I’ve been following Marcel’s beautiful blog for a long while now. They get away most weekends either hiking or climbing, or doing Via-Ferata. Marcel & Chrisi very kindly took us on one called “Hexensteig”. Only created recently, it climbs up a hole in the middle of a mountain (pretty much). Marcel has some nice pictures here on the trip too – worth checking out.

The method of climbing in a Via-Ferata is a little like the setup for caving. You have a harness with a couple of carabiners attached to it on slings. There are metal wires strung on the route attached by bolts every 2-4 meters. You clip yourself into the metal wire, and then when you get to a bolt, you transfer your carabiners one at a time (so you’re always attached to something). It was a little physical in places, very slightly overhung. It’s amazing how fast you lose climbing condition!.

The weather was supposed to deteriorate come midday, so we cheated and took the lazy-way up. Fun though. Oh, and Switzerland has signs everywhere.

To get into the cave you had to do a tyrolean traverse. Of course, Maaike and I were old-hands at this from the Paso Del Viento circuit. Easy peasy.

Anyway, loved it. Really fun to be back in the hills. I must say, the prospect of a holiday of via-ferata’ing would be something I’d love to do. I believe Austria has a lot?!

It took about an hour and a half to get through the route, and then we walked on up the hill for a view. One crazy thing was the grass. This slope:

is at about 1,600m elevation. It’s on about a 45° slope, or so. It is also mown. When Marcel said that I thought he was kidding. But it really is. To keep the avalanches down. Check out the lawn mowing machine.

Finally, back down the hill (it took me 6 days to be able to walk properly again! my thighs are completely out of shape for this!) and then a quick dip in Lake Lucerne.

Many thanks to Marcel and Chrisi for taking us on this trip, putting us up in Zurich and generally being such great hosts. Looking forward to your visit to NZ ;)

Travel in Europe is reasonably cheap, flights certainly are, as long as you book far enough in advance. Maaike and I weren’t quite sure what our plans were after Tuscany so we hadn’t booked anything. Flights back to NL were quite expensive. Trains are ridiculously expensive. However, if you’re Time rich, cash limited, Busses are a decent option. Eurolines seems pretty rubbish, but eventually came across “Flixbus“, a German company with a very good network and an easy to use app. It’s not a short trip from Florence to Roermond – about 20 hours or so by bus. Zurich however is nicely in the middle – and my friend Marcel lives there with his partner Chrisi – perfect opportunity for a visit.

Zurich is really nice actually. Very pretty, very expensive to live in. It has the biggest density of fountains of anywhere I’ve visited so far.

It’s quite nice this relaxing travel, we came across a pianist and a flautist practising in a church, and just stayed to listen for a while. Lovely song – no idea what it is.

We also had some quite decent thunderstorms while there. (could not see while driving! – we were the red dot in the weather map)

I think I could live in Zurich, as long as I had a very well paid job! It has good access to the hills, a nice feel to it. It also has shops where you can spend 12K Euro on a watch. Probably a lot more than that if you want to. I thought about it, but the budget didn’t qqquuuuiiiitttteee stretch.

After the NL party it was on to holiday in Tuscany. It’s a hard, hard life I lead. Flew into Pisa and quickly fixed up some legacy engineering issues.

Actually, the tower area is really cool, you can wander about for free which is quite nice. Of particular interest is the baptistery. Acoustically perfect, every 30 minutes a security guard comes in and sings a few notes cleverly calculated to achieve harmonics as they interfere with each other. Anyway, it’s hard to describe, just make sure if you’re ever in Pisa that you go to the baptistery, it’s free to go in if you’re praying.. Here’s a recording (not mine) – scroll to 1 minute 20 seconds..

After you’ve been into the baptistery, you can then go (not free) into the Cemetery. It has a statue of Fibonacci there, and the most horrific hell scene I’ve ever seen. Seriously graphic.

From Pisa we drove to Barbarino Val D’elsa, a small village in Tuscany. My sister had picked out the place, and it really was superb. A “Palazzetto” (small palace) it was basically 4 houses combined into one. Massive. Liz had even worked out that the house would have the most killer view out over the countryside (something stupidly left out of the literature for the house… it would have been a main selling point if I was marketing it!)

Anyway, a week of exploring Tuscany, discovering the delights of “Vin santo and Cantuccini” (almond biscuity thingies dipped in a sort of desert wine), exploring Florence (Galileo museum and Uffizi), eating tonnes of ice-cream, finding a skeleton in a church and a wine tour (Chianti region)

Oh, one final thing was the sculpture garden. I really enjoyed this one – called “Energy”

These are instructions on how to take a google map and get it into a GPX file for use for offline navigation using OSMAND+ on an Android Phone.

1. Go to Google Maps and get directions (choosing the biking option) between two points.
2. Pull the route around finding the smallest roads you can!
3. Click through to the “details” page for the route and copy the URL
4. Paste the url into gpsvisualizer choosing “gpx” as the output.
5. Save the GPX into your Dropbox account (this is just to get the file onto your phone, there are lots of ways to do this, but Dropbox is the easiest)
6. If you have an Android phone, install OSMAND+, if you’re on iOS use “maps.me”
7. Go into Dropbox on your phone, and find the gpx file, click on it, and choose to save it as a track
8. Then open up OSMAND and go into “Configure Map” -> “GPX track…”, then find your gpx track
9. Finally just click on the navigation button and it should prompt you for “Do you want to use the displayed map for navigation?” after that you’ll have offline directions on your chosen route – perfect.
10. Specifically for the UK – the Sustrans website was handy. It shows bike routes around the UK. For the life of me I couldn’t see how to export a GPX of the route we did (route 4) eventually finding a sort-of export someone made from all the OpenStreetMap data. A very handy file which I can’t seem to find any more … however.. waymarkedtrails.org seems to allow you to download some of them. Note however that sometimes route 4 splits in two.. so I’m not sure how that works on a GPX.

Do you have tips? I’d love to hear them in the comments.