on with the journey

Well, things got a bit sidetracked and busy, but I still have more of our road trip to cover, so onward...

After we left Lugano, we drove through a bit of Italy. Here is Lake Como, with the Alps looming in the background. It was such a beautiful day.

Here is The Boy and the dogs (Gibby, as usual, running so fast that none of his legs are touching the ground) having a walk on the shore of Lake Como. And probably a bit of a pit stop too, if we're honest (the dogs, not The Boy!)...but if they did, you can be sure that it got cleaned up immediately.


We wound through a number of tiny Italian towns, like Chiavenna, where I took random photos. Here's one of a very old slate-roofed barn or garden shed:


And just across the road from that, my favorite photo from the whole trip -- this is an old church with the Alps in the background and I just love the whole view.


After this, we started to wind up into the mountains. Really, REALLY wind up. Look at this road we took to get to Maloja Pass:


No kidding -- those were the tightest hairpin curves I have ever experienced. And it was sort of barfy, to be honest. But the beautiful scenery at the top was worth it. Here's a view once we got up to the pass:


Look! There's Roo sitting there with his luggage box on. Isn't he cute? He has taken us all over Europe and the Alps, bless him.

After the pass, you come to St Moritz -- playground of the rich and beautiful, so naturally we didn't really stop there. Well, we stopped to take a photo of this super cool house:


Damn. Amazing.

But we kept going, toward our destination of Scuol, which is a really lovely old town in the Romansch section of Switzerland. We stayed at this oh-so-cute and warm and friendly and hospitable hotel, called the Hotel Traube. If you're ever going anywhere near Scuol (and you should be!), you should totally stay at that hotel, it's one of my favorites ever. Here's a not-very-great picture of it from the outside (the hotel's site has much better photos):


And here is a picture of Gibby and Deedee taking over the bed right away:


The room had a semi-separate little sitting room, which is the direction the dogs are looking. There is a small river just outside the hotel, and we opened the windows to the small terrace off the small sitting room, and had the sound of the rushing water to lull us to sleep. Ahhh, bliss. Scuol is one of the old "Bad" towns -- "Bad" meaning "bath." It has springs and spas and people go there to take the waters. We had planned to go to the spa ourselves, but got there a bit late after all.

But we had a lovely dinner in the restaurant in the hotel, which was AWESOME -- some of the best food I've ever had in Switzerland. Jen ate a salad with pigeon on it. The rest of us had our salad without pigeon. But she seemed to enjoy it, so there ya go.

The next morning, we hit the road again -- and this was the view as we pulled out of town...


So long, Scuol -- I'm sure we'll see you again soon!

Next up: Austria and Germany...