Merrily zooming around Europe and temporarily uncertain of our present
position, that's us! We used to worry about getting lost, but now
it's all part of the adventure.
We left St. Moritz and headed off into the Alps. It was a glorious
morning, sharp, clear, sun glistening off the snow on the mountains.
Sadly we have returned to non-Italian coffee and I have donned my
Michelen Woman costume (but I am NOT complaining about being cool,
just describing the differences!). We had a great time weaving
through the valleys and zigzagging up and over the mountain passes.
We went over one, the Fruilipas (sp) that climbed well above the
snowline and we were riding up through the snow fields! It was
beautiful and thanks to my trusty MW suit, I was toasty! Snow fields
around us and craggy snow covered mountains towering above us, an
amazing experience in July!
We were zipping through a valley when Steve said, "The sun is rising,
we're heading north, making great progress!" The rising sun was over
my left shoulder, "We're going south." "That's a problem," replied
Steve quite calmly. No road signs and we were on a lovely road so we
kept going until we found a cappocino and map review stop. Yup, wrong
way, heading back to Italy, it was a lovely bit of road though!
On to Bregens by Lake Constance where we have been been before on
another motorbike trip, just for lunch and then up the side of the
lake and through the hills to our destination of the evening, Freiburg.
So often on this trip, the national language spellings of names are
different than the English ones (Genoa / Genova) that I didn't really
pay any attention when Steve kept saying Freidburg and I kept seeing
Freiburg. We knew the town we were going to, had been there before
and had specific ideas for dinner once we got there. And we arrived
as planned, yup, right town, there's the cablecar up the hill to the
restaurant we ate at last time, well done!
Steve gave me the map and we started the hotel hunt. Now, we really
need a GPS to do this well, but I do have to say, I'm getting pretty
good at spotting the signs and navigating to the hotel from the back.
We drove around and around and around and I couldn't spot a single
street that matched any of the ones on my map. Several times we
stopped so Sreve could try and figure out the map too, but we still
couldn't find anything that matched. We finally broke down and
stopped at a petrol station and bought a map - and still couldn't find
any of the streets on the map!
What the two maps did have in common were postal codes, each area on
our purchased map had a postal code labeled and the postal code was
labeled on the mapquest map - now we're getting somewhere! We
scrutinized the purchased map searching for the code that matched
ours. The codes on the map were all in the 70000's and our code was
in the 80000's, ours wasn't even on the map!
Then we looked at the town name. We were exactly where we wanted to
be, Freiburg (remember, we've been here before!). However, our hotel
was in Friedburg, a couple hundred kilometers away!
(Can you believe we used to be entrusted with millions of pounds?!)
Och well, we're in the right place even if the hotel isn't, time to
find a new hotel - which we did in a matter of minutes and in a matter
of a few minutes more, we were showered, togged up and sitting in an
outdoor restaurant in the main town square listening to a band play
and admiring the view of the cathedral.
The Friedburg hotel had never received our reservation so we didn't
have to suffer the indignity of being in the wrong town AND paying for
two hotels. While the Freiburg hotel was a bit pricy, after St.
Moritz Steve wasn't phased. "I paid this much for a beer last night,"
he commented.
Dinner on the town square was just as we expected, very Germanic food,
lots of it, some good music, Vicebeer and a glass of local wine. A
perfect ending to a perfect day!
