Day 81: Into the Alps

In the morning, we headed for the row of snow-covered mountains on the horizon – it was time to leave Italy behind and make our way to the only other appointment that we had arranged before we left: Christmas at my aunt's in the Swiss Alps.

At coffee time, we pulled off the motorway at the little village of Quincinetto – so little that we had to drive around it a couple of times before we found the 'centre'. It did have an imposing bell tower and church, and thankfully it also had a quaint cafe/deli that did a good espresso. I was also impressed by the slate roofs on the houses – not nice, neat, thin, regular slivers of stone like you usually see but huge great hunks of rock that must require some significant support beneath. 

We then stopped in another little village for lunch – Etroubles, which sounds like some sort of IT malfunction. By now we had climbed quite a bit higher, and the temperature had dropped significantly, so we were pleased to stumble across a cosy little pizzeria. 

After lunch, we finally got above the snow line as we approached Great St. Bernard Pass (elevation 2,469 metres), the third highest road pass in Switzerland. The road over the pass was closed, but the tunnel, which is celebrating its 50^th birthday this year, was open. It starts out as a sort of 'open tunnel' – there's a concrete roof over the road that's open at the side. We dealt with the border formalities, bought our vignette and then drove into the tunnel itself, where we officially crossed over into Switzerland. 

As we came out into the open air again, there was a very light snow falling, but as we drove down into the Rhone Valley, this turned to quite heavy rain. Sally soon sent us off the motorway and up the mountainside along a very narrow road (we had to stop several times to let other cars pass) through the vineyards. As we approached Randogne, where my aunt, Dorrie, lives, the rain turned back to snow - quite heavy snow - and we breathed a collective sigh of relief that we had shelled out on those winter tyres way back in Abruzzo. 

Although we've been to Dorrie's numerous times, we were approaching from a novel direction this time - and the heavy snow wasn't making navigating any easier - and we took a wrong turn, so we pulled over and called her to get directions. She was out, so as well as giving us directions to the house, she gave us directions as to how to let ourselves in and not long after, we were back on familiar ground again for the first time in months.