September 5

September 5th (sunny, warm – cold and snow)
Our plans were to stop overnight at Chur, however upon checking the weather report on the internet, it was going to be -2 and snowing. We decided that we’ve taken enough risks with the van and will forego camping at Chur tonight and our brief foray into Liechtenstein. Instead, we will stick to the main road: the road we chose was to drive the highway instead of the byways even though they were parallel to each other because the highway barreled through the mountains with tunnels whereas the byways zigzagged their way up and down putting undue stress on Susi. We are very cautious as to the roads we use due to the “red light” syndrome.
Unfortunately the day started off a little stressful because the red light on the temperature gauge was blinking immediately at the get-go from Locarno. Again, taking into account of what the mechanic said, we carried on, but we still had our doubts. True to the weather forecast, it became cold, cloudy and yes – it started to snow upon reaching San Bernardino in the Alps. The blanket of white added impact to the already beautiful scenery that surpasses even our Rocky Mountains. At one of the high-altitude rest stops, we found out how cold it really was and how silly we looked running around in our shorts, short-sleeves and sandals. We quickly changed clothes.
As the weather has changed our itinerary, our new destination of the day was Lucerne, a city of approx. 60,000 inhabitants. In our travels towards the city, we passed a few lakes and over here the lakes are huge. The two large ones we passed were over 60 kms long. We even drove through an officially designated area called “Heidiland”. At one point in time, we were actually 60 – 70 kms drive away from Immenstadt where Seb, Susi and Steff live. Upon reaching our destination, we were taken aback by the unbelievable setting of Lucerne. Looking forward to hoofing around town tomorrow in what is expected to be a sunny day.
Before we went to bed, one interesting thing happened. As we have internet access, Georg decided to get more background associated with his first Canon camera which broke down in Nurnberg. He turned on the camera so that he could see the error message displayed on the screen and to his surprise when he turned it on, the lens actually worked. Upon several successful “on and offs”, we now have two working cameras although the original one still has some lens problems.