A few years ago, I intended to drive from Bellinzona from the Italian speaking part of Switzerland to Montreux, in the French speaking part. Google Maps gave me two options for the route:
There is another route, which looks much more straight forward, with only 247km.
I was not sure why Google recommended the longer route, and gave similar time estimates for both. “Let’s take the short cut,” I told my cousin, who was travelling with me.
Twists and turns, literally
What I did not realise was, the shortcut actually consisted of many twists and turns. This is a closer look:
And we realised that were actually in the mountains surrounded by snow – and nobody around for dozens of kilometres. Refer tot he header image of this post.
My cousin was very excited – coming from coastal plateau near Shanghai, she does not see snow capped mountains very often, let alone be completely immersed into them.
She was zapping pictures while I was deeply worried – when could I get out of this, it was getting dark!
I asked her to take a picture of the GPS in the car (as the mobile phone was losing signal), and this is how it looked like:
Be prepared
Hours later, we were finally on (relatively) flat land and a bigger road, and started to see villages and towns. Huge sigh of relief!
The journey, with shortcuts, is never as easy as you think at the beginning of the it.
Not arguing that you should not do it – but be sufficiently mentally prepared, so you can go through all these challenges and obstacles – and emerge stronger, happier, and more successful.
This is the morning after the drive: