Alps - Vosges

In Munich I remembered that my tattooer, who has done almost all of my tattoos, lives at the moment in Davos. Because of one unfinished birdie, I wanted to contact him to see whether he would have time to finally finish it. Luckily he did and so we headed towards Davos via Rinnen, Berwang.

Haus Seebach at Rinnen.

We had a nice room at Haus Seebach, which is a very typical Tyrolian house. For our huge surprise we got there so far the best hotel breakfast of our trip! They had delicious fresh figs, nectarines, bananas, plums and a mango. Amazing! :D The surroundings were amazing as well. Beautiful vast forest with a lovely waterfall, where we had a long and pleasant walk in the evening.

First I thought this was a rubber toy, so still it was, but in the end it moved a bit. Really strange looking creature and so intensively black!

The only negative thing about the place was this graveyard right behind our room door :( Really creepy and so sad to look at!

Ötztaler Alpen, Austria.

Lago di Resia, Italy.

Lunch brake at Lago di Muta, Italy. Delicious watermelon for us and some cookies for girls :)

Ofenpass, Switzerland

Davos, Switzerland.

Good winter transport to carry beer in the Alps..? :D

Roadside beauty...

...and some more :)

Who is the biggest stinker? Excellent sign!

Plenty of poop bag-dispensers everywhere in Davos and the city really was clean from dog poo! Well done :)

Switzerland is very expensive country for budget travelers! After some heavy searching and some misunderstandings we finally got rather nice little apartment for two nights. The flat was totally a flashback from the seventies, with all the brown colours and funny furnitures :) So in the end I got inspired to do breakfast according to the theme... :D

Apple-plum-cinnamon "pudding".

...and I finally got my beautiful birdie and flowers finished :) Thanks Ile, you're the best!

I really love my birdie collection and it will definitely grow over time!

My photographing astronaut :D

Pretty soon after we left Davos Wolfi had a very unpleasant little accident. On one very tight mountain road he got squeezed by a camper van :( Because of the slow speed I could easily see what was about to happen and tried to wave the Italian guy to stop, but for some reason he just needed to push through and broke Wolfi's left sidecase! We got totally furious about this and I was especially worried about girls, because the sidecar was stuck between the camper and the mountain!

After some sweating and swearing on the road and causing some minor jam, we finally found a common language and managed to move to a parking lot nearby, where the swearing continued... The guy had really annoying attitude and was just constantly saying, that no big damage happened and that this sidecase would be easily fixed with some banging! He also tried to justify things by saying that he got much bigger damage to his camper - well, he lost a piece of plastic, which anyway is just a decoration! Wolfi almost lost his very expensive sidecase and the PC inside there and the exhaust pipe... Not just a little thing for us, especially when it's about our home!

We were really close to call a police to solve this thing (and I was close to do something else, but decided just to curse in Finnish...), but after some thoughts realized that most likely it wouldn't help anything. It would just delay our trip with several hours and anyway it was just our words against theirs. So we momentarily fixed the sidecase with a string and hoped it would last until Rudi...  

The entire case got twisted, bent and pushed towards the bike... 

The locks won't close properly anymore and there is now a gap inviting rain water in.

Exhaust pipe was very close to get badly damaged.

Only few kilometers after our problems we noticed a biker in the ditch and of course stopped to help the poor Swiss guy. Bike didn't look too well anymore, but at least the guy seemed to be fine. Hopefully only hurt self esteem...

It's not too easy to pull a bike from the ditch, takes many strong men to do it... ;)

After Davos came the best part of the trip. Gorgeous Swiss Alps with magnificent views and exciting serpentine roads! That day was great fun, but also a bit exhausting, since we drove 330km and mostly just heavy curves!

Oberalppass, Switzerland.

Furkapass 2431m, with a view to Grimselpass.

Grimselpass 2164m. Töff = motorbike in Swiss :D

From Switzerland we drove back to Germany for one night to have a shopping day at Freiburg. I'm totally addicted to my Vibram shoes and desperately needed a new pair, since the old ones are soon worn out.  We have been trying to find a shop that sells Vibrams almost ever since I got the first pair back in Berlin, but without too much success. Obviously the shoes haven't conquired too many countries yet. Well luckily we heard from Rudi's brother that there is one very good shop in Freiburg and it was anyway basically on our way! So I got a new pair which is better for trail running and I'm extremely happy about them :D We also found a great Alnatura-market and got plenty of organic goodies for the rest of the trip. For example delicious chocolate-rice-icecream and huge medjool dates, yummy! :P

Then we were good to go to the Vosges...

Jep, iso pallopää! (pakko kommentoida ennen kuin pikkusisko kerkee :D)

View to the Alps from the Vosges.

We stayed two nights at Soultzeren and we got to enjoy again very beautiful and hot weather. I think it was over +30! Vosges has very lovely forestry landscapes and we had again nice walk on hills, where we met a really funny sounding donkey and a young runaway bull. On top of the hill we also had a small karate training, which was a nice change to a normal walk. Wolfi's learning quite well ;)

My great new Vibram Spyridons, perfect for heavy terrain!

Some sort of chestnut tree? Beautiful anyway :)

Overall we had a very nice and interesting loop. Almost constantly beautiful sunshine and very warm days! I saw plenty of new places, but also some old familiar ones, and got again much better with the sharp curves.

Our track - ca. 2300km

Height profile of our track

~ Ilta


P.S. Today I will go alone for two weeks back to Kappeln (first via Gerolstein) to have some intensive karate trainings... Wolfi will stay with girls here at Rudi and hopefully finally has his vacation... :D