Tag Archives: Swiss vignette

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Fancy in Annecy… but first, a little Swiss piss… part two

The weather on May 3rd, 2018 was looking kind of cold and dismal.  It was chilly enough in Germany, and it appeared that we might have some bad weather in France, too.  In fact, The Weather Channel was even predicting avalanches for the Annecy area.  Because I wasn’t sure what to expect, I packed clothes for every occasion.  I ended up bringing more than I really needed to, especially since after the first night, we had absolutely glorious weather.

A couple of weeks ago, Bill and I got stuck in a horrendous traffic jam on A81 when we decided to go to the ADAC office at Breuningerland in Sindelfingen to pick up a couple of Swiss vignettes.  For those who don’t know, here’s a brief explanation.  If you drive through Switzerland, you need a “vignette”, which is basically a sticker that proves you paid the yearly toll.  It costs 40 Swiss Francs or 35,75 euros.  The 2018 vignette is valid from December 1, 2017 until January 31st, 2019.  The stickers are available at the border, or you can order them and have them sent in the mail.  Most of the time, it’s very easy to just go to the mall and get them, although we may think twice about that next year!

Anyway, after Bill took the dogs to Max’s and put the sticker on my Mini Cooper convertible, we were ready to go.  The Mini Cooper is another reason why I wanted to leave the dogs in Germany.  Annecy is the kind of place that just begs for a convertible.  My car doesn’t get driven enough and it’s super fun to take it on the Autobahn, even if my husband’s RAV 4 is somewhat more comfortable and roomy.  When I saw the clouds in the sky on Thursday morning, I was afraid the trip might be wasted in my little car.  Luckily, as you’ll see as this series progresses, we had perfect convertible weather.

I guess these things had to come from somewhere.

Our trip south started off relatively uneventfully.  We headed down A81, passed the big phallic looking tower near Rottweil, and crossed into Switzerland.  I always get a kick out of the area near the border, since there’s a big Wunderbaum factory there.  Wunderbaum is the company that makes those “trees” you hang in your car to make it smell “fresh”.  Other than that, the Swiss/German border is a pretty boring place.  Actually, I was hoping for a beautiful drive like we had last year when we drove through Switzerland to get to Italy.  Unfortunately, the GPS sent us a different way.  Apparently, the main highway was closed for some reason.  Consequently, we went through some truly ugly parts of Switzerland… very industrial and not at all picturesque.

As the morning continued, I started getting hungry.  Bill agreed it was time for lunch.  He went into a town and then, inexplicably, decided that it wasn’t a suitable place to find food.  Time went on… I got hungrier.  Then I had to pee.  For some reason, Bill kept driving.  He was hoping to find a nice local restaurant, rather than a fast food place or highway restaurant.  Usually, when we travel with the dogs, we end up eating fast food.  Since we didn’t have them with us this time, he wanted to avoid that.  Good plan.  Except I get super bitchy when I’m hungry and have to pee.

Finally, as we got closer to Bern, I told Bill I didn’t care where he stopped, but I really needed to whiz.  At that point, I’d been holding it for a couple of hours.  It was also getting pretty late for lunch. Just as restaurants in Germany close for “pauses” between lunch and dinner, so do they in Switzerland and France.  It was about 1:30pm when he finally started searching for a place.  We passed an Italian restaurant that had parking out front and was curiously co-located with an Indian restaurant that also sold saris.  I kind of demanded that Bill stop there.  Drei Könige to the rescue!

Bill, being the sport he is, took the liberty of ordering a half carafe of house red while I took care of business.  Then, he took his turn.

See that look on Bill’s face?  I wasn’t the only one who needed to pee.

 

There was only one other guy in the restaurant when we visited and he was finishing up.  We had the waitress’s undivided attention as we decided on pasta dishes.

I had Spaghetti Carbonara, a dish I’d never had before I started dating Bill.  It’s pretty rich, since it’s made with egg, cream, and bacon.  The waitress brought me a huge serving, too.  It looked like they’d dumped a whole box of spaghetti into the pot.  I didn’t come close to finishing this and we couldn’t take it with us.  I will admit that it hit the spot, almost as well as the surprisingly good house red was. I don’t know what the house red was, but it was excellent.

Bill had spicy penne pasta that came in a more manageable size.  I liked his dish, with its sassy little peppery kick.

This was in both the men’s and ladies’ rooms.  It’s basically a natural aid for guys with large prostates.  I don’t know why this was in the ladies room, but I couldn’t resist sharing it.  I love this kind of stuff.

