Day 2: Sarnen to Aprica

An eventful day all round.

We left the rather wonderful hotel (well, certainly when you hear
about our hotel in Aprica) at about 9ish ready for a good slog up and
down the Swiss Alps, taking in the Grimselpass, Furkapass (or
Sustenpass / Oberalpass, depending on how brave we felt).

The former route also included "La Tremola", a cobbled mountain pass
that was replaced by the Gotthard tunnel - allegedly one of the
longest in Europe. After a wrong turn, we actually ended up taking in
half of the two routes just mentioned, doing the Grimsel and
Furkapasses, but completely bypassing La Tremola by doing the
Oberalpass afterwards. As it happens this was a rather fortunate
mistake to make.

After leaving Chur (sidenote: absolutely full of very good looking
women) and setting to our daily image challenge, today's being trying
to match photos taken on our digital camera to snippets of pictures
taken by the organisers, we noticed a certain lack of 'pull' in the
engine and a bit of a backfire.

What happened next was a blaze of panic, stress and unbelievable luck.
Not 20 minutes after having broken down, up comes a stream of fellow
S2N'ers who pull up, including Team 18 (more on them later) and the
Grassy BMW teams. Amazingly, the co-driver in one of the BMWs was an
ex-Jaguar mechanic who decided to lend us two hours of his time to
take a look at what was wrong. He got out his latex gloves and had a
good feel around, cleaning up various contacts, sensors and what-not
(including a couple of calls back to the UK to Ian Button and other
contacts) until, finally, us calling the RAC. We decided to give it
"one more go."

It worked. Unbelievably whatever our friendly, neighbourhood Jag
mechanic did, it did the trick, so off we toddled towards our final
destination, still a good hour-and-a-half's drive away in fading light
and conditions. Obviously, by now we had completely given up on our
image challenge, but after some fast snapping (necessary due to some
fast driving!) we managed to snap 15 of our 20 images and cruised
behind Team 18 over a few more Swiss passes into Italy and got to
Aprica pretty much last (again) at around 8:30.

However, on arrival it soon became clear that our booked hotel was not
'optimum'. It had been closed for two months until we fetched up in
town so the place smelt of damp and the hot water was brown! Errrrr.
It didn't affect our sleep though.

-I, M & S