OK, I've had a bit of a sleep and some Bircher Muesli and coffee and a strange fruit juice, so I'll try to write-up another day's truck camping before I have to wrestle the car off the valet parkers and head for the office.
Day 3 (Saturday)Surprisingly the woman with children who arrived at 2am was up and going for a walk before we were. It was a beautiful morning though. A quick breakfast outside in the sun and then we headed down the mountain, stopping for a quick walk by a lake and dam on the way down:
We descended into the flat planes of the Alsace heading bast Mulhouse (where that fantastic Bugatti museum is) and then crossed the Rhine into Germany. If you start the count in the UK this made country 3.
As with many border crossings in Europe there was little more than a small sign to show you crossed, and we were too busy admiring the Rhine to notice. Only the other side did I notice the GPS was reporting a different speed limit and looking at the road signs the language had changed. Our speed limits are pretty similar all across Europe, usually varying by maybe 10 km/h here and there. One exception is parts of the German autobahn system which have no limit (until you approach a city and suddenly find limits and speed cameras). Not that this makes much difference to us, travelling at an indicated 60mph (actually 90km/h if I look at the more accurate GPS speedometer).
We weren't in Germany long before crossing into Switzerland at Basel. Since we would be using Swiss highways we needed to pay for a vignette - their tax for their divided highways, which are all in a sense turnpikes. Unfortunately you have to buy a year's vignette, which is a bit of a ripoff when you only need it for a couple of days. I had enquired about buying a vignette while in Geneva for business, but an acquaintance there said "just buy one at the border, the queue for buying a vignette is much shorter than the queue for entering if you already have one". He was right. The 2 lane road divided into cars with vignettes on the left, and those needing to buy them on the right. Since almost everyone had a vignette our queue was very short and we were soon met by a friendly young Swiss woman who sold Sally the vignette and even affixed it to the windshield for her. Note I says Sally, since my truck is right-hand-drive, so all the toll booths, etc. are all on the passenger's side when outside the UK.
I'd never been through Basel and it looked very industrial - but we just skimmed over the top on the elevated highway. Heading for Zurich there was a hooting of musical car horns and Sally looked out to see a group of British guys in cheap old cars festooned with sponsorship stickers. They wanted to know if we were going their way. They were on one of these sponsored road trips, where you have to buy a wreck of a car for a few hundred dollars then drive it across Europe (some even go into Africa), raising money for charity and having a huge laugh on the way. These guys were heading for Monte Carlo:
A lot of the northern part of Switzerland is industrial. You think of Switzerland as mountains and cuckoo clocks, but there is a heck of a lot of engineering industry based there. As we headed east we started to see signs of the big mountains - we would be skirting north past the Eiger, but would save visiting that for another vacation:
We stopped at a rest-stop for a sandwich. The previous night we hadn't been able to dump our grey water, so I had ratchet-strapped it to the roof. We found the rest stop had an excellent dump station and we could also fill up with drinking water too:
We carried on east across Switzerland. I had marked a waypoint for a campground by a nice lake in eastern Switzerland. It was in a great location, but when we arrived not only was getting to the campground a nightmare of narrow streets and height limits, but the campground appeared crammed with vacationers and children everywhere. It was a sunny weekend in summer, so I guess that was no surprise. Sally said she didn't want to stay there so we headed on. The area was beautiful though:
Notice the folded rock on the mountain the other side of the lake.
So we headed for the tiny country of Liechtenstein on the border with Austria, Pretty much the whole country is on the side of a mountain (certainly the main city is). There is a natural bowl surrounded by mountains that you can drive to, so we headed up there. It was a real surprise to find ourselves crawling up tight switchbacks in the middle of a city - normally you find these things in the middle of mountain passes in the countryside, but here they had built their city up the switchbacks. Eventually we reached the tunnel that gave us access through the mountain to the centre of the country:
We continued to drive to the end of the road - again, very steep, until we came to the skiing village at the top:
And the chance for more ice cream:
We asked about camping, but no-one knew of any, other than a campground I had marked on the GPS in advance, down by the Swiss border. A check on the GPS showed the country only had only one campground, so we headed for it:
It wasn't cheap, but was in a good location, and is the only time I am ever likely to stay the night in Liechtenstein.
OK, I better head off to my customer now. I'll add some more updates tonight. Stay tuned for Italy...
