Well, we are back at home in Prague and tonight I will sleep in my own bed. It was a great vacation, but it’s good to be home. So, this is the last of the vacation blogs and tomorrow I will probably be back to making fun of Mitt Romney for lying about everything, or maybe his wife for her horse’s 8th place finish (which I kind of suspect may have been deliberate, get that horse’s name out of the news as fast as possible, but maybe that’s just unnecessary conspiracy theorizing), or maybe I’ll have something to say about aquatic phenomenon Michael Phelpsbecause he is, after all, a fellow stoner. Tonight, however, it’s still about the trip.
The Mittagspitze
After leaving Geneva, we drove straight across Switzerland and camped in Liechtenstein. This morning we drove pretty much the length of Liechtenstein, south to north, and then cut across a corner of Austria, deliberately avoiding getting on the freeway because we didn’t have a sticker and didn’t want to buy one for such a short distance, so by the time we crossed the German border and got on a proper high speed road, we were totally ready to fly like an arrow back to Prague and the kids behaved amazingly well for being forced to spend so much time in the car. A few games of “I spy” and similar alphabet games and they were fine.
I am of two minds about Liechtenstein. The campsite was awesomely beautiful, at the foot of a high, and steep mountain called the Mittagspitze. There were a lot of summer cabins, which looked lovely, and plenty of flat, grassy camping spaces. The restaurant at the campsite, which I’d hoped would have some cheap snacks, was actually kind of expensive but the food justified the price. A creamy apple soup, which I’d never even heard of before and found the whole idea bizarre, turned out to be pretty good. The main course was a mixed grill, garnished with small bits of about 7 or 8 different vegetables – corn, carrots, beets, something I didn’t recognize, coleslaw, and a couple of others. Then there was vanilla ice cream and hot blueberries for dessert.
In the morning, we started off with a quick tour of Vaduz, which I just thought was the most pathetic national capital I have ever visited. The castle, up on the side of the mountain overlooking the town, is kind of impressive, as castles tend to be, but the town itself (city would be an exaggeration) is a bunch of soulless late twentieth century buildings
plonked down along the main road, where the large trucks rumble through.
The natural part of the country was beautiful. The urban parts were totally devoid of charm, and most of the country is the urban canker that grows alongside that one road which parallels the freeway which is the border with Switzerland.
Oh, well. At least it’s small.
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