In which Sid and Doris use the pre-rally rally to iron out some mini problems.
The four-day journey down is most pleasant. A garden hotel in Epernay, a lakeside hotel in Neuchatel in Switzerland, a mountainside hotel in Courmayeur and then the final run to the Mediterranean coast and Sanremo. We are not very good at buying expensive hotel nights for ourselves but alas (cue crocodile tears) this little tour bulk-bought the rooms and so we “had” to go with the tour choice. Which gives us this extraordinary view from the rooms at Hotel Palafitte which are actually built out over the lake at Neuchatel. You might call it a posh trailer park, but we intrepid travellers call it an individual luxury bungalow. No, we don’t know how they got planning permission for it.
Anyway the four days of driving give us the “opportunity” to find and sort out various niggles with the Mini including a windscreen wiper which decided to abandon ship on the autoroute (the wipers are now tethered to the car with dental floss) and brakes which developed a most strange and unhelpful juddering action (mostly fixed by a mechanic in the hills).
After all, even though this journey isn’t technically Epic, you didn’t expect us to waft through it without using the tool kit, did you?
And it also gives us the opportunity to see some splendid European sights, so here they are:
First, some more pictures of That Quincaillerie. What a splendid place.
Then some interesting traffic. A four-unit trailer train for a travelling funfair, and a specialist tractor for the vines.
A museum on the French-Swiss border which showed how they had water mills actually in the caves. These pictures also show you again just how clever the iPhone’s camera is, sorry I will stop going on about that now.
An Alp. You will probably get bored with pictures of Alps, but this was the first one we saw hooray so here it is.
This next series of three pictures requires some explanation. The train running alongside the road has actually just run, a couple of hundred yards away from the first picture, down the street. Then here we are driving down the train tracks. And then here is a horse being ridden across the stream of cars which is driving down the train tracks. A satisfyingly integrated traffic system, I am sure you will agree.
The final two pictures and the video are of another opportunity to share the road with animals, this time the transhumance festival in Chateau-d’Oex. It looks like there is a prize for best-flower-arrangement-on-head for these animals, and we were mildly surprised that the cows seemed completely unfazed by the entire process (not to mention not even a little bit peckish for the portable lunch on each other’s heads). Dingle dongle bingle bongle and ho for Sanremo.
