Europe Road Trip Day 7: Loving Life, Hating Sand
As we fled from the clutches of a man who was either a massive creep or who had never once seen a woman before Eden walked into his B&B, I couldn’t help but feel that Verona had been somewhat less romantic than advertised.
We set off west, our route for the day taking us past Lake Garda and Como, up through the Italian Alps, over the Swiss border, past Dagenham and then to the charming city of Luzern (not sure if that’s all correct, my geography is patchy). Before any of that, though, we stopped for breakfast in the town of Sirmione, known for the 13th-century Castello di Scaligeri and for this scene in Call Me By Your Name:
It’s hard to say what was more exciting: the medieval old town perched on a spit of land jutting out onto Lake Garda, or the selection of pastries we found in the Lidl afterwards.
Lake Garda is surrounded by fairly flat land at its southern end but gets very dramatic further up, so I would have loved to spend more time doing a scenic drive along its length, but as so often on this trip, there wasn’t nearly enough time.
So we continued onwards to Como, where the sights are much more compressed into one spectacular view. Como is probably the most scenic of the Italian lakes, seen in the final scenes of Casino Royale and, even better, in the “I don’t like sand” scene of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. If there’s a way to travel without viewing everything through the lens of films and TV shows I’ve seen, I don’t know how, and also I don’t care.
The town of Como sits at the southern tip of its lake, the hills rising sharply, deep green but speckled with 5-star hotels. It was absolutely stunning, particularly as we caught it in a bout of sunshine at golden hour, but you’re also aware of the mega-rich quite literally looking down on you from above. Eden and I tried the sand while we were there, and to be fair, we didn’t like it either.
Moving onwards, we turned north and crossed the border into the land of Swiss cheese and Swiss watches, but, oddly enough, not to the land of Swiss people — very few Swiss people actually identify as Swiss, which is strange because the entire country feels like a potemkin recreation of what a country should look like, with spotless towns and cities and idyllic views around every corner. Maybe it’s something to do with Switzerland’s association with the worst of the world’s financial industry, or maybe something to do with how that industry benefitted from huge chunks of stolen Nazi gold. Safe to say that Switzerland is a bit of a guilty pleasure for me.
The temperature dropped dramatically as we rose into the Alps. To get to Luzern, we needed to pass through the Gotthard Tunnel, which is both more and less exciting than it sounds. At almost 17km long, it is the fifth-longest road tunnel in the world. (Never let it be said that this blog isn’t well-researched, although I’m beginning to wish that it wasn’t, because I found out this fact during that research:
Is three days really long enough to make sure a mountain range isn’t about to collapse through the roof?)
Anyway, we made it through unscathed. The actual experience of the tunnel was, predictably, quite boring — the only surprise was how claustrophobic it felt to see nothing but identical dark grey concrete for 15 minutes of driving. Opening the window only made it worse — it was 31 degrees and deafeningly loud outside. I was very very relieved to reach the end and drive out into the crisp Swiss air.
From there, it was only a short drive to the city of Luzern, which cradles a great lake as it spills into a river. Stretching across the river is the ancient Kapellbrücke, a wooden construction with a medieval tower in the middle — as you walk across the bridge, frescos painted onto the woodwork tell the history of Luzern. Unfortunately, part of the bridge was destroyed in a 1993 fire, so some of the frescos have been replaced and now tell the story of Heimlich the Dickhead, who started the fire by driving his boat, already on fire, into a highly flammable medieval footbridge (this is actually mostly true).
Anyway, we got to Luzern late and had most of the old town completely to ourselves, which was a complete treat. Unfortunately, we were now in Switzerland rather than Italy, so by 10pm nothing was open but the Burger King and McDonalds by the train station, so our day of culture came to an abrupt but tasty end.
