I had planned to head to Garmish via St
Moritz, but without any internet, and relying on my phone to look up the road
conditions pages which were all in German, I couldn’t confirm 100% that all the
roads would be open. So we had to take the boring safe route and go back out the way we came in, and up the freeways.
That meant those narrow roads from Hades
back along Lake Como.
To makes things worse, Sygic carked it that morning, and
there was no way I was able to get it going again.
So we had to resort to the old fashioned way: paper maps and road
signs. Now this can be a bit tricky when
your paper map covers the entire continental Europe, and road signs aren’t in
English and don’t always clearly depict the direction you need to go.
Getting back to Como was simple enough, if
extremely hairy. But in Como, the signs
for the A9 said Milano (southbound), and didn’t say Lugano (northbound). So
rather than risk it I decided to keep going on rather than just heading to the A9 and seeing where we ended up. This meant we went all around the outskirts of
Como. I decided in the end to just head
to the A9. Worse case was at least we’d
be on it, and if heading the wrong direction would just have to turn around when we were able to. As it turned out, this was the
correct course and we were thankfully on the motorway heading north. The views from up high over the lakes are
just spectacular, even today when the weather was overcast and hazy.
As the paper maps were proving a little
dubious, I turned to back up navigation, Google Maps. This worked well enough for the most part,
even though it chewed through $30 worth of overseas mobile data. Still that would have been what some decent
maps cost would have cost.
Smooth sailing however still eluded us, and a few more dramas lay in wait. One of the motorways was completely closed
for 10-20km, but that was not too much drama as I could ignore the nagging
google and just follow the old original highway, which eventually joined up with the motorway past the closed section.
There was another
section though which had me completely baffled as google told me to turn off the motorway, took
us 25km along the back roads where we came to a blocked road with diversions. We followed the diversions as far as we could, but ended up losing them. Then google said we had to go back all the
way we came, back onto the motorway were we left it, and then continue on
again. Weird. But at least we saw this huge table and
chairs at the side of the road, which are actually spread around the internet
as being a horse shelter a farmer built as he was refused council
permission. Not true according to
snopes.com, through the huge table and chairs do exist.
So, between getting into the car in Italy,
and some 6 or 7 hours later getting out of the car in Germany, we’d driven
through Switzerland, into Schaan, Lichtenstein, back into Switzerland,
backwards and forwards between Austria and Germany a few times, passing through
the San Barnardino pass with superb views, and a quick hot dog stop (it was the
only thing on the menu at the food kiosk that I knew what it was. Which is a bit weird given nobody knows
what’s really in hot dogs…)
Anyway, however we got here, the scenery
was magic and Garmisch is beautiful. We were greeted by our lovely host Irene,
shown around our lovely and neat apartment just near the middle of town, then
headed off for a walk and explore.
The lass in the tourist shop was the most
helpful I’ve come across to date, and we had the remainder of our trip just
about sorted in no time! Then we dropped
into Zum Wildschutz where I had schweinshaxe and apple strudel. I am so stuffed I’m in pain. I’ll be planning to do a bit of mountain
hiking the next few days I think just to make up for that meal!
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