of you in Italy not able to check email because you can't figure out where the @ symbol is, I'll tell you. It's in the bottom right corner of the ò key. Yup. Just to the left of where it says ç. But you still can't press it? Nope it's not shift! That's how you get ç. Plus it'd be too easy. If you don't have a couple Gorgian guys to point it out for you, you're pretty much screwed (pardon my french... or whatever).

Anyway, LOOK! SEE! That's my travely buddies standing on top of a dam in the Swiss Alps with a giant green lake behind us! Crazy huh? It's it cooooool? The picture below (fittingly enough) is looking over the side of the dam! We drove up that road (the little dark grey one in the very upper right hand corner of the picture)!



For those of you following along at home, you might be going... "wait... what?" (I had to press "shift" and the "2" key for every single " you see from now on. Appreciate it!) And right you are to go "wait... what?" Those of you not paying particular attention to my travels are probably going "what are they 'wait... whatting' about." Well the fact of the matter is... I have skipped around four days of my adventures in Switzerland. They include traveling up a huge mountain! Finding a huge swiss catapillar (that I couldn't keep) on top of said mountain. Eating dinner during a rainstorm in a barn. Mall shopping and other amazing stuff that you will never hear about! Because... after all. Who really wants a blow by blow account of every day I spend out of the country. (ok fine, I've had computer troubles and managed to not have about four days worth of pictures, so we are skipping ahead to out departure from Switzerland).

ALPS! LOOK AT THEM!



I actually felt bad about taking this picture as there is no way my tiny camera can capture the amount of depth contained in these mountains. There mountains are bigger than it is possible to comprehend. Trust me. You have to visit. Actually there's not really any point in you even looking at the pictures of the mountains. So whatever. I'll complain about this lack of accurately portraying size and depth later in my blog. Probably many times. Get used to it.

Ok Swiss Alps. Imagine switchbacks up and down a thousand more picures, just like the one above and you've got a fairly accurate idea of the Swiss Alps. I'll post more pictures in a bit.