After a good nights sleep in the Hotel Mercure in Basel-we headed on up to the Basel Hilton for the start of the days driving. The manager of the Hilton had closed off the road around the Hilton so we could have a "start line" for the days adventure. With nearly 100 cars all gathered at the start, hooting their horns, sirens, claxons etc the locals were certainly more than well aware of our presence!
The challenge for the day was a "treasure hunt" where we had to find missing words from signs, Grimsel bus times, the whereabouts of signs and many other clues we had to get answers for.
We didn't do very well on that days challenge!
Onto the driving. Once we'd found our way out of Basel (thanks again Paul, Kim and "SatNavBird"!) we headed out alongside beautiful crystal clear lakes, past glacial flows and on towards Grimsel Pass and Furka Pass.
Grimsel provided us with our first real challenge of the rally. Claude was finding it quite hard work up those hills! He didn't fare too wll on the way down either losing his brakes through boied LHM.
After Grimsel came the Furka Pass, Rachael found Furka a tad on the scary side as there weren't many barriers on the side of the roads. It didn't bother me, I was driving so was always in the middle of the road.
Furka Pass also provided us with another Scally Van in our little convoy with Surfy and Kenny (team 81 "Life's a beach") who joined us halfway up Furka where we'd stopped for a picnic. Satisfied with our bread and pate, Surfy and Kenny made themselves bacon butties, all of a sudden, bread and pate seemed rather dull!
After a fantastic days driving, we arrived in Como just in time to get hopelessly lost. Paul and Kim lent us SatNavBird to try and find our hotel, unfortunateley it led us straight to a pedestrian zone with no sign of our hotel. Several phonecalls later, the hotel manager sent one of his staff out to lead us to the hotel. He took us down bus lanes, the wrong way down one way streets and finally back into the pedestrian zone we'd been in earlier where our hotel was just around the corner!
The evening was rounded off nicely however with a beer or 6 down by the lake with other Scalliers. Cheers people.
Sunday 14 October 2007
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