I wake up around six, a bit early but that’s okay, we have a lot to do this morning! We first pack up mom’s trekking gear, which we won’t need again until I drop her off at home, and stuff that in the trunk of the car. Next we drag the bike rack and bike down and get that installed, all of that takes about half an hour, now we’re ready for breakfast. We eat leftovers, so it’s a bit a disjointed meal: a tomato, some anchovies, breadsticks and a muffin. I have my five sips of coffee and hand my cup over to mom to finish it. We clean up, pack up our remaining stuff (what we’ll need in Basel) and move out around eight thirty.
First stop: Il Centro in Arese. that’s about half an hours drive, it’s the largest shopping mall in Italy with 92.000 sqm and 200 shops, built on the site of an Alfa Romeo factory. It has plenty of parking, plus an SignorVino store, where we’re planning to buy a small supply of Italian wine to take home. We’ve been paying attention the last few days, so we have some ideas of which grapes we like and the friendly shop assistant gives advice where necessary. We walk out of the mall with 27 bottles, plus ham and cheese sandwiches for lunch, and it’s not even ten.
We set our destination in the GPS and take off again, first the madness of Italian highways, then the slow crawl through the Swiss road works, a half hour wait at the Gotthard tunnel, .. at least the weather is sunny and we have good music. Not much chatting going on though, the driving takes all my attention. We eat our lunch at a rest stop halfway through Switzerland, sitting outside with a view of the mountains. It’s just ridiculous how good looking these are, with meadows like golf courses (we can see the occasional cow, plus it’s pretty steep terrain, so we’re pretty sure they are not golf courses), snow capped peaks and icy blue lakes.
We arrive at our hotel in Weil am Rhein (Germany) around three. It’s a bit of a fuss to get organized, as the hotel is actually on top of a mall, which makes the parking a bit complicated. We drive up to the sixth floor, then take one elevator all the way down, another one up to the sixth again to end up at the reception, then down and up again to move the car all the way down for a safer parking spot, where at last we discover an elevator which goes directly from the parking lot to the floor with our room, so we can avoid all this dragging when leaving on Sunday. We’re right at the point where France, Germany and Switzerland share a border, so it’s confusing for the cell phones as well, I’ll leave my roaming disabled until we’re well away from Switzerland, that’s for sure.
We set out for Basel center, about 20 min by tram, quite convenient. We have a yummy but ridiculously priced dinner and then reconnoiter the old town. We see the colorful city hall, the medieval minster with its cloister and the viewpoint over the river Rhine. From the bridge over the Rhine we see small boats with two standing oarsman struggling to complete a buoy marked track on the fast flowing river. It must be a sport of some kind, because they looked very practiced and they were queuing to take a turn. We take the tram back around eight and plan a quiet evening.
Febe writes 