 |
Some of the travel we do is for business and some is just for fun so
usually when Lynn travels for business, I go along. Occasionally,
though, I’m not able to go with her and that happened recently when
she was gone for a week. Faced with the prospect of being home alone
for the week and the weather having been so good for quite a while,
I thought this would be a good time to do what I refer to as the
Grand Tour. This trip was not so much to see different cities as it
was just to take the ride through some areas I hadn’t been to. I
prepared impeccably because I knew just where I wanted to go.
Life is what happens while you’re making other plans. The trip
hadn’t even started and things became slightly askew. It was raining
hard on the morning of departure and the weather forecast for the
next several days was terrible for much or Europe. I almost bagged
the whole thing. What a mistake that would have been. The first day
was the long trip to Füssen, Germany, and I thought this would be
the hardest part of the trip because it was the longest and most of
it was on highways. Highways, whether in the U.S., Europe, or the
Antarctic are all pretty much the same and my idea had been to take
the back roads. The rain had subsided before I left but it was
cloudy and overcast for several hours and then it rained like it
would never stop. But by the time I reached Stuttgart the sky had
cleared. With about a hundred miles to my destination and the time
getting toward 6 p.m., I had two options. First, stay on the highway
which was boring but I’d get there sooner. Second, go via the back
roads, take an hour longer, but see what there was to be seen. I
picked (b) because that was the point and was that a great move. The
back roads were really back roads. Some times I stopped and turned
off the car. There wasn’t a sound except for
cowbells, the Alps were in the background, and it was an
incredibly pastoral scene. The road went through many small German
villages in southern Bavaria with what looked like populations of
less than 500. The ride from Stuttgart to Füssen was so beautiful,
so serene, that I think that that two hour period may be the
definition of what I wanted to see in Europe that I wouldn’t have
been able to see as a tourist. But even so, I hadn’t seen nuthin’
yet.
The purpose of coming through Füssen was to see
Neuschwanstein, the New Swan Castle. You can read about that
here. Füssen is a
stone’s throw from the Austrian border and almost immediately after
crossing the border, one starts to go up into the mountains. At this
time of year, the mountains are a lush green. The road went through
tunnel after tunnel. Sometimes after emerging from a tunnel there
would be a town. Then the road would start to climb the switchbacks
and one could look down and see the village below surrounded by
mountains. Once I caught a glimpse of where the road I was on had
exited from the tunnel. Sometimes I hear people describe a sandwich
or a pair or shoes as awesome. Sandwiches and shoes cannot ever be
awesome. This view was awesome. And yet, I still hadn’t seen nuthin’
yet.
I made my way to Innsbruck. The reason for coming to this city was
that the Olympics had been here once and I just wanted to see the
place. It, too, is in a valley and it’s easy to see why this was an
Olympic site. There was nothing about the town that made me want to
stay for any length of time and I wanted to get to Vaduz by evening.
Vaduz?
What, you’ve never heard of Vaduz? Neither had I until a week ago
planning this trip. Vaduz is the capital of Liechtenstein which is
the fourth smallest country in Europe (the Vatican, Monaco, and San
Marino, if you’re counting) at four miles wide and twelve miles
long. Its total area is about 62 square miles compared to
Philadelphia’s 142. When I crossed the eastern border from Austria, I drove for
about ten minutes until I reached Vaduz and the hotel. I didn’t
realize it then but I had crossed the whole country as Vaduz is on
the western border with Switzerland. Liechtenstein is a remnant of
the Holy Roman Empire and as a principality, it is presided over by
a prince who is the ninth wealthiest head of state in the world.
(Here’s his castle on the hill from
below where I was and from near the
top. Where does all this money come from in a country whose
population is about 34,000? Consider that there are more registered
corporations here than people. That tells you something; this is a
tax haven, even more than Delaware.
