Day 18: September 11, 1999
Bellagio, Italy to Arosa, Switzerland

We woke early and did the breakfast thing, then I brought the car around and we loaded it up and headed out. Still the lake was hazy. I wonder when it's clear? Rather than taking the boat, we decided to drive back to Lecco and then headed northeast up to Switzerland. We wound up stuck in rushhour traffic in Lecco. This means that people make two lanes out of one, block traffic circles as they wait for the light, whatever they want. Unfortunately, Walendo was driving, but he seemed to deal with it okay.

After a while, the road turned to kind of a country road going through little towns with farmland around it. We stopped in one town to get gas, just turning into a little inlet that constituted a gas station. Who knows how much we paid. Eventually, we started going up into the hills and finally crossed the border. It was pretty low key, they didn't even ask us any questions, I guess because we had a Swiss license plate. I stopped to get some sucking candies, paying in Lire just to clear us out. (The candies ended up tasting like soap. Oh well.)

Our little car made a game effort climbing the hills and making the hairpin turns. Once we got into Switzerland, it was less hazy but still not completely clear. We turned off before getting to St. Moritz toward Chur (which the Lonely Planet told us was pronounced like Chhhoor, with a lot of throat hacking involved, so we had fun saying it). At Chur, we still had 30 kilometers to go to Arosa, so onward we went, Walendo still driving. It was a very twisty, windy road, the kind you can't believe people drive in winter but they must since Arosa is a ski resort town.

Hotel Hold Arosa, Switzerland

We didn't have a reservation, so we just took some recommendations from the Fodor's book. The first one was full, but the second one (Hotel Hold) had a room for $80, so we took it. (We had to park the car a little ways up the road after we'd unloaded our stuff, but when Walendo drove by, the lot was full. He turned down to a second lot, and that was full. I thought he could have "made a spot" in the first lot, so he had me drive, and when I got back to the first lot, there was a nice empty spot ready and waiting. Hee hee.) It was a perfectly fine room a bit of a ways past the main part of town, but near to the hiking. We noticed people just hiking down from the mountains walking by our hotel, so we figured there must be some good trails nearby. We were both pretty hungry, though, so we decided to walk into town to get something to eat and then see about hiking. (I didn't bring my camera, for the first time all trip.) We just wanted a sandwich or something light, but it was kind of late for lunch and there didn't seem to much in the way of sandwich places. So we went to the Coop and bought bread and cheese and meat and chips and water, and then walked around looking for a bench. The benches are next to the cheap eating places, which don't exist. Of course, about 100 yards after buying stuff, we found some panini places, thus reinforcing the "keep walking after you think you should stop" rule of finding things. (As we were walking, a Bernese Mountain Dog came up to us but pulled away whenever we tried to pet it. I finally gave it some cheese in honor of Monica & John, and that made it follow us some more but still didn't warrant a pet. Oh well.) So we walked entirely across the town, until we cam to a lake that had some benches. There, as we ate we noticed that there was a cable car coming down the mountain and ending up at a station right near us.

Looking at top of tram from our hotel

We went to the information booth and asked about the cable car, and it the woman told us it went up to the top, and in fact it was cheaper than usual because it was after 3pm. (That meant it was $14 instead of the Standard Swiss Monetary Unit of $20.) We decided to go for it. On the ride up, there was another dog with the two other people on the lift. Walendo squat down to pet it, but when he reached out the dog backed away and spent the rest of the trip comfortably snuggled against its owner's legs. The view at the top was gorgeous, a 360 degree view that looked into the valley we'd driven up on one side and over the peaks into the next valley on the other side. Not as spectacular as the view on the way to the Eiger, but nice nonetheless. When we got to the top, the sign said it was 1.5 hours to the bottom, so we decided to go for it. I was still feeling kind of tired and I had a terrible runny nose, but I wanted to do the hike anyway. Meanwhile, we still had our little grocery bags, which were kind of silly to schlep on the trail but at least mine had some water and Walendo's chips and I didn't want to throw those out so I kept it. It did look a little silly, though.)

About half way down, we realized that we were heading off to one side and that there looked to be a shorter, more direct, path to town if we cut across a field. Meanwhile, some other hikers were happily heading off on the path away from the town. After hemming and hawing a bit, we decided just to head for the town. We ended up walking into a farm or something where we saw some orderly cows and some bunnies. Walendo's new word for the day was cacowphony, in honor of the bells worn by the cows in the Alps. We passed some women who were hiking up to the peak next to the one we came from, apparently to stay for the night. They have some sort of facilities there and their group was staying there. My main memory of this hike was my attempt to keep dabbing my nose with the paper towels I'd stolen from the restroom. They were harsh and my nose was already pretty sore, so I didn't want to rub.

We eventually reached the town, both tired and cold (well, I was cold), so we took about an hour nap. It was a good hike, definitely a good workout for the legs, but I couldn't help teasing Walendo about how it was just his style to take a ride up to the top and hike down. Even after the nap, I was still not feeling great. I wanted a cheese fondue, though, so we decided to head back into town and got as far as the menu posted on the wall of our hotel, which said that they had cheese fondue so we ate there. We each had soup (both were good) and then the fondue, which was only ok. (It turned out you could only order the fondue for two, so Walendo got points for being willing to have it, even though he wanted more. What a sweetheart.)

By this time, I was in pretty bad shape, so we went upstairs and went to sleep. Walendo gave me an antihistamine/decongestant, which seemed to help reduce my snot production at least long enough to get some sleep.

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