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Have you ever gone somewhere completely unfamiliar with only a general sense of your direction and no specific route or detailed map to guide you?  Such carefree meandering can either feed your exhilarating spirit of adventure and ultimately create deep feelings of accomplishment or overwhelm you with stress, confusion and anxiety as you end up thoroughly frustrated and lost.  In fact, you might find you experience a combination of all these reactions during the course of a single journey. Or someone in the car with you might be experiencing one set of feelings even as you are on the polar opposite end of the spectrum.  I mention it only because this was the exact situation that occurred throughout most of our trip, but certainly never more than on the return leg of the voyage.  

Mom is typically our navigator.  She absolutely adores maps so this makes her ideally suited for the role.  In fact, she spent many hours pouring over maps and discussing various routes while we were visiting our friends in Switzerland.  We enjoyed a number of dinner table conversations related to tunnels – which is the longest, which is under construction, which is the busiest this time of year, which one dumps us out in the best place, which have we previously traveled, etc.  This led to reminiscing about days gone by and all sorts of tunnel-related memories.  Eventually, as a result of our ruminating, we each had a decent mental map of where we were going and how we might get there.  Of course, our maps were less like a Philips atlas and more like the Miller Atlas. A “60,000 foot” view (so to speak), but it was a decent overall idea of the basic route.  Actually, in the end, this was probably the only thing that saved us from a complete misadventure.  

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We bade our German friends farewell in the morning and made our way steadily across the Swiss countryside on Highway 19, snaking through the Alps from Brig to Domodóssola.  We decided to take a route that did not include a tunnel as the weather was finally sunny and beautiful and we wanted to see as much of the countryside as possible.  Also, both Mom and I have had multiple prior life experiences that include being stuck in tunnels in Europe and none of them are positive.  In fact, the last time I piloted a vehicle in Italy, I ended up reversing through a tunnel on the freeway! That said, this was our first time ever traversing the Swiss Alps without driving through some famous tunnel.  Which means, we spent our time precariously hanging on to the surface of the mountains rather than taking a direct (straighter and shorter) route through them.  

Sharing the narrow, twisty road with motorcyclists, tour busses, bicyclists and other motorcars was challenging enough, but when we started to encounter roller-skiers using their impressive thighs to power uphill in the sunny but freezing temperatures, I achieved an entirely new level of driving skill.  Probably this new skill level should be noted on my license and maybe even my resume.  I should also take a moment to point out that this particular carriageway does not have the comforting safety feature of a guard rail that I personally believe would be an excellent investment, if only for the tourists who admittedly do not have the same driving acumen as the locals.  I do not recall a time when, as the driver of the vehicle, I have actively wished for this specific restraint system more than on that one particular route.  Even if it only kept the Alpen cows from wandering across my path!! 

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After a thrilling decent complete with waterfalls, cheese huts, fantastic wildflowers, wayward bovines and tiny picturesque villages, we popped out of the Alps into northern Italy.  It is at this precise moment that our adventure evolved into more of a “general-sense-of-direction” situation.  We planned to use the same tactic we had previously used on multiple occasions: identifying familiar destinations on the road signs and progressing forward by default.  Unfortunately, it turns out there is a great deal of difference in specificity between the 60,000-foot perspective and the actual, wheels-on-the-road level when it comes to navigating through northern Italy.  The towns listed on the map were not listed on the immediate road signs and vice versa.  In fact, we weren’t entirely confident of any harmony between our mental and physical maps. After a considerable distance, we might be fortunate to identify a familiar location by name which was usually enough to turn us around or to spur us on.  I reminded myself many times that the point of relocating to Europe was to “see more of the world” and that was exactly what we were accomplishing even if it was a little more granular than I had originally anticipated.  

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I can not tell you much about where we were in northern Italy except to say that it was very lovely there.  We toured some farmland (likely on a private road) and wandered along a river (we were convinced it would take us closer to a lake) and through a variety of quaint small towns (each with so many traffic circles that it is a wonder we are not still there driving around in loops).  Somehow, miraculously, we arrived in Baveno and eventually, with our last remaining drop of luck, found the B&B we had reserved in the Italian villa overlooking Lake Maggiore.  We celebrated our accomplishments on the balcony overlooking the beautiful town and waters while Allita read to use about the historical significance of Palazzo Borromeo, visible on a tiny island in the distance.  All-in-all, the trip was “molto bello” and I felt like a modern-day Marco Polo audaciously and meticulously exploring a small part of our world.    

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Photos by Allita Barefoot