More reconnaissance Thursday 30th May - Interlaken to St Beatus-Höhlen and beyond

 

They are arriving this evening, and that’s when the cloak and dagger stuff really begins.  We wouldn’t be E for quids.  She’s been plotting this since New Year’s Day and they’ll be staying with her and C so it will be a monumental effort not to slip up in conversation.

We, on the other hand, simply need to be wherever they are not, setting off in the trusty ASX or whatever exotic letters suit a spy mobile (there must be an “X” we think), in search of appropriately exotic adventure.  

The weather forecast is for conditions continuing to deteriorate, so it was surprising to say the least to arrive at the Trauffer Museum the home of traditional carved wooden toys in bright sunshine and twenty seven degree heat.   The museum could have been a splendid hiding place too with its delightful mazes and rooms and possibly the best hot dogs in all of Christendom and everywhere else to boot.

While we were congratulating ourselves on our accidental culinary win, the actual weather moved closer to the forecast, with the temperature dropping by seventeen degrees and cold wet stuff tumbling from the sky.   We headed to another prospective hiding place, this one not nearly as pleasant, but it served poor old St Beatus well in times long past.   The caves that bear his name were spectacular and cold and damp and noisy with rushing water for company for the entire kilometre we were able to traverse, if that’s what moving inside a cave is called.

A good time was had by all, despite them not making caves tall enough for modern humans.  If push came to shove, and if one had to choose between hiding in a cave or a toy museum, I’d have to say the cave would come a very distant second.

The Secret Hideout Wednesday 29th May - Interlaken

 

When one of us woke to find herself at Camping Lazy Rancho 4, so improbably named that no one would believe us if we told them we were here, she smiled.   Then she peeked out of the window beside her bunk to discover the mountains were still there, smiling back. 

With our targets still in the UK, there was little chance of them hearing her gasps as the mountains revealed themselves to the new day, although everyone in Switzerland probably did.  To be fair, she’s a sucker for mountains, particularly ones with snow on top. Had the weather been more predictable we would without doubt have travelled to the “top of Europe” on the Jungfrau, but it wasn’t and the chances of seeing anything from the top were “iffy” at best.

Therefore we settled for the much less ambitious “top of Interlaken” and the funicular ride to Harder Kulm where the views were more predictable and taken at a leisurely pace as was indeed lunch, before returning home on the 104 bus in mid afternoon.   

All other plans for evening exploration (reconnaissance?) were abandoned in favour of a late afternoon dose of horizontality, in deference to that overwhelming desire that one’s body has to sleep at peculiar times after traversing the world by jet plane.

The Secret Mission Tuesday 28th May - Zurich to Interlaken

 

Proper spies never have to work out where they are and when they got there, let alone how they got there.  

For reasons that will have become obvious by the time this has been posted, even if we did know any of those things, just like proper spies, we weren’t allowed to tell anyone until Saturday and thus it was that an embargo was placed on this publication by those “higher up”.

Having arrived in Zurich tired but inarguably happy, we were in short order made less happy and more tired by the discovery that payment for our hotel using the special credit card issued specifically for overseas travel, had been declined.  It turned out after a rather stressful hour waiting without success on an internet service chatline (“we’re here to help, expect a response within five minutes”) and a further fifteen minutes on a phone call to Australia (“your call is important to us, please hold”), that the whole problem came about because we were overseas!   

The lovely lady we eventually spoke with resolved the problem in a few seconds, and in exchange for a swipe of that very same card, a nice man at the airport gave us a car suitably equipped for our mission.   

After just a short drive we were met by E who not surprisingly was with C, who provided us with a rundown on our secret mission, the workings of their caravan and provided a dossier of things to do and see while we waited, cameras in hand for the cloud to clear from the  tips of the Eiger and Jungfrau.

The Waiting Game Monday 27th May - Brisbane to Dubai

There are lots of ways of calculating how long a journey like this really takes, and there’s plenty of time en route to let those numbers twirl in all sorts of permutations and combinations.  Waiting is after all, one of the joys of travel.   On this journey we have a ratio of about one waiting hour for every two in the air.

I usually like to calculate P2P or “pillow to pillow” - the time it’s taken from rising from one bed to sinking thankfully into another in some far distant corner of the world.    I will do that tomorrow, but it feels like cheating this time because we have been travelling thus far somewhat further forward in the aeroplane than is our custom.

The result of that is that in this one fourteen hour flight sector alone, the writer has managed to achieve a total amount of sleep equal to or greater than the total of all the sleep amassed on previous flights this decade and is desperately trying to become accustomed to NOT having the feeling of having just emerged from a washing machine on a spin cycle.  

For the first time in memory, the other of us is not asleep while we sit for the five hours it’s going to take for our next flight to depart, and it’s decidedly odd having someone to talk to.

Of course we'll miss you all. Sunday 26th May - Dicky Beach to Brisbane

 

Today we might have gone for a walk along the beach if we hadn't been so busy  squeezing an ever-growing list of last minute tasks into our schedule before our nine PM pickup.

After a long absence from our travels, we are a little out of practice, and perhaps as a consequence a little older.  So we've packed as lightly as we can, tidied as well as necessary, and launched ourselves in the direction of the big smoke.

Perhaps by the time you are reading this we will be blissfully asleep on an aeroplane whisking us through the night.  

Most likely we will be eating snacks and watching one of as many movies one can condense into twenty one hours of flying time, having declined the airline's kind offer of WiFi (when available) perhaps with some vague notion that we can recapture some of the romance of travel in a bygone age when sleep was deemed unnecessary.

We are not completely anti-technology of course.  This post was written yesterday in a haze of procrastination, and scheduled for now in the hope that romance of travel in a bygone age doesn't involve some last minute misadventure!

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Once more into the breach. Saturday 25th May - Dicky Beach

My father never explained why, but used to often remind me that "a boy should always carry a piece of string, a shilling and a pocket knife", and so it is that for going on three quarters of a century I have always followed part of that advice.   

I followed the bit about the pocket knife at least.  I have a small one on my key ring which is undoubtedly doomed like its predecessors to meet its end in an airport security bin on that one day I forget it's there, and a second, checked-luggage multi tool with pliers and longer blade in a leather pouch goes where ever we do.  This second knife is I think, an attempt to make up for the absence of the shilling and the penny.   

That knife, when it is not travelling on a boat or in a checked-in bag, has a home in the door pocket of the van and although I had a vague Idea that I'd got it out to stick in the bag, it's whereabouts were not apparent.

It seems that these days, a journey across the planet begins with at least two trips to visit the van, to pat it's little slumbering nose, ready loaded so it can be ready to take off at a moment's notice on our eventual return,  to retrieve a couple of things we'd forgotten we might need.

That knife it turned out was hiding, not in the van, but on my desk under the mound of papers that life in this paperless age dictates are necessary to travel across borders.   

The van resumed it's slumber, and with just one sleep to go until we depart, one of us sat about thinking about what he might need do next, printing eTickets and gathering paper, while the other simply got on with it, as is her way.

The tiniest rush of relief.

 

Yes there are fingerprints all over the thing, but there are fingerprints all over us as well, and who cares, today we took a very big step.     

It's currently 31° (feels like 34 apparently) and 85% humidity - a bit more of both in the garage and it's a bit hard to handle anything, let alone juggle it into place without getting great smears of perspiration over the lot let alone a few little fingerprints.  But  I digress.

On the the day we picked up the fridge, which only came in one singularly inappropriate colour for a fridge, I determined that we'd try to match the design "language" for the rest of the fit out.  I think we've finally done it, or as close to it as we can!  We've made light plastic drawers look like heavy plastic ones!

Only the galley unit remains to be fitted, and the printer does seem to be enjoying the change of colour as it chugs away making the plumbing fixtures.