Liechtenstein is sort of the little brother of Switzerland. Because
of the
Schengen Agreement, crossing borders in western and central
Europe is generally like going from Philadelphia to Montgomery
County, but because Switzerland and Liechtenstein are not
signatories to this treaty, there is a border patrol in both of them
which consists of security by license plate. Coming from Austria
into Liechtenstein, they looked at my Dutch license tag and waved me
through. Pretty secure. Once when entering Switzerland on a previous
trip from France, I was asked the difficult question, “Where are you
going?” Sissach. I guess that was the right answer because they
waved us through then, too. But the border between Liechtenstein and
Switzerland is almost
invisible. Not only that, Liechtenstein uses Swiss money, Swiss
stamps, and the whole Swiss postal system. However, they have
different football teams.
Leaving Liechtenstein from Vaduz, I went to Chur, Switzerland, and
began a climb into the Alps. This was why I was here and I was about
to see sumthin’. The climb began slowly and it became apparent after
a while that “up” was the only way I was going. The roads started to
have switchbacks after a bit and they haven’t heard about guardrails
around here yet. The vegetation changed a bit and I reached an
altitude where there was snow. From a great distance away, it’s
clear that the highest peaks were still covered with
snow
but I was nowhere near that. The highest peak in the Alps is Mont
Blanc at 15,780 feet on the French-Italian border. The highest I got
was 6,700 feet at
Oberalppass. While not covered, there was plenty of snow and it
was very close to higher peaks. Being so close, the mountains look
different than they do from far away. Shadows from the trees are
visible and when the sun shines on a severe angle it makes for a
sharp contrast. You’ve seen pictures like these in magazines and
that’s what it looked like: a picture. It looked as though this
couldn’t possibly be real. It was indescribably beautiful.
The descent from the Alps was faster than the climb with switchier
switch-backs and narrower roads. My car is fun to hit the corners
hard with, but there was zero margin of error and I’m no dope.
Getting to the base, though, didn’t mean I was finished with the
mountains. If you can’t climb them, you go through them, this time
on a train. Twice the road ended at the base of a mountain. Cars
then drove onto the back of a train and went as far forward as
possible. When the train was loaded it headed into a tunnel. The
rides lasted about 15 minutes through total darkness and a lot of
noise. I have no idea have many thousands of feet of earth were
above me and I tried not to think about it. It was a very strange
feeling.
With the Alps now behind me and shrinking as I moved away, I headed
to Strasbourg, France. There was another border incident, this time,
at the Swiss-German border. The traffic was backed up for about
quarter to a half mile on a Sunday afternoon. There was a barrier
there not unlike the barrier one sees at a toll booth crossing a
bridge but there was only one lane open. We inched forward. No, we
centimetered forward. Sorry. Once again, the security was really
tight. The one border patrol person waved everyone through one car
at a time. I don’t think she even looked at my license tag.
On the way to Strasbourg, I indulged in a making a minor fantasy
come true. Many years ago, long before it ever occurred to me that I
would ever live in Europe, I always dreamed of visiting here and I
wanted to one day stand on the banks Rhine River in Germany and look
across to France. So I did just
that.
The journey was coming to an end and about the last thing I wanted
to do was to take the ride from the city of Luxembourg to the
northern border with Belgium. I’ve written about this
before. This road was
built with my car in mind. You gotta love a place that has names
like Wilwerwiltz, Esch-sur-Sûre, Wemperhardt, and Useldange. Near the border I took a slight
detour. There is a point where there is the confluence of
Luxembourg, Belgium, and Germany. It’s in the woods and there’s a
monument to a unified Europe about 100 yards away. The border is
marked by a little creek flowing into a larger one. This
picture was taken from Belgium. Across the small creek on the
right is Luxembourg; across the large one at the top is Germany.
Four days on the Grand Tour. I came back a much richer man.
See all my pictures of the Grand Tour.
Read an essay about Neuschwanstein.
See a video from
Austria.
See a video from
Bavaria.
See a video from the
Swiss Alps. |
