Surprise, surprise: since my last trip to a oft-visited and even more often photographed valley just before the Italian border, I’ve been itching to get back. This summer has been fortunately amenable to hiking, and with a long weekend in August it seemed only reasonable that the best way into Zermatt would be on my own two feet. But I’m jumping too far ahead too fast. First, I needed to revisit an old friend.
Travel in 2017 ended not with wistful excursions to Nice and Riffelsee but rather with the standard home trip to the US. After a month without much snowfall, I left the Allgäu in the middle of a snowstorm and left myself plenty of time to get to Zurich Airport. It turns out I planned in too much time, as I arrived before the parking garage opened. I decided to circle the arrivals area, but I forgot I was in Switzerland; of course they would charge drivers to pick up arriving passengers. I drove to the garage after 5 CHF paid for my fifteen minutes of shame, turned on my blinkers, and stubbornly blocked one entrance to the parking garage until I could enter, thinking I had left the snow behind until I got back to the Allgäu in January. Boy, was I wrong.
The first half of 2013 has been a bit rough. Charleston is a charming city, but its charm is — in my opinion — best experienced with friends rather than alone. Working somewhere around 50 55-hr work weeks (which doesn’t include meal or commute time!) in the span of a year isn’t conducive to a healthy social life, so I’ve gradually begun to develop a case of Wanderlust that I so happily nurtured in 2011. Luckily, I have always had an overzealous shutter finger to remind me of easier times and an overactive imagination to dream of when I can do this again.
Germany
The Autobahn and good drivers, the happiness and fun-loving nature of Munich, and a sunset in a small village not so far away from Stuttgart.
I booked a trip to Seattle under the impression that it’d been two years since I had last visited, but when I looked back at old photos I was shocked to realize that it had only been a year since I had visited the Emerald City. Unable to change my flight date without incurring the airfare again in change fees, I decided to see if the weather of 2012 would cooperate with blue-sky pictures of my favorite mountain as much as it did just over twelve months ago.
En me brossant les dents 