Day 13 { june 7th 2002 }
“Cats and dogs”
Last stop before we will haul ourselves on top of that huge pile of rocks, the Alps. Man, that is one hell of an undertaking. We meet a sporty elderly German, and dodge some raindrops in the meantime. The Alps seem to come to live at night: thunder and rain. Beware!
In the middle of the night, around 1 o’clock, it starts raining cats and dogs and I hear an occasional thunderclap.
There is nothing more relaxing than laying cuddled up in a sleeping bag, warm and cosy, listening to the rain clattering on your roof.
My mind is blank. I close my eyes and fall asleep. Around half past 8, being sleep drunk, I recognise once more the characteristic sound of raindrops crashing downon canvas. Damn. It hasn’t stopped. It must have been raining for hours.
“...cuddled up in a sleeping bag, warm and cosy...”
A triumphant “good morning” is heard from the tent opposite me. Rick and Bianca (R&B) are awake. “Just leave out the ‘good’ part“, I answer. In the background, their radio.
I strain my ears: a Dutch radiostation. It reports about an earthquake in Switserland. Bad weather as well. “Well, it seems we’re stuck here for another day” Rick says. “Time to do some shopping and washing my laundry”, I reply.
I decide to light a waxine-light (to get rid of the moist in my tent), and stare at the ‘ceiling’ for a while.
Flashbacks... It’s all coming back; the sheer heat in the Vosges, the pure air in the Ardennes, the RedLions hotel... Gosh, what a trip so far.
“...seems to be supper-glued to a bar seat”
We go down-town to do some shopping and find an internet connection. From previous experience, R&B manage to locate a cafe with a terminal. Hmm...it’s occupied. The person seems to be superglued to a bar-seat and after 30 minutes of regularly looking over our shoulders, he still does not get the message.
“Let’s try the local library”. But we are not allowed to acces the WWW over there, being tourists.
Oh well.
The supermarket (read; food) compensates for this ‘set-back’. Rick, in the meantime, reveals an
unusual interest for cookies, chips and chocolate...
“Rudi”
Later on in the afternoon, we get company. A man who puts up a tiny little tent in a matter of seconds (so it seems...).
It’s Rudi from the former East Berlin. He joins us at the wooden table when we have dinner.
The conversation is difficult for he does not speak English, and our spoken german is, well, to put it mildly, not good.
But we manage. Understanding German is easy for us. We let him do the talking.
He has flown to Barcelona with his bicycle
and is cycling back to Berlin. Amazing guy, considering the fact that he already hit the big 60!.
“Running the gauntlet”
Being a very experienced cyclist, he has some interesting stories to tell. A near-death experience in the French ‘Grand Canyon’
and a story about the nazi heritage, he experienced in the Netherlands and Poland. “There are two places were I have been specifically confronted with the German WW II heritage, and that was in Warsaw and The Netherlands”. He did not want to go into detail about
the latter one...
Too shocking, too personal?
“Apalling”
He tells us that up in Splügen, the weather is appalling.
He camped there for a day or two in the freezing cold in his mini tent, waiting for better circumstances to go down.
He grew impatient, took the bad weather and snow for granted and went down-hill. We look at one another without saying a
word and all think the same (that is, I think we do).
In the meantime, a group of scouts inflate a rather spacious tent next to our campsite. A bottle of compressed air always
beats a pair of lungs.
We hit the sack early, so I hope they will keep things quiet tonight. Tomorrow will be tough. It’s the test of tests.
We will go over the Alps. We will run the gauntlet!
