Day 29: Travel Day
Nau mai
Yesterday we played a show at Plaza Club in Zurich.
Shower Door Daily was in Schönenwerd, Switzerland yesterday morning and brings you exclusive coverage from the b_smart hotel (it is supposed to be lower case). It was a remarkable design, this single leaf glass door, an aluminium frame housing the pane with rubber seals on all the vulnerable joints. I won’t say that this shower entrance brought me joy, but I will say that water egress was held at unmeasurably low levels.
“⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️”
I ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant before we got on the road. A bowl of Bircher muesli was topped with fruit salad and consumed with a spoon. A plate with tomatoes, cucumber, cheeses, and brown bread was attempted next, using a combination of fork and fingers.
We were four weeks into the tour, and our butts were getting sore. The hours of sitting in decently comfortable padded leather seats were not providing the muscle toning and postural strengthening that we had hoped for, and we were switching between various oddly angled poses to give our sit bones a break.
It was another full day in the van with 600km to cover in order to make a good dent in the two-day journey to Barcelona. We drove across Switzerland for a good few hours, glimpsing the occasional majestic lake view as we sped southwest past farms and vineyards. It was gloomy and overcast and despite some very fine scenery the morale began to dip.
A number of factors brought the morale back up later in the day. I will use bullet points here because I never get to use bullet points.
The cloud cover began to spread, and we caught some rays of sun while the van was stopped.
We visited French Bunnings and Teddy was able to buy some paint remover to get the graffiti off the trailer.
Jon bought some tennis balls and was able to bowl a ball at someone.
At Bunnings.
Sadly the graffiti remover wasn’t strong enough.
Jon returns with a fresh quiver of balls.
The scenery changed as we headed into southern France. The sky cleared completely, and the sunny weather was a perfect backdrop to the craggy terrain of the rugged alpine foothills that climbed steeply into the distance.
You could feel that we were nearing the Mediterranean. The ground looked more arid, and terracotta roofs began to appear on the clusters of old stone buildings. Golden hour wasn’t a bad time to drive this last part of our journey and as we wove through farms and olive groves we enjoyed the chance to see something that feels about as far away from Aotearoa as it gets.
Our accommodation was in a sleepy old village called Castillon-du-Gard. With no responsibilities until the next day we were free to enjoy a dinner eaten around a table and an early night.
