Alpe Bolla

A couple of weeks ago a friend and I hiked up to Alpe Bolla from Monte Bre, partly to get out of Lugano for the afternoon and partly to check out the hut at Alpe Bolla. Hiking between huts is a new (to me) and massively improved (imho) take on backpacking. You hike all day! And then there is an actual bed to sleep in! And a delicious meal, complete with the local variety of alp cheese! No need to carry a tent, or survive on trail mix, or sleep in the rain. I can't wait to take advantage of this...

The hut!

 Thinking of good photo captions/titles is just not one of my strong points...

Dandelions

 I took a ton of pictures of the dandelions...my hiking buddy was a bit baffled by my new-found love for dandelion photography. She asked seriously, "You don't have dandelions in the US?"

Special and Beautiful Swiss Dandelion

The specifics: Alpe Bolla is about 2 hours from Bre, hiking quickly. There are a number of routes down (or up, I suppose): backtrack to Bre, down to Pregassona or Cureggia, back to Bre via Monte Boglia, or on to Dente della Vecchia. We descended to Pregassona, which took closer to 2 hours than the projected hiking time of 3. There's a TPL bus from Lugano to Bre (beats the expensive scary funicolare, though it doesn't run as often) and another one back from Pregassona. Ditto Cureggia, but not on Sundays. The Pregassona bus runs much later than the Bre bus and funi, so my recommended route would be Bre to Alpe Bolla to Pregassona, with a potential side trip to Dente della Vecchia (that's going to be my next hike).

 *When resuming blogging in a totally abandoned blog, it is best to just pick things back up without comment, tempting though it is to write several paragraphs apologizing for being a bad blogger. I just made up this blogging rule. It's a good blogging rule, don't you think?

Boggera Canyon

Well, that was embarrassing.

I really meant to start posting photos within 2 months of moving here (or for that matter, probably within 2 weeks). I've got a new camera (SLR! for the first time since high school! this one has all kinds of fancy tricks like autofocus, and no darkroom required) and a ton of photos from Switzerland, Italy, and Iceland. Including this one, which I've been meaning to post for about six weeks.

Granite

I took it on a lazy holiday weekend afternoon with some new friends at a local sunbathing spot. If one is hardcore (we were not), it also doubles as a local canyoning spot. I'll have to go back, though I'm still way too protective of the camera to bring it along on any adventures like that.

Changes

So I'm moving to Switzerland.

This started out as a photoblog, because I got sick of having a political blog (I've since begun to miss that one). Then, I discovered I like writing a few words or sometimes a random little story or a travel narrative along with the photos. So now it's, what? Photos + writing? Seemed to work ok.

Now the blog is going to be a few more things, I think. Travel-in-Europe blog (travel-in-North-Africa-and-the-Middle-East-too blog, I hope). Expat blog. Not the whiny kind, I promise. Maybe even a bit of politics, from time to time. I mean, I'll have a whole new continent to learn about!

Posts for the next month will probably take on a goodbye Reno nostalgia form, as I am going through a phase of preemptively missing Nevada. I might write some more on this, later. It reminds me of my last month in Japan, which was just a whirlwind...I knew leaving was the right decision, but the last weeks were just a crazy blur of goodbyes and packing and that weird preemptive nostalgia. I felt like this:

I know there are so many good things to come, though. Cheese and chocolate and Italian lakes and planning my first weekend gettaway. And then there's the job...I don't want to get into that on a personal blog, so I'll just say it sounds completely awesome. And then there's the small, insignificant fact that stuff works in Europe. I've already begun bugging my British co-worker here by giving him running updates on how many weeks I've got till "socialized medicine." The Swiss system isn't even close, as far as I can tell, but better than the US system for sure. Though at this point, leeches and bloodletting might be better than the US system.