 

Switzerland is expensive.  This simple lunch set us back about 88 Swiss francs– that’s roughly akin to the same amount in US dollars.  However, the waitress was very kind to us and even mistook us for Germans.  I was surprised about that, since although we were speaking German, it was pretty terrible German.  She seemed genuinely surprised that Americans were dining in her restaurant.  She asked if I wanted to take the rest of the pasta, but it wasn’t feasible.  She agreed that it was a very large portion of pasta, even for a “truck” like me.  (“Truck” is a nickname a chef at a restaurant where I once waited tables gave me because I could carry up to nine entrees at a time.)

I snapped this photo as we were leaving…  just in time for them to take their “pause”.  Yes, I would eat there again.  The food was good, even if it was a bit too much in terms of quantity and price.

 

We got back on the road and promptly hit traffic as we approached the French border…

I was a little slow on the draw, but you can see we were nowhere near Paris.

This was a bummer…

But I got a kick out of the change kiosk.  They don’t have one of these fancy ones at the German border.

Yea!

 

Okay… so here’s about where Bill started getting really antsy for Annecy.  There was a lot of traffic.  We had to pay about 7 euros in tolls and Bill didn’t get close enough to the machine to collect his change.  Then, we were in one of many confusing traffic circles.  Some guy honked at Bill when he was trying to figure out which exit to take, causing him to take the wrong one.  He started cussing and I told him to chill out.  And then, blessedly, we got on the right road to Annecy, although it was not the most direct route.  I started to see why so many people fall in love with this area.  The scenery is just stunning.

Suddenly, I saw misty mountains by the crystal clear lake…

I snapped pictures while Bill pissed off all the people behind him, including one woman who was very animatedly showing how exasperated she was.

But I’m glad Bill slowed down so I could get a few shots.  This was our only totally cloudy day.  We only had a few clouds on Friday.

 

Talloires is a world away from Annecy, which is a true city in every sense of the word.  There are several hotels in this area, as well as a large campground and a place that appeared to rent “tiny” houses by the lake.  We didn’t take the time to explore the camping or tiny house options, but I wanted to mention it for those who are into that kind of thing.  Here’s a Web site for one place we noticed last night.

We pulled into the parking lot at Hotel Les Grillons at about 5:00pm… just in time to freshen up for dinner.

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The ballad of the Swiss vignette…

Sung to the Gilligan’s Island theme song… (although I’m sure a lot of you younguns don’t know about Gilligan’s Island…)

Just sit right back and you’ll read a tale,
A tale of a stressful jaunt.
With traffic backed up horribly,
Upon the Autobahn.

The driver was a contractor,
His wife by his side long haul.
The two passengers set off that day
For a trip to the mall. (A trip to the mall)

The traffic started getting slow,
The Mini Coop was tossed,
If not for the patience of fearless Bill
The Mini would be lost, the Mini would be lost.

The car crawled down the Autobahn, like every other schmuck
Seemed every German
near Stuttgart
Was similarly stuck.

So this is the tale of our hapless crew,
In traffic for a long, long time,
They’ll have to make the best of things,
It’s an uphill climb.

The cranky wife and her husband too,
Must do their very best,
To make themselves less miserable,
In that highway mess.

No exits, no shade, no pretty lakes
Just endless lights from brakes,
A Stau from Hell it sure was,
Obnoxious enough to cuss.

So join us here in an hour my friend,
We’re sure to still be there,
Just two unlucky motorists,
Hurrying to get nowhere!

This Stau sucked!

Today’s creative opening comes courtesy of the two hour odyssey Bill and I suffered today on our quest to buy Swiss vignettes at the ADAC store in Sindelfingen’s Brueningerland.  Ordinarily, the trip to that mall takes maybe a half hour from where we live, down here on the edge of the Black Forest (with all the other nuts).  Today, I swear to God, it took about two hours.

The trip started off innocently enough.  We had beautiful weather.  I was giving some thought to visiting somewhere pretty and/or cool, where we could walk around, have a nice lunch, take pictures, and go home.  But then I realized that in two weeks, we’ll be driving through Switzerland.  So I told Bill that maybe we should go to the ADAC store in Sindelfingen to pick up 2018 Swiss vignettes.

We really should have just gone to the damn Swiss border!  Or, barring that, we should have just ordered them and had them mailed.  These stickers are good from December 1, 2017 until January 31, 2019.

My original plan was to go to the Swiss border itself.  In retrospect, that probably would have taken us less time.  But at about noon today, we still didn’t know that there had been some kind of big accident on the Autobahn.  We were blissfully ignorant of what lie ahead on that stretch of treacherous highway.  So off we went north, the top down, Van Morrison blaring on the stereo.  We got up to just beyond the Ehningen exit when traffic slowed to a crawl.

Bill checked the GPS and didn’t see any reason why we should be held up, but we sure as hell were.  The traffic was absolutely horrible.  It turned out the police had shut down the part of the road that goes through Sindelfingen, so everyone had to detour off of exit 23.  It was a nightmare.  By the time we got to the mall, it was about 2:00.  I was decidedly cranky and hangry as we parked and went inside the surprisingly cool shopping mall, which, for once wasn’t a madhouse.

The wait at ADAC was also blessedly short.  In fact, we had no wait there at all.  We bought two vignettes at a cost of 71,50 euros.  Then, we went searching for food.  For some reason, I’m always at Breuningerland when I’m hungry.  I get very irritable when I’m hungry.  Bill was pretty funny, because he could see how tense I was.  As I eyed the menu at Nordsee, he said, “Isn’t there a restaurant up on the top floor that has wine?”

“Why?” I asked him.  “Do you think I need wine?”

“Clearly.” he said, nodding.  We made our way to the top level and went searching for a place to have a late lunch… later than I would have wanted it, anyway.

Actually, we ended up having lunch at Miyo, which is an Asian “Soul Food” place.  They have a sushi bar, which was packed today.  I didn’t have the patience for that, so we went to the main counter and ordered a chicken Satay with peanut sauce for Bill and a Mandarin sweet and sour duck dish for me.  You order at the counter and they give you your drink and bring the food out to you.

The chicken came with a rich peanut sauce, which I loved.  The vegetables were nice, too.  The rice was both dry and sticky, though.  It was stuck together in clumps, yet kind of had a dryness, as if it had been sitting awhile.  I’m not sure how they managed that.  Business was steady today.

My duck was crispy, but came with sweet and sour sauce, pineapples, bamboo, carrots, and red peppers.  Bill said that after a couple of bites, the color came back into my cheeks.  We washed this down with Erdinger weizens.

 

Miyo wasn’t a bad place to have lunch, although I’ve had better Asian food.  It did the trick in wiping the scowl off my face.  I felt remarkably better after I got rid of my hanger.

Then, Bill said, “Hey, do you think we should go get some tequila?”

I said sure to that, so we went to the Edeka on the first level of the mall.  We picked up bottles of gin and tequila– the gin is for Bill and the tequila is for me.  We also bought some rather sickly looking limes and some chocolate.  You know, the essentials…

Tequila, limes, gin, and chocolate…

I managed to resist the troughs of Nutella…

And the “shots” obviously meant for horny 20 year olds who want to get drunk.  They probably taste great, though.

 

By four o’clock, we were ready to head home.  I was relieved to see that traffic was flowing southbound.  But the northbound side was still shut down, a good three hours after we first got caught in the Stau.  Whatever happened was clearly very serious.  Bill noted that it took us a lot less time to buy the vignettes, eat lunch, do a little shopping, and go home than it did to drive up A81 to get to the mall in the first place.

Many police officers and highway crew were still clearing the scene two hours after we arrived at the mall.

 

That Stau was no joke!

 

We’re both now exhausted.  This will probably be us tonight.  Hopefully tomorrow, we’ll go somewhere a little less irritating.

 

There is definitely a reason the Stuttgart area is nicknamed STAUgart.

Edited to add:  Here’s a translated news story about the cause of the Stau.

It’s not that fast. After at midday a scrap truck on the A 81 – at the height Breuningerland – had tipped over, the clean-up work continues. A tip to the drivers: Sindelfingen drive around.

The reason why the scene of the accident has not yet been cleared: Many small metal parts, which were scattered by the accident on the highway, must be picked up laboriously. The sharp-edged sheet metal remnants could otherwise lead to damage to cars and possibly subsequent accidents. According to the police, the motorway in the direction of Stuttgart is therefore likely to remain closed until around 18:15 / 18:45. You may be able to temporarily open a lane. Currently, traffic is being diverted at the motorway exit Böblingen / Sindelfngen. Traffic on the highway is currently jamming back to Ehingen. Also in Sindelfingen and partly also in Böblingen the roads are heavily encumbered by the motorway closure. Best, you bypass the area spacious.

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