News from Nowhere

Thankyou to everyone who left comments on my previous post; I don't know what to say, except "Thankyou" and "I appreciate it."

Birthdays never come singly, and today is D's. A year ago we were at the Villa Saraceno, a dozen or so of us for once managing for once to occupy the whole length of the dining table to enjoy a birthday dinner cooked for us by the concierge of the property. But I've written about that before...

durham_rambler and I had booked ourselves a few days in Switzerland on our way home. We had orginally planned to cover the distance in a single day, and this would have been perfectly possible, if we had stuck to the motorways - perfectly possible, but not much fun! When we discovered that the accommodation we wanted wasn't available for our first night, we took the hint, and planned a more scenic route. But we may have overdone this.

We left the Villa at ten in the morning, and drove north on local roads, winding slowly through the vines, skirting the Euganean hills. As we'd discovered before, every town had something to stop and admire: and the one we couldn't resist was Piazzole sul Brenta, where the main road delivered us into a great arcaded square with a magnificent villa standing back from one side of it across a narrow waterway. We felt as if we'd been driving for ever, and deserved a break and a stroll; looking at the map now, I can't believe how little way we had come from Vicenza.

Onward, through one beautiful town after another: Cittadella, where nose to tail traffic gave us plenty of time to realise that the whole place was indeed a medieval citadel; Bassano del Grappa, the centre of (yes) grappa production, and up into the Trentino. There were more vines here, though I never managed to photograph the distinctive way they were trained, tall trailing vines, with supporting arms raised high to support the heavy canopy which shaded the bunches of black grapes hanging low underneath - the first time today we had actually been able to make out the grapes!

We found ourselves an overnight stop at a pleasant little town called Male in the Trentino, in the mountains not far from the Swiss border, and realised that despite a day's hard driving (and despite resisting temptations to stray even further into the mountains (the Asiago plateau looked good...), we were no closer to our destination now than we had been when we set off. Still, if we hadn't taken the back way round Padua, we wouldn't have seen Piazzola, which would have been a pity; and we still had all of tomorrow...

'Tomorrow' turned out to be even worse. We set off from Male before ten, and we reached Sierre, our destination, at nine that evening, after stopping for lunch, but not for dinner. Some of this was sheer bad luck, some was self-inflicted, if only through the cutting things fine which lays you open to bad luck - not to mention seriously overestimating the adequacy of Italian roads.

The low points were: getting stuck behind two coaches through Aprica; the shambles which is the road round Lake Lugano, in which two-way traffic including lorries and caravans fights its way through village streets barely wide enough for a single vehicle; and a ten kilometre tailback from the San Gotthard pass.

The high points were: finally rounding the end of I don't even remember which of the Italian lakes, and pulling in to a little café where we sat on the balcony overlooking the blue water and ate the first pizza of this Italian holiday; finally giving up on the San Gotthard pass on the basis that the minor road couldn't be worse, and discovering that the minor road was in fact delightful, and took us up through green valleys to a pass from which we saw snow covered peaks and unfamiliar alpine flowers; driving down the upper Rhône valley (promising ourselves that one day, but not today, we would return to visit the source of the Rhône) past villages on wooden chalets out of the picture books (only rougher and more real); and finally - finally! - arriving in the warm twilight at our accommodation among the vines.