TOURING

As I sit here doing the few final bits of swiss officialdom, I look back upon the last two months as a couple of the busiest I have had in recent years. I finished work on the 22nd of February, had a great send off from everyone at work, and got the necessary knife as a leaving gift, I suspect this is so I fell more like a "bushman". The evening ended with lighting an excessively large firecracker that has been sitting under my desk in the office for the past 6 months. The next day it was off to NZ for a quick visit with family and friends for 2 weeks. I also managed to get a few bits and pieces for the trip that I was having a hard time finding in Switzerland. At the same time I realised that camping gear is more expensive in NZ than Switzerland – very disturbing. While I was over in NZ Dani and Chris from the B5 Group were replacing the head on the car and taking it in for its final Swiss “Warrant of Fitness”.

After the long haul flight all the way back to Switzerland it was time to get my a** into gear and start getting the car ready and the apartment empty. With Louise still at work I was left to my own devices and it took a few days to get going. One of the first things was to head down to Lausanne to get some bits for the car. As my kraut skills still aren’t the best, I chose a French garage to get most of my spares and to my luck they were very helpful and had enough second hand parts to build about 10 landies. So they just handed me things for free. I looked at half of the stuff they handed me and just asked them what it was. I know I was a mechanic for the whole of about 6 months but they left me clueless about 80% of the time.

With Easter and Louise’s last day fast approaching, it was time to really start packing and getting the car sorted before we were homeless. Trevor and Nick volunteered their services to help with the car but it took nearly the entire 4 day Easter weekend to get all the small final bits attached or swapped. This left Louise to pack a 5 room apartment on her own, which lead to the grumpy girlfriend syndrome. Along with that we also got grumpy neighbour syndrome as we occupied the cleaning bay of the communal garage for the greater part of the weekend, I really don’t understand some people in this country they are either born to complain or to do the same monotous crap on the same schedule and if they don’t get to do it on that exact schedule they flip out. The grumpy neighbour drives a Twingo, it’s a piece of crap, no matter how much you wash it, it will still be crap. The day after easter it was time to move, we were shifting our stuff to 3 different locations; my aunt Sonia’s, Louise’s parents and a small storage place that we had organised. Oh and the last location was the tip with 1.2 Tonnes of rubbish. As we did all of that in a day and a half with excellent help from the cousins, we seem to have misplaced all of our files which contain all of our official papers. Luckily only the past ones, but the cousins suspect they are in the “surprise” box they packed that went to the storage location. Guess we’ll find out when we get back.

So now that we are “homeless”, we still had a few bits to do this included cleaners coming into the place to clean before the official handover. You would think paying a large sum of money to a professional cleaning company would deliver good results. Well you’d be wrong; they put a huge scratch in the bathroom door and destroyed one of the taps in the same bathroom. Luckily enough we didn’t pay the bill, so guess who ain’t getting paid.

Louise is staying with her parents while I stay with Sonia, where we have managed to get the second bout of grumpy neighbour syndrome, seems they don’t like the car either, then again Sonia just thinks they are spineless creeps, as they complain to another neighbour who then passes on the message, it’s a pity they don’t live on the ground floor, otherwise I would run over their flower pots as a leaving gift.

We hope our departure date will be Wednesday the 9th of April. As long as we get the carnet de passage and a piece from the U.K..

Lots of people have asked us to add a guest book or comments section to the website so hopefully we’ll be able to do that in the near future.

I would really like to say thanks to everyone that has helped out over the last few months with everything that we needed. In particular Trevor and Nick for the car, my cousins for the help with the move, Sonia for letting us turn her place into a bomb site, Dave my brother in law in NZ for helping me find everything I was looking for. A huge thanks to Lars and Eva, Louise’s parents for looking after the cats for our time away. And to everyone else of course for the support and we’ll see you soon!