Emma, Brendan, me and Shawn

Tivoli fun park in Copenhagen

Waterfront cafe strip in Helsingborg

Looking from the castle in Helsingborg out to Denmark

Official Danish letterbox range

Square in Copenhagen

Sweden

Shawn (a friend from Uni) has moved from London to Helsingborg in Sweden so we felt it was a good excuse to head north. Brendan and his girlfriend Emma also came over for the weekend from London and Siobhan came over from Lincoln. We flew up to Copenhagen early on Saturday morning and then took a train into the centre of town. We had a quick look around the central area in the cold air. It was ok, but not spectacular. The same could be said of the pastries. We had come with high hopes of sampling real “danishes” – the pastry with fruit and custard fillings you get in Australia. It turns out that these aren’t the real thing and there is no matching snack in a real Danish bakery. The closest thing was a very sweet pastry called a Spandauer which didn’t have much filling and was more a spiral than a pocket of pastry. Oh well…

I also found Copenhagen a little plain. I think living in Milan for a few months has made me used to a constant collision of colour, noise, people and traffic and Copenhagen just seemed a little quiet. I'm not sure what I will think of Australian cities when I get home...

We then caught a train across to Malmo and then north along the Swedish coast to Helsingborg. It is a nice town set on the water looking across to Helsingor and its castle on the Danish shore. Although small this was a nice change from Milan and also from London for Shawn. We looked around town in the afternoon and had a snack on the waterside. Dinner was at a nearby Swiss restaurant and we kicked on to small nightclub where Brendan wowed the locals with his style on the dance floor.

Sunday morning Kath and I had a nice walk on the waterfront before a quick lunch. We all got the train back to Copenhagen and had a look around the Tivoli fun park. It was quite fun (despite the cold) and we ate dinner at nice restaurant on the lake that brewed its own beer. We then headed to the airport to fly home and left Shawn heading back north on the train.

Autumn colours behind the gates of one of the many large houses on the lake shore

Kath racing downhill on the lake shore road

Mist over Lake Como

Looking back down the run.

The main lift open

Some fresh snow was still around off piste at Passo Tonale

First Ski

Kath had a Uni soccer tournament on the weekend in Milan. Come the weekend I am always ready to get out of the city so I took the chance to get a day’s skiing in. It is still very early in the season and most resorts don’t have any snow. However, there was a 20-30cm fall of snow on the highest peaks during the week so conditions were reported to be good at a resort north east of Milan. Milan had a heavy fog (as normal) but soon after Bergamo I left the fog behind and was greeted with a clear blue sky. The skiing was ok with only one quite steep and very well used run open. But the mountains were beautiful in the sun and the air was very clear after Milan so it was good day out. I’m also sore in many parts of my body which is all good preparation for the ski season ahead.

On Sunday Kath didn’t end up playing so we went for a short road ride around the shore of Lake Como. It was very cold but the autumn colours over the misty lake were very picturesque. Also the road dips and climbs through small villages and patched of forest making for a very pleasant ride.

Colosseum

Fountain near Campo de Fiori

Spanish Steps

Sistine Chapel

St Peters

Inside the Pantheon

The Pantheon

Rome

One of the Italian cities on our list was Rome and we finally got around to organising a weekend there. On Friday evening we caught the train down and after a pleasant journey on the train we were in Rome 4 ½ hours later. Catching a local bus across to our hotel the amazing architecture was immediately apparent. We were the only ones craning our necks out the window – the locals must have long got used to the parade of buildings spanning the last 2000 years. Out hotel was small but well positioned and we walked over to Travestere for dinner at a busy local pizza shop.

Next morning we headed directly for coffee at the well renowned Taza d’Oro coffee shop near the Pantheon. The coffee was very good but the brioche was terrible, I guess you can only excel at one thing. The Pantheon was fantastic – the powerful entrance and the sheer size of the dome inside is all the more impressive when you realize it was built in 27 BC. The skills and knowledge to build the dome were lost to the Italians for hundreds of years and it wasn’t until Brunelleschi built Florence’s cathedral dome in the 1300’s that the skills were rediscovered. My favourite part of the story is Brunelleschi climbing onto the top of the Pantheon and removing bricks to work out how the Romans had managed to build the dome all those years ago.

Next we saw the fountains in Piazza Navona and then headed over to St Peters. We had a short queue but were soon inside admiring the huge amount of art inside. Bernini’s baldacchino (a bit like pagoda I guess) in the middle was fantastic but I couldn’t help wondering what the Pantheon would have looked like before they took the brass off and melted for the baldacchino. The Swiss Guard looked quite ridiculous but our guidebook assured us they were a highly trained security force. The square in front of St Peters was good but the curve hides front of the church from much of the square – we thought maybe an oval might have been better?

Next was the Vatican Museum (including the Sistine Chapel). We arrived just before closing time at 12:45pm and started to move slowly towards the Sistine Chapel. Initially the crowds were unbelievable – you could hardly move in some rooms the crush of people was so tight. We sat to one side and waited for the flow of people to ease (as no one else was entering the museum at this stage) and by doing this managed to enjoy the beautiful paintings in Raphael Rooms in relative peace. We then descended down to the Chapel and spent the last 15 minutes there until we were ushered out. The scale of the paintings is amazing – it certainly is an amazing sight. It’s not what I though it would be – the word Chapel didn’t prepare me for the color and size of the paintings. You can see why Michelangelo spent so much time locked away painting – it is an enormous amount of work for one man.

Afterwards we went back to the room for a rest and then headed out for dinner in the light rain that had started. We ate up near the Spanish Steps so saw them on the way. I wasn’t prepared to be amazed by a set of steps but they were very beautiful. On Sunday we made a late start hoping for the rain to ease. It didn’t so we bought another umbrella from the street sellers and headed over the Roman Forum. We visited the Forum, the Palatine Hill and the Colosseum. They were all quite good, but at the same time disappointing how much had been removed over the years. We had a late lunch and then boarded the train back to Milan – arriving back home by 10pm. It was a tiring weekend because there is so much to see. Everywhere you look in the old town is a significant building or fountain. So there were a lot of things we missed but just wandering through the streets and seeing the variety of architecture and ruins was the experience we went to Rome for.

Kath heading back down the river into Gstaad

Looking out from our hotel across Lac Leman

Morning sun on the vines

Swiss Mountain Biking and a New Car

It was time to swap our lease car over for a new one. To do this without a one-way charge we had to go to a French city. We choose Geneva so we could combine it with some mountain biking. Leaving at lunch time on Friday we were in Chamonix by late afternoon. The drive up was good, it was a clear blue sky and the late autumn colours in the Alps are fantastic now with hillsides of orange, gold and yellow. Also the Mont Blanc tunnel had no queue and 10km in a tunnel doesn’t seem so bad now.

We looked at some ski gear shops in Chamonix and had an amazingly cheesy meal at a restaurant there. We avoided the fondue and raclette but still ate a huge amount. Next morning we headed into Geneva and swapped the cars over. All went smoothly except that Renault have remodeled the Clio completely and our roofracks don’t fit the new model. So we had to jam both bikes inside – never the best thing for a brand new car’s interior.

We headed around the lake past Lausanne and had lunch among the vines lining the shore of Lac Leman. It was so nice we decided to stay the night in the area. However, it was hard to find a place with space and it took us a lot of driving around. In the end we found quite a nice old place nestled in the vines with a balcony that looked out onto the lake and the mountains on the opposite shore. We ate at the hotel and enjoyed the sunset from the terrace. Next morning dawned fine and clear again and we took a walk down to the lake shore as the sun rose. After a lame first breakfast in the dining room (it was included with the room) we had second breakfast on our balcony.

We then headed around the end of the lake and climbed up out of the valley and down to Gstaad. We parked the car and headed out on a Swiss National mountain bike route. We climbed up out of town over a spur and then worked our way up a long valley beside a river. At the head of the valley was a lake that was a obviously a popular day walk. We then started a long climb above the lake. It was cold in the shadow of the ridge and we were glad to reach the warm sun higher on the climb. A long section too steep to ride took us over the ridge and then we had some brief good trail then a long set of steps. This wasn’t looking so good and when we came to a junction we decided to change the route. The suggested path headed up steeply in front of us but to our right an inviting piece of singletrack headed back down to the valley we had come from. We were helped by seeing two other riders head that way.

So we took the trail and were treated to a technical downhill all on singletrack that twisted and turned its way down. Part way down we caught up the other riders, they were a couple from Gstaad and showed us how to piece together bits of singletrack all the down the river. They took the road at that point but we followed the walking path on the river bank all the way back into town. All up the descent from our highpoint was about 12km and it was all singletrack. The great trails, snow capped peaks and autumnal trees all combined to make it a great ride. We squeezed the muddy bikes back into the rapidly aging car and started the long drive home over the Simplon Pass.