Making it to Italy

Well, still have a day to catch up on, so am going to do that in this post, then do a big Florence post when we leave here on Thursday.

Lausanne seems like a long time and distance away but we only left there yesterday morning. We were supposed to catch a train around midday for Brig which is in the high part of Switzerland, near to the Matterhorn, as the first leg of our journey to Florence. However, trains to Brig were going every half hour or so from Lausanne and we decided to catch an earlier train and spend a couple of hours sitting in the sun there.

The journey to Brig took about an hour and a half and it skirted the shores of Lake Geneva, through Vevey and Montreux, so we had the lake on one side and beautiful Alps and vineyards on the other. We had tried a wine from this region on Sunday night, a red called Plant Robert, which we called Robert Plant and thought that perhaps he owned the vineyard, sadly not! Apparently the vines that make it were established long before Led Zeppelin was born, but interesting that “Smoke on the Water” was written about a fire at Montreux when Deep Purple were recording their album, “Machine Head,” after a Frank Zappa and the Mothers of invention concert - just listen to the words next time you hear it,

My husband had helped an elderly woman onto the train with her suitcase (no, not me!) at Lausanne station so we sat with her and she and I proceeded to have a bizarre conversation, during which she seemed to assume that my French was much better than it is. I understood that she was going to a chalet in the mountains for the day, returning to Lausanne that evening; that she couldn’t take too much sun because she had undergone a brain operation which had left a visible scar on her forehead and had been very unpleasant and that she could only eat farmed salmon because wild salmon has too much fat and upsets her digestion. Also, she had never been out of Switzerland, apart from going to Norway, which is terribly expensive. Who knows how much of this is accurate! In any case, I did a lot of nodding and saying, “Oh oui!” in a very understanding  voice.

She got off several stations before us and at a subsequent station there was a bit of an incident when a family were so busy playing around on their phones that they missed their stop, with some diving off before the train shut the doors and left the station and some being left on. A passenger got on  and realised their plight and pulled the emergency cord, at which point all hell let loose among the train officials. The guard started shouting that the train would now be running 6 minutes late - I wonder how he would feel about working for South Eastern trains.

In any case, they made up the time and we reached Brig about midday. Our  connection to Milan was leaving at 14.45, so we decided to use up all our swiss francs at the station cafe bar there.

It was lovely to soak up the sunshine and feel the warmth on our backs until I needed to use the ladies so had to go back into the station and put money into a slot to open the entrance door. Having used the facility I was struggling to find the end of the toilet roll which had got a bit stuck, and I had clearly used up more than my allotted time, as suddenly there was a bit whoosh, and icy cold water was unleashed onto my nether regions, and I shrieked as the water made contact. I must say it did wake me up and I walked back to the cafe feeling invigorated and wide awake.

I had been looking forward to the train journey from Brig to Milan, and then Milan to Florence, but in the event a large proportion of it was disappointedly spent in tunnels. On leaving Brig, it was blue and sunny,  but 5 minutes later we emerged from a tunnel into grey skies, rain and low cloud. We did pass alongside Lake Maggiore for a while and enjoyed some scenery there, but on the whole it was less dramatic and scenic than I’d hoped for. Likewise the journey from Milan to Florence, which is a high speed line and very comfortable, but most of the journey from Bologna to Florence is in a tunnel, so we had few glimpses of the Tuscan hills. It's interesting to note that since we left Ebbsfleet last Thursday we have only had our passports checked in the hotels we've stayed in, despite having passed through France, Switzerland, France (again) and into Italy.

From Florence station we made our way to our B&B, and found the street and the entrance to the B&B. We rang a bell and received no answer and finally found a door, locked, with the B&B sign outside. Nobody came and we waited for over 25 minutes, with my husband by now in a very bad mood and deciding we should go and book in elsewhere. Just as I was about to leave him fuming on the stairs, telling him that things are more laid back in Italy, a couple came out of the door and phoned the owner for us, only for us to be told that we were in the wrong building, we should have been next door. I went there and found our very nice B&B and the lovely Elisabetta waiting for us, concerned as to why we’d taken so long to get there from the station. All’s well that ends well!  It ended with a lovely warm evening, pizza and some prosecco and beer al fresco.

Summary of Lausanne: pleasant as a city and the lake location was stunning.

We stayed at the Hotel du Marche in the old town, which was clean, very well situated, comfortable and excellent value for money.