October 1999 Switzerland Alps

Photo gone

In my above blog called "Photo gone" I started to write about Paris in Fall 2009 when a particular photo was taken on a bridge on the Seine in Paris when I was there.

This started me thinking about the trip I took with my then 10 year old daughter (now 21) and my then (25 year old son) now 36 and my mother (then alive and in her early 80s). My wife and youngest daughter decided to stay home because my youngest was a toddler and my wife thought that one person in their 80s would be enough and bringing a toddler along might be just too much for that trip to work for anyone.

So, what this reminded me of was my trip there to Europe in 1999 and finding "The Dalai Lama Camping Club" in the mountains above the Aoste area towards the Matterhorn 

After this experience and my son and his friend resuming their Euro Pass train ride throughout Europe for several months in their mid twenties (Probably September through December for my son and longer for his friend) I drove our motor home (6 passenger diesel powered) back to Munich where we had rented it. One night I had taken a (short cut) and was high in the Alps and it was snowing. And because there were no guard rails now with thousands of foot dropoffs I was starting to get scared going downhill and meeting a very large truck with thousands of feet dropoffs (with no guardrails on my right). So when the wind started to blow above 50 and up to 70 miles per hour, I gave up driving and just pulled to the side of the road in a protected place. Even parked the wind was just so powerful in gusts that it rocked the motor home and I worried we would blow over even stationary during the night because we were moving over 3 feet at a time at the roof level.

As my mother and 10 year old daughter slept fitfully during that night I dreamed about Nature spirits in the Alps. They had very angular features like the carved wooden figures one often sees in Germany and Switzerland. The Nature Spirit king wanted to keep my very beautiful 10 year old red headed blue eyed daughter and I said emphatically "No!"

This was a really intense experience that night both waking and sleeping and so I woke up tired from the whole experience but really invigorated when I looked outside at all the snow. Snowplows had cleared the road and I was able to get the motorhome rolling even though I didn't have chains. But since I had lived and worked in snow and ice in places like Mt. Shasta, California and Santa Fe, New Mexico (3500 feet in elevation and over 7000 feet in elevation) I felt relatively at home driving even a large motorhome in the snow. However, I was worried about hitting too much packed ice or even black ice. However, I made it through out of the Alps and back into Germany and returned my Motor Home to the Rental Yard there and took a taxi to the Airport (Flughaven in German) Also Munich in German isn't pronounced Mew-nik it is pronounced more like munch-in.