Monday 16th May

We started today later than the last few days due to being exhausted from concentrating through the German rain on sunday, leaving the hotel at 9:30am and heading straight out of France onto the Swiss motorway through Basel. On the lookout for cheap fuel we made our first stop of the day at a services with a great erotic megastore and got ripped off with some Swiss francs as change. As we continued (and passed another services with another erotic megastore) we soon saw some snowy mountains in the background and headed for them. The scenery was beautiful.

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Soon enough, we found ourselves leaving the motorway and heading to the ski resort of Andermatt. Our fairly minor road soon took a major detour as it turned onto a haripin and then suddenly we saw cars on various levels above us. The passes had begun.

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We reached Andermatt with little difficulty, after a lorry had pulled in for us and a derv Mk1 Golf had covered us in black smoke. We stopped here to sample the fresh alpine air and to get a little bit of lunch and some Toblerone. When in Switzerland and all that...

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Having checked the pass status, our next mission was the Gotthard Pass. We got very lucky! We made it up to the top, though there was plenty of snow at the side of the road, the actually surface was dry and easy. We spent the next hour freezing our asses off in the snow, all for a couple of photos and a bit of naughty graffiti. Id recommend San Gotthard to anyone. The pictures just dont catch the pure beuty of the place!

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Group shot at the top

We headed down the pass (being overtaken by a loony local in a Megane estate!) and then down a motorway, down for about the next 50 miles! It was crazy how far up we had been. As a second break, we decided to visit the Goldeneye dam at Contra, well worth a visit, for the road up to it alone even!

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Contra Dam, Switzerland, as used in the James Bond film Goldeneye


View from the Contra Dam, Switzerland

As we headed to Italy, the driving standards got worse, and worse. We found a random traffic jam caused by the police and four motorcyclists and got abuse from the locals for pushing into the fast lane. Oops! It didn't take us long to reach the hotel (apart from a detour through a random town to avoid a non existent toll, where Ed got stopped by border control for taking photos of them when they hadn't got their hair done, or something like that...). We took a short break from the chaos and then went for our dinner on the shores of Lake Como in a rather nice italian restaurant. The 15 minute drive each way was the usual mayhem, but at the end of the day, we are all safe and rather exhausted.

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