Day 2 - more mountain passes..Switzerland

After doing a bit of Yoga, we left early today to master all the todo’s. A beautiful morning with the first signs of fall and morning fog, very good air, and sunshine. Leaving Bormio to get to St Moritz via Livingo through easy mountain passes. We went to the airport in Samedan, a few miles from St Moritz to do our first mission to get a foto in a helicopter.. the maintenance guy there was very interested in what we are doing on the rally and helped us.

We also did the 2nd task which required to sit on a motorbike, a nice elderly couple had fun with us not knowing how to get onto the bike.. but we made it!!

Much harder was to find a police officer to drive our car.. we tried multiple, nobody dared to do it.. the first ones said ‘ this is a military zone’ at the Italian/Swiss border, the next ones preferred to drink their coffee and so on… Most said they are not allowed to have a foto taken.. one offered us his jacket to pose ourselves as police officers.. so.. this is still a task we have to master.

Now our mountain pass tour began.. instead the usual Julier pass drive from St Moritz, we wanted to do something new and drove the Albula pass, a very beautiful drive, not too high, so all ‘green’ with trees and nice villages. We then got to the first official misson, the Splügen Pass which is an Alpine mountain pass of the Lepontine Alps. It connects the Swiss, Grisonian Splügen 5 kilometers to the north 675 metres below the pass with the Italian Chiavenna 21 kilometers to the south at the end of the Valle San Giacomo 1,789 meters below the pass. Elevation of 2114m, a piece of cake versus the 2757m yesterday.

The next stop was on the top of the San Bernardina Pass, 2066m is a high mountain pass in the Swiss Alps connecting the Hinterrhein and Mesolcina valleys between Thusis, Graubuenden, and Bellinzona, Ticino. The top of the pass represents both the Italo-German language frontier and the watershed between the Po basin and the Rhine Bain.

The route first became important as a mule track in the fifteenth century when the route between Thusis and Spluegen was known as the Via Mala.

Traffic flow was much facilitated when in 1967, the San Bernardino road tunnel was completed: since then vehicle traffic on the pass has been reduced, benefiting those taking the time to avoid the tunnel. The pass road is only open from May to November.

We met many teams on the tops, some taking breaks and having lunch.. we decided to rather drive on to Lago Maggiore to go for a swim and ice cream. After a real rainy summer, today felt like a beautiful summer day, 83 degree Fahrenheit/28 degree Celsius, driving along the beautiful lake, first the ‘tidy’ swiss part and then the typical Italian part mades us feel to be in the South of Europe. We found a small village, went swimming and had some ice cream.

Already 4pm, we know took the fastest route to get to Valenza in Piemont where a meeting of all teams was organized. The place called Villa Gropalla was an old house with a beautiful park where most of our teams camped. We enjoyed local Italian food, a thick white bean and pasta soup and watched as teams kept arriving.. We decided at 9pm to get back to our hotel.. now.. it is called Terme di Monte Valenza and turned out to be a small house with a kids playground and swimming pool which closed today for the season.. Right in the middle of nowhere, the drive to it was an adventure itself via non paved roads..of course it turned out that there is an easier way to get to it.. we finally found that as well. Going to be early was not happening though with meeting the Dutch rally community at the hotel and enjoying their company for a few